Stories of Psychopaths

This Ted Talk was given by Jon Ronson, who is a writer and documentary filmmaker. In his Ted Talk, Ronson discusses how the line between crazy and sane is unclear. He argues that we try to define people as psychopaths without paying attention to the normal parts of them, and that we should not “define people by their maddest edges.” In his Ted Talk, Ronson tells a story of a man he met named Tony. When Tony was 17, he beat someone up pretty badly, and then in order to get out of going to jail, he faked being crazy. It worked too well, and Tony was put into Broadmoor Hospital (an insane asylum). He tried to tell them that he was not actually insane, but, as he told Ronson, “it’s a lot harder to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.”

Ronson interviewed Tony (for a book Ronson was writing) while Tony was still in Broadmoor, and Ronson felt that Tony seemed pretty normal. Tony’s clinician told Ronson that although they did accept the fact that Tony pretended to be crazy in order to get out of his prison sentence, they assessed him further and decided he was a psychopath because “faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath.” There is a list of clinical traits of a psychopath created by Robert Hare. Tony told Ronson, "You know what, one of the items on the checklist is ‘lack of remorse,’ but another item on the checklist is ‘cunning, manipulative.’ So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn't.' It's like witchcraft. They turn everything upside-down." Eventually Tony was let out of Broadmoor (after 14 years) because they decided they could not hold him indefinitely just because he had a higher than average chance of relapsing into criminal behavior. Ronson says Tony is a “semi- psychopath. He’s a gray area in a world that doesn’t like gray areas. But gray areas are where you find the complexity, the humanity, the truth.”

Later in the Ted Talk, Ronson tells another story of how he interviewed a man named Al Dunlap who worked in corporate business. Hare had told Ronson that there are many “corporate psychopaths,” so Ronson convinced Dunlap to go through the Hare checklist with him. Dunlap did fit many traits of the list, but there were also many traits that did not fit Dunlap. When Ronson was interviewing Dunlap, he realized that he tended to disregard Dunlap’s normal answers and to focus on his “crazy” ones. Ronson then discusses how some mental disorders are over-diagnosed because of this reason. For example, many children are diagnosed with bipolar disorder because they have temper tantrums. This is where he realizes that we should not “define people by their maddest edges.”

The purpose of Ronson’s Ted Talk is to discuss the blurred line between sane and insane.  He suggests that too many people are diagnosed with mental disorders because a list of traits is used to identify insanity when in reality humans are too complex to be categorized so easily. Maybe many people do have psychopathic traits, but their “normal” traits override the bad ones.

So, why should we trust what Jon Ronson has to say? Ronson wrote a book, called The Psychopath Test, that explores psychopaths. He has also written other books, articles, and films that investigate madness and obsession. Ronson also discusses how he went on a psychopath spotting course run by Robert Hare and became a certified psychopath spotter.

Ronson structures his argument by telling two stories that support it. The stories are of high quality because they are about experiences he personally had. Since Ronson told two stories that support each other, they make his argument more effective and credible. Ronson also strengthens his argument with factual information like statistics. For example, he says “one in a hundred regular people is a psychopath.” Ronson effectively argues his point, but in order to make his argument stronger, he could have brought in the opinion of other experts or proposed and broken down a counter argument.

Ronson also uses tactics to evoke emotion from the audience. First, he makes jokes throughout his Ted Talk in order to keep the audience interested and probably to keep the tone lighter as he talks about a darker topic. It makes people more comfortable and connected to the speaker, which in turn, makes the audience more likely to agree with the argument. The second way he evokes emotion is not through his speech, but through music and visual images. As he tells his stories, he has music and pictures in the background that go with what he is saying. They help the people in the audience really feel like they are experiencing, first hand, what is going on in his story.

I chose this Ted Talk because I find psychology to be very interesting, and anything having to do with the way the human brain works intrigues me. Also, we have just finished a unit in English involving insanity where we watched a video about the over diagnoses of multiple personality disorder, and I am sure the fact that I have just finished watching Dexter contributes to my continued interest in this topic.