The Psychopath Test journeys into the minds of the mad, from death squad leaders to battling CEOs. Steven Hsieh speaks with author Jon Ronson about the fringes of sanity

Jon Ronson’s fascination with psychopaths began when he met Tony, a charming asylum patient who swears he’s sane, only convincing others of his madness. Confounded by this Catch-22 stance, the best-selling author (The Men Who Stare at Goats) sought help from Robert Hare, the psychologist behind the 21-point checklist of personality traits used to diagnose psychopaths. With this tool at his disposal, Ronson takes readers on a journey of diagnosis in his new book, The Psychopath Test. He spoke with us from London about the madness industry, why many psychopaths rise to the top, and our obsession with labeling every instance of unusual behavior.

How did learning the Hare checklist change you?
It totally changed me. In the middle of all this, The Men Who Stare at Goats movie was being premiered at Toronto. So I flew with the screenwriter, and I remember on the plane I was telling him, ‘There are psychopaths everywhere! And I know how to spot them!’ And he looked at me like I was insane, like, ‘you’re talking bullshit. What happened to you?’ [Laughs] And that was very real. And at that stage in the journey, the book was going to be about that, about how there are psychopaths everywhere, and that they’re kind of creeping in at you. And your wife is probably a psychopath, that the people who bullied you at school were probably psychopaths. I remember somebody was being slightly aggressive towards me on Twitter, and I was convinced he was a psychopath. He wasn’t a psychopath at all! And it took me quite a long time to come to that realisation that I had really profoundly changed with my new psychopath-spotting powers. In retrospect, I’m glad it happened because it gave my journey a shape, and I think you want that in books.

A few people you encounter regard their psychopathy as a strength.
It is fascinating, isn’t it? In some ways, there’s something to be said for being a bit psychopathic. I’m sick of feeling anxious all the time. Just yesterday, I was thinking to myself, ‘God! How nice it would be to be a bit more psychopathic and not have these terrible feelings of anxiety.’ I think the chilled-out side of psychopathy – there’s something to be said for that. There are also people who say that psychopaths make very good brain surgeons or soldiers. However, if you said that to Hare, he would say that is bullshit, because if you take empathy out of the equation, what always takes its place is malevolence.

You reported on Hare’s suggestion that many high-level politicians and CEOs are psychopaths. How do you feel about that now?
I think there’s truth to that. I think I’m at this sort of place now, where I’m being quite rational about the whole thing. What Hare says, and a lot of psychologists say, is that this is the brain anomaly that rules our world. This charming, remorseless, ruthlessness is a potent combination, and it makes people rise to the top. You can certainly succeed a lot more if you don’t care about people.

You write a lot about the fringes.
I feel most alive when I’m doing those kinds of stories. It just touches my muse. If I’m writing the ordinary world, I just don’t write it very well. But it’s never about freakishness. It’s about how the fringes tell us something about us. It’s going to their world and standing with them as they look back at our world. I think if it’s just about their world, it becomes a shallow, freak show story, which I don’t like telling.

What do you want readers to take away from The Psychopath Test?
I know it sounds a bit grandiose, but I think this is a book about asking ourselves what sort of people we want to be. What makes us human? When you’re confronted with somebody like Tony, a kind of semi-psychopath, how do you deal with him? Do you define by his madness, reduce him, or are you naively tolerant of him, and looking for the best in him? I think the book asks quite profound questions about who we want to be as people. Do we want to be tough, cold-hearted bastards? Or do we want to be naive, kind-hearted people?