You have seen the film right? Woman in a shower. Crazy music. A ruined shower curtain. Blood circling around a plug-hole. I’m sure there is much more scary stuff out there these days if you want to study psychopaths; and of course some of it isn’t fictional.
I’m not sure though that the ‘psycho’ in popular culture truly aligns with the actual psychopaths with whom we all share our lives. If psychopaths were all murderers then there would be many more plug-hole moments and wasted shower curtains. You’ve guessed it; one percent of us are psychopaths! That’s 78 million people – walking the planet right now.
According to the United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends 490,000 people were murdered globally in 2004. There were 6.5 billion of us then so, assuming that the psychopathic rate was the same, that equates to just one murder for every 132 psychopaths! I wouldn’t want to see that played out in a shower cubicle.
So evidently not all psychopaths are murderers and perhaps not all murderers are psychopaths. Rutger Bregman mentions in his book Humankind that 1% of human deaths during the twentieth century were classified as ‘violent deaths’. These deaths include murder victims but also people killed in war and conflict with which the twentieth century was of course overly defined. It is useful to note that although 1% of human deaths were violent last century, our nearest animal relative the chimpanzee (with whom we share 99% of our genes) managed a 4.5% ‘violent death’ rate.
Well, if psychopaths aren’t out there sneaking up on people trying to wash away their worries, what are they up to? Many psychopaths are able to lead relatively normal lives of course, hiding amongst us, content to reek havoc in marriages, on motorways, in offices and posting on twitter. Although 1% of the general population has psychopathic tendencies their numbers increase significantly within certain sectors. Importantly somewhere between 3-20% of chief executive officers and leaders are psychopaths. They are the people, historically, who send their more empathetic peers off to war and conflicts and to do their dirty work.
So when you are standing in your shower tomorrow morning don’t worry. It’s possible that some of you will be sharing your homes with a psychopath – for that you have my sincere sympathy; but statistically you are probably safe. If you, or one of your housemates is a chimpanzee or a chief executive however….best to lock the bathroom door.
One Percent Blog 