Summary Of Robert D. Hare's Without Conscience

Robert D. Hare’s book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us focuses on psychopathy in our society. In the book, the author highlights the characteristics of psychopaths in a simple manner that are understandable to an everyday reader. Psychopaths are individuals who are deceitful and manipulative and they don’t care who they hurt. Hare points out his personal experience with psychopath in prison that eventually lead him to create The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. In the Checklist, Hare emphasizes characteristics that makes someone a psychopath such as “shallow emotions, deceitful and manipulative behavior, lack of guilt, lack of empathy, impulsiveness, poor behavior control, lack of responsibility, need for excitement, early behavior problems, glib and grandiose behavior” (Hare 1993, p. 34). The author employs detailed interviews and a close study of psychopaths to research and create an instrument that could help detect psychopathy. In the book, Hare goes further to provide

In many junctions throughout the book, the author reiterated the importance of Psychopathy Checklist-Revised and how vital it was to a psychopath’s diagnoses. While the author made convincing points in the book for the checklist, the author, himself, created the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised based on his research and experiments. So, the fact that he was pointing back to his own research repeatedly didn’t add confidence to the information given. It only made his opinion on the topic appear bias. Also, in the book the author mentioned the other tests as being less reliable at identifying psychopath “…criminals were able to fake the results of psychological test” (Hare,1993, p. 31). Because the author was the creator of the Psychology Checklist-Revised, he was bashing other psychological tests while making his own seem