Thanks, that’s an interesting distinction.

Can I test it with something more concrete?

What if I told you that I was assessed at 28 on the PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist–Revised)?

Would knowing that change your answer or your initial impression of me? For example, would it make you more cautious about trusting me, collaborating with me, or evaluating my work - even if my actual behaviour toward you had given you no particular reason for concern?

I’m particularly interested in whether the numerical assessment itself changes anything for you, compared with simply hearing the word “psychopathy.”

There’s also a tension here that I find genuinely interesting. I have enough self-awareness to recognise and discuss these aspects of myself openly, and I’m relatively unafraid of talking about something that carries a very strong stigma. At the same time, I can understand intellectually why other people might have concerns and why disclosure could affect their trust in me.

What makes it stranger is that my internal experience doesn’t necessarily correspond to what people expect from that understanding. I can sometimes feel very little, mentally or physically, and still be curious about what is happening, analyse it, recognise another person’s perspective, and deliberately choose how I want to respond. Understanding something cognitively and experiencing an emotional response to it aren’t necessarily the same thing.

That creates an odd problem when talking about psychopathy. I find myself having to choose my words unusually carefully, because if I describe too much self-awareness, concern, curiosity, restraint, or willingness to take other people’s perspectives seriously, I may inadvertently disabuse you of the idea that I’m psychopathic at all. People can have a surprisingly black-and-white model: either someone is psychopathic and therefore shouldn’t display these qualities, or they display these qualities and therefore cannot really be psychopathic.

Yet if my assessment is taken seriously, those things evidently have to be capable of coexisting. A PCL-R score doesn’t make a person a one-dimensional character, and self-awareness doesn’t necessarily make the underlying traits disappear.

That’s partly why your observation that I seem to “care” caught my attention. What exactly counts as care? Is it an emotion, concern about an outcome, curiosity about another person’s experience, choosing not to harm someone, acting according to principles, or some combination of these? I don’t think those distinctions are as simple as the stereotype suggests.

And that’s where disclosure becomes frustrating. Being sufficiently self-aware and relatively unafraid of the stigma makes it possible for me to talk openly about it. But the more openly and thoughtfully I talk about it, the easier it may become for someone to conclude that I don’t fit their conception of psychopathy in the first place. Conversely, if I simply give them the label or a score like 28, they may infer characteristics about me that they wouldn’t have inferred from interacting with me.

That’s the tension I’m interested in: which should carry more weight — the label and assessment, or the person you actually observe?

That’s partly why the decision is difficult. If you’re willing to be open about it and genuinely want to engage with people constructively, it would be unfortunate if the openness itself caused people to discount everything else they could observe about you.

Your comment about the fact that I seem to “care” is particularly interesting to me. I don’t think care is necessarily a simple binary variable, and I’m curious whether knowing the PCL-R score changes how you interpret that observation.

I also realised that I left out an important piece of context about the PCL-R score. The assessment in which I scored 28 was conducted as part of a research project, rather than as an ordinary clinical assessment. I should have mentioned that when I gave you the number, because I don’t want to imply a context for the assessment that wasn’t actually there. It’s only given when a person has committed serious crime.

It doesn’t really change the question I was asking you — I was interested in whether knowing the score would change your perception of me — but I think it’s important to be precise about where the number came from.

I think one of the difficulties with the psychopathy label is that it immediately places a person into a conceptual box. Once the label is there, almost everything the person says or does can start being interpreted through it.

I also think it’s possible for someone to score quite highly on psychopathic traits while genuinely trying to be a good person. Those aren’t necessarily contradictory propositions. A person can recognise traits in themselves that aren’t particularly prosocial while still deciding what kind of person they want to be and trying to behave accordingly.

Where I think it becomes complicated is empathy. If the emotional response that normally guides someone is weak or absent, then “trying to do the right thing” doesn’t automatically tell you what the right thing is. You may have to rely much more deliberately on reasoning, principles, learned rules, cognitive understanding of other people, and feedback from them.

And that can still go wrong. You can intellectually understand that something affects another person without having the same internal emotional signal telling you how important it is to them. You can misjudge situations, cross boundaries, or rationalise something that another person would have rejected much earlier because their emotional response acted as an immediate brake.

That’s partly why I find the black-and-white picture unsatisfactory. “Psychopath” doesn’t necessarily mean someone has chosen to be harmful, and “trying to be good” doesn’t necessarily make the underlying traits disappear either. Both things can be true at once.

In some ways, that makes self-awareness particularly important rather than contradictory. If you know that some of the ordinary emotional guidance other people rely on may not work the same way for you, you can at least try to compensate for that consciously.

And perhaps that connects with what you said about judging people from experience. The label can tell you something about a psychological profile, but it can’t by itself tell you what someone has decided to do with it.