Psychopathy: Theory and Research

Hare's argument is that psychopathy is not merely a clinical label or a moral judgment but a coherent syndrome with identifiable physiological and learning correlates. He rejects the approach that treats psychopathy as a descriptive psychiatric category whose boundaries are settled by clinical impression alone. Instead, he assembles evidence that psychopaths differ from other populations in cortical arousal, autonomic reactivity, fear conditioning, and avoidance learning, and he proposes that these differences explain the behavioral pattern—the failure to learn from punishment, the need for stimulation, the superficial social facade. The book is therefore an argument for a laboratory-based science of psychopathy rather than a purely interview-based one, a program Hare would pursue for the rest of his career.

Psychopathy: Theory and Research is the intellectual foundation on which the PCL-R was later built. The 1970 book identifies the core features of psychopathy and grounds them in experimental findings, but it does not yet provide a standardized assessment instrument. Hare's subsequent work, culminating in the 1991 PCL-R manual, translated the construct described in this monograph into a scored 20-item clinical rating scale. The relationship is one of research program to measurement tool: the monograph establishes what psychopathy is and why it matters scientifically; the PCL-R makes it operationally measurable across settings. Readers of the PCL-R manual who want to understand why Hare chose the traits he did will find the rationale here, in the psychophysiological evidence he considered decisive.

Hare treats Cleckley as the indispensable starting point but subjects his clinical portrait to empirical scrutiny. The Mask of Sanity provided the descriptive vocabulary—superficial charm, absence of remorse, mask of sanity—that Hare retains. But Hare's method is to ask which of Cleckley's traits can be operationalized and tested in the laboratory. He does not simply accept Cleckley's patient-based sample as representative; the book's experimental chapters implicitly test whether the traits Cleckley observed in psychiatric patients generalize to other populations, including prisoners. The 1970 monograph thus historicizes Cleckley: it preserves the clinical insight while submitting it to the demand for replicable measurement, a move that would later generate the debate about whether the PCL-R overemphasizes criminal behavior relative to Cleckley's original profile.

Contemporary reviews were favorable, treating it as a competent and timely synthesis. Jesse G. Harris, reviewing it alongside a book on depression in PsycCRITIQUES in 1972, described it as clear, compact, and well organized, with appropriate page allotment by significance of topic, and judged that both volumes met their editors' stated objectives. The review noted that the book delivered theory and research in psychopathy in a concise technical style. The book appeared in Wiley's Approaches to Behavior Pathology series, which positioned it as a scientific monograph rather than a trade book. Its reception established Hare as a leading empirical researcher on psychopathy, a reputation that would grow substantially with the later development of the PCL-R.

The core insight—that psychopathy involves abnormalities in fear conditioning and response to punishment—has been substantially supported, though the simple under-arousal hypothesis has been refined. Modern research on amygdala function and fear-potentiated startle has vindicated Hare's emphasis on deficient fear learning, but the picture is more complex than a global low-arousal model. The book's treatment of cortical under-arousal and stimulation-seeking anticipated later work on sensation seeking, though the specific EEG findings Hare reviewed have not all replicated robustly. What has endured is the methodological commitment: psychopathy is best understood by combining clinical description with laboratory measures of learning and emotion. The book's limits are those of its era—small samples, heterogeneous diagnostic criteria—but its programmatic direction proved prescient.

The placement reflects the book's subsequent influence rather than its original disciplinary home. In 1970, psychopathy research was a branch of abnormal and personality psychology, and Hare's monograph was written for that audience. Its migration into forensic psychology occurred because the construct proved indispensable for predicting recidivism and violence in criminal populations, a development that accelerated with the PCL-R. The 1970 book itself contains little forensic content—no risk assessment protocols, no legal applications, no discussion of expert testimony. Readers seeking the direct forensic application should consult the PCL-R manual or Snakes in Suits. This book is best understood as the scientific prehistory of forensic psychopathy assessment, valuable precisely because it shows the construct being built before it was enlisted in the courtroom.