How Evolutionary Psychology Can Explain the Existence of Psychopaths

Abstract

People diagnosed as psychopaths demonstrate callous, self-serving behaviour. They are extreme free riders who appear to be unable to experience guilt. We argue here that, in order to understand the existence of psychopaths at a population level, we need to consider both theoretical and empirical findings based around evolutionary principles. In particular we suggest that the concepts of Life History Theory, where individuals make trade-offs during development and Frequency Dependent Selection, where individuals develop reproductively successful strategies, can be used to understand the maintenance of psychopathy