Psychopathic Behaviour: Approaches to Research

The book contains revised versions of papers presented at a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in Les Arcs, France, September 5–12, 1975, supported by NATO's Scientific Affairs Division [citation:1][citation:5][citation:17]. This origin explains the volume's character: it is not a systematic treatise but a conference proceedings, with contributions from an international roster of researchers who were invited to present their current work and argue with one another. The NATO sponsorship also signals the Cold War-era institutional investment in behavioral science as a strategic resource. Readers should approach the book as a snapshot of a research community in conversation, not as a unified statement of doctrine. The chapters vary in style and depth, reflecting the symposium format rather than editorial imposition of a single framework.

The 1970 monograph was Hare's personal synthesis, organized around his psychophysiological program and presenting a coherent argument for a laboratory-based science of psychopathy. The 1978 volume is a collective enterprise edited with Daisy Schalling, and it sacrifices coherence for breadth. Its chapters cover genetic determinants, childhood histories, persistent criminality, and treatment—territories Hare's solo book treated only briefly or not at all. The edited volume also represents a methodological broadening: where the 1970 book centered on autonomic and cortical measures, the 1978 collection includes contributors working from sociological, developmental, and clinical perspectives. Read together, the two books trace Hare's trajectory from individual program-builder to community organizer, a shift that would prove essential to the later standardization of the PCL-R.

The recurring problem is definitional: psychopathy lacks a stable, agreed-upon referent, and this instability frustrates cumulative research. The book's synopsis notes that it opens with a review of problems associated with the definition and diagnosis of psychopathy for research and clinical purposes [citation:11]. This is not a minor methodological quibble but a crisis for a scientific field: if different researchers mean different things by 'psychopath,' their findings cannot be aggregated or compared. The volume's contributors approach this problem from different angles—some proposing refined diagnostic criteria, others arguing for narrower operational definitions suitable for specific research questions. The collection does not resolve the definitional problem, but it documents it with unusual clarity, making the book valuable as a record of a field confronting its own incoherence.

A contemporary review in the journal Criminology, comparing it with three other books on criminal behavior, noted that the volume was generally well edited but identified instances where authors were referred to and even quoted without citation of the source, and passages where claims about 'a number of studies' or 'abundant evidence' appeared without a single reference . These are technical criticisms rather than substantive ones, but they matter for a research volume whose value depends on traceability. The review's tone suggests the book was received as a competent contribution to the literature rather than a transformative intervention. It appeared in the same period as competing volumes on biosocial bases of criminal behavior, indicating a crowded and active research landscape.

The volume represents the pre-PCL-R moment, when psychopathy research was rich in hypotheses and methods but lacked a standardized assessment instrument that could unify the field. Several contributors address the measurement problem directly, and their struggles anticipate the solution Hare would later provide. The PCL-R, published in 1991, effectively resolved the definitional crisis this volume documents by imposing a single, widely adopted operationalization. Read retrospectively, Psychopathic Behaviour shows why that resolution was necessary and what was lost in achieving it: the diversity of approaches represented here—genetic, developmental, physiological, clinical—was largely subordinated to the imperative of reliable measurement. The book is thus valuable for recovering questions that the PCL-R's success made it possible to set aside.