Pieter Hintjens - The Psychopath Code - Cracking the Predators That Stalk Us

Project groups are vulnerable to bad actors by default. Their founders must take explicit steps to protect the group. Otherwise, Mallory can waltz in on a cloud of charisma and chaos.

Mallory loves project groups because they give him good cover. Project groups are rarely wealthy, yet individual members may well be. Members come and go often, and most groups do not vet new members. This gives Mallory the means, motive and opportunity.

What Mallory is looking for depends on gender, as I explained in The Hunt . There will be sexual seduction and deception. There will be fuzzy business deals, loans, and gifts. If the group has funds that Mallory can get control over, they will become chaotic. Money will disappear.

You can measure how resistant a project group is to attack by bad actors. A resistant group has formal defenses that survive people coming and going. A vulnerable group has none. It depends on the goodwill of its members and organizers. You can just ask the organizers, "how do you stop bad actors joining your group?" If they have no answer, that means they are relying on trust.

Classic defenses against walk-in psychopaths are:

❂ Careful vetting of new members. There may be a formal process to filter out bad actors before they can do damage.

❂ Rules and structure that discourage bad actors from taking part. Mallory prefers vague, unwritten, or chaotic rules.

❂ Isolation of assets. Money on the table is psychopath bait. Mallory finds an empty table to be discouraging.

If a group has assets and no defenses, it is inevitable that Mallory will invade the group. There is no "if" here. Indeed, you may see several psychopaths striving for advantage.

The symptoms of infection are clear and easy to see, once you know what you are looking for:

❂ A healthy group makes its members happy, secure, and strong. An infected group makes its members miserable, anxious, and weak.

❂ A healthy group is successful with its projects, and grows over time. An infected group tends to avoid risk, and shrink over time.

❂ A healthy group spends little time on decision making. Its members have high independence. They tend to do first, talk second. There is little or no argument. An infected group struggles to get consensus. Its members argue over irrelevant details. Even the smallest project takes huge planning, and stresses everyone.

You cannot fix such groups. I have tried many times. Groups grow around founders and rules. You cannot change the rules after the fact unless you are the founder. And to keep out bad actors, you must have the right rules. It doesn’t help to identify Mallory and chase him out. That just makes space for a new Mallory to come in.

You could start a new group with a healthier structure, and offer it as an alternative. You may then find yourself at the sharp end of a campaign to discredit you. If you become a plausible threat to a group, they will rally around even the worst leaders.

So an idealistic approach can make things worse. You cannot save a dysfunctional project group from its founders. You cannot recreate it without risking a lot of conflict. What you can do, though, is:

❂ Use it to study Mallory in a real environment. In the science of human behavior, you are your own best instrument. You can join the group, talk to people, try to be a good member. See where it hurts. Ask others what hurts them. This is useful data which can be hard to get any other way.

❂ Offer specific individuals a way out, if you want to work with them. When Mallory attacks a project group he will often force out the nicer people first. Only those who can withstand the arguments and conflict remain.

Where is Mallory in a project group? We know his strategies for hiding and hunting. So we can predict where he will be in a project group, and how he will act:

❂ Mallory may be a founder, yet that is rare. If he is a founder, someone else did the hard work. Look for burned-out skeletons in the closet.

❂ Mallory is most often a new member. He may be surprising best friends with the founder and some of the organizers. He is quiet on public forums and in meetings. He prefers to do the heavy talking in private.

❂ Mallory has no verifiable track record. He may come with grand stories, yet only by his own word. He claims authority from his connections to important people. He does not bring his own knowledge and abilities.

❂ Mallory does little visible work in the group. He spends his time in the group manipulating people against each other. Or, he is absent on "important business."

❂ Mallory is always a VIP by some unspecified law that everyone accepts. His dominance is not earned, yet it is tangible. I’ve explained how he does this, with language and behavior.

❂ Mallory breaks the social conventions of the group. This is a dominance mask. Social humans feel fear and anxiety when they do this. Mallory gets a kick from how others respond to him when he does this.

❂ Mallory is immune to the general stress and anxiety infecting the group. He doesn’t see chaos as a bad thing. The worse it gets, the happier he seems to be.

❂ Mallory is a poor organizer, and depends on others to do that for him. He lacks the ability to plan events. He cannot orchestrate people, without empathy. He does not ask openly: he demands, bullies, and intimidates.

❂ Mallory cannot execute long term plans within the group. Everything is short term, and last-minute drama. As good as he is at one-on-one manipulation, he is incompetent at collective works.

It can be tempting to stick the label "psychopath" on anyone we don’t like. Be careful of that. It is not science to leap to conclusions. Remember that Mallory is a life-long expert in hiding from people like you and me. The right way to identify a possible psychopath in a group is to start with damage and pain. Then, rule out suspects until one person remains. In some rare cases you may see a coalition of psychopaths.

The prognosis for a project group infected by a psychopath is always bad. The real problem isn’t Mallory, it’s that unfixable culture. There are no cures, only various ways of dying.

So it is worth asking, "can we write rules that keep psychopaths away?" The answer is an emphatic "yes." I’ve spent the last decade developing, testing, and using such rules.

The rules must remove all scope for manipulation, secret agreements, and power structures. The details depend on the kind of work the group is doing. These are the essential pieces:

❂ Stay away from legal entities, and the power structures that form around them. Beware of board elections, general assemblies, votes, and such. Legal entities operate accounts, so clear the table. Find a way to work without funding.

❂ Aim for many small groups rather than one larger one. Encourage people to start their own groups, around projects. Groups can then live and die with their projects. This isolates any infection.

❂ Give people the right to create competing projects in any area. Give them the right to take over a troubled project’s work. This lets good actors in an infected project leave and continue their work.

❂ Put all discussions on the public record. This makes it harder for Mallory to troll, disrupt, and lie.

❂ Lower the barriers to entry. While this makes it easier for bad actors to join, it also makes it easier for good actors to join.

❂ Document the rules well and make them a charter for every small group. Allow the rules to evolve over time. Clear rules make Mallory pause and go elsewhere.

❂ Develop a process for identifying and expelling bad actors. Ensure this process exists in your rule book.

If the group produces music, photos, software, or designs, then licensing matters. Standard copyright rules make it easy for psychopaths to capture people. Capture a work, and you capture the authors and users. So use a license that lets people move, with their work. For photos and music, use a Creative Commons "share-alike" license. For software, the Mozilla Public License (v2) is a good choice.