(Aeon) – One of the more jarring examples is the assassin Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem in the movie No Country for Old Men (2007). Utterly deprived of any emotional resonance, Chigurh wanders through the arid Texas landscape as he slaughters innocent people like cattle. Though characters such as Chigurh are, of course, works of fiction and not serious attempts to portray real people clinically diagnosed with psychopathy, Chigurh-like characters still animate many of the central traits associated with psychopathy, such as emotional detachment and moral emptiness.

However, there’s a problem with this idea of psychopathy. While it has been researched across hundreds of empirical studies – especially since the explosion of research in the late-1990s – there is still remarkably little evidence that corroborates popularised claims about the diagnosis. Despite enthusiasm among researchers in the 1990s and 2000s, when a few studies seemed to validate theories about psychopathy, the past two decades have been sobering. Today, virtually every single claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all. (Read More)