How Psychopaths Become CEO’s (Pt 5) – Relational Preferences

Psychopaths prefer relationships in which we will tend to:

• Permit psychopaths to break the rules
• Be seduced by confidence
• Misinterpret success for talent
• Allow charisma to overshadow truth

In other words, style easily influences humans, so psychopaths will leverage these influences.

Since we tend to view those who break rules as powerful, psychopaths will often overtly break them to establish their power with us. They will also establish rules to control relationships but hypocritically breaking, again establishing their power.

Humans naturally fear uncertainty. Confidence reassures us. Psychopaths know they can use confidence to seduce us. In relationships, they will seek and enforce unquestioning respect for authority and rules to protect their confident persona.

Since we have a natural propensity to overweight talent’s impact on results, psychopaths will smartly position themselves to seize favorable opportunities and build their resumes. They will unabashedly take credit from others’ and embellish their contributions.

Psychopaths aren’t natural relaters so often make up for it by learning charisma and improving their emotional intelligence. Still, they must consciously think through every relational event. The same clumsiness results though as when thinking through every step of swinging a golf club or playing an instrument while doing it. Therefore, they will prefer one-on-one and large group interactions. The latter, even diverse ones, aren’t conducive to deeper discussions taxing to psychopaths, but diverse, intimate groups of three to eight individuals are. That’s why, as a whole, psychopaths will prefer homogenous cultures so they can avoid consciously toggling among many different personalities,

Consequently, hypocrisy, confidence, uniformity, agreeableness, obedience and charisma are key relational preferences psychopaths leverage to advance themselves interpersonally. Knowing the situations, trends, people and relationships that benefit psychopaths will help us recognize their shallowness and insincerity when they attempt to influence us.