What can he see? Michael Blann/Getty

Psychopaths in films and TV are often masters of manipulation, but in real life they’re not so good at taking other people’s perspectives into account.

The ability to understand that other people can have different beliefs and opinions to our own develops in the first few years of our lives. Known as theory of mind, this plays a fundamental role in our social interactions.

Recent evidence suggests that theory of mind has two components – an explicit kind, where we consciously reason about what someone else is thinking, and a more automatic version that influences our decision-making subconsciously.


Psychopaths are known to be have normal abilities when it comes to explicitly working out what other people are thinking. But Arielle Baskin-Sommers of Yale University and her colleagues have now found out that psychopaths are worse than the average person at subconsciously registering someone else’s perspective.

Count the dots

The team recruited 106 prisoners from a maximum-security prison in Connecticut. Using a standard mental health questionnaire, the team found that 22 of them were psychopathic, 28 were definitely not psychopathic, and the others scored somewhere in the middle.

The prisoners then took a test designed to assess how good a person is at subconsciously taking other people’s perspectives into account. It involves looking at a picture of a room and counting the number of dots on the walls. However, there is a figure standing side-on in the room, and – depending on which way they are facing – this person may not be able to see all the dots.

How many dots do you see? Adapted from Drayton, Santos and Baskin-Sommers 2018

When both the figure and the test-subject can see the same number of dots, the subject takes about a second to answer the question. But if the figure cannot see all the dots, the subject takes a fraction of a second longer to respond – an effect termed interference. “We seem to be automatically taking their different viewpoint into account,” says Ian Apperly of the University of Birmingham in the UK, who developed the test.

Less delay, more crimes

When the non-psychopaths did the dots test, they experienced a delay of about 100 milliseconds if the figure was unable to see all the dots. But psychopaths were less perturbed, with a delay of just 60 milliseconds – suggesting they take less account of the perspectives of other people.

The team found that the less of a time delay a psychopathic participant had, the more assault charges they had been convicted of. This suggests this difference plays a role in their criminal behaviour, says Baskin-Sommers. “What they see in the world is different to non-psychopaths. They just don’t have a propensity to take other people’s perspective.”

But it’s not clear yet that the dot test really does measure our subconscious theory of mind. People also perform more slowly in a version of the test that has an arrow pointing towards some of the dots instead of a figure in it. So the effect might be a result of our attention being drawn away from the other dots, says Patricia Lockwood of the University of Oxford.

Psychopaths have also been found deficient in the ability to recognise other people’s fearful expressions.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1721903115