The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us
A new book says that sociopaths aren’t just Scott Peterson and BTK. They are your neighbors, bosses — even therapists. Salon.comMarch 22, 2005

It sounds like a treatment for a creepy psychological thriller: a world in which one in every 25 people walks through life without a drop of human compassion. On the outside, these creatures appear perfectly normal. They get married, buy homes, hold down jobs. But on the inside, they’re morally bankrupt and completely unrestricted by conscience. They can do absolutely anything — lie, steal, sabotage — without feeling a shred of guilt or remorse. Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, Ph.D., says this is not science fiction. In her controversial new book, “The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us,” Stout claims that 4 percent of the population are sociopaths who have no capacity to love or empathize. Using composites pooled from her research to illustrate her points, Stout details the havoc sociopaths wreak on unsuspecting individuals — marrying for money, backstabbing co-workers, or simply messing with people for the fun of it. The fact that most of us never suspect our friends and neighbors of sociopathy only makes the transgressions easier to pull off.