Psychopath IQ: Are Psychopaths Smarter Than Average?

Psychopath IQ scores are, on average, about the same as everyone else's or very slightly lower. A meta-analysis that pooled decades of studies found a small negative "correlation" (a number from -1 to +1 describing how closely two measures move together) of -.07 between intelligence and overall psychopathy, which means a person's IQ tells you almost nothing about how psychopathic they are.

This article traces where the "evil genius" image came from, what the research on psychopathy and intelligence shows, why different parts of psychopathy relate to IQ in different directions, what makes the topic hard to measure, and what studies of young people add. In this research, "psychopathy" refers to a cluster of personality traits measured on a continuum, and it is rare at the extreme end. In a household survey of Great Britain using a standardized clinical rating scale, Coid and colleagues estimated that 0.6% of adults scored in the psychopathy range, while most people showed no psychopathic traits at all.

The image is partly clinical history. In The Mask of Sanity (1941), the psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley wrote one of the first detailed descriptions of psychopathy, and one item in his profile was "good intelligence." Popular culture took the idea much further. Sánchez de Ribera and colleagues note that the public picture of the psychopath has often been the criminal mastermind, with Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs as the standard example.

Cleckley's profile deserves less weight than its fame suggests. In a review of how the construct developed, Robert Hare and Craig Neumann point out that the profile was based on an unrepresentative sample of patients and argue that modern ideas of psychopathy should rest on empirical research rather than on strict adherence to early clinical descriptions. A memorable case description is a hypothesis about a population, and the hypothesis has since been tested many times.

Two meta-analyses carry most of the weight here.

• O'Boyle and colleagues (2013): This review looked at the "Dark Triad" of Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy in 48 independent samples. General mental ability "showed no consistent relation with any DT trait." The authors concluded that the data supported neither the "evil genius" hypothesis nor the opposite "compensatory" idea that less intelligent people turn to manipulation to make up for it.

• Sánchez de Ribera, Kavish, Katz and Boutwell (2019): This larger meta-analysis included clinical and offender samples as well as community ones. It found a small, statistically significant negative relationship between intelligence and total psychopathy (r = -.07). Intelligence was also negatively related to antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder (both r = -.13).

To put -.07 in perspective, it is so close to zero that you could not guess anyone's psychopathy score from their IQ, or the reverse. What little tilt there is runs away from the evil genius: across a large body of research, higher psychopathy goes with very slightly lower scores. The stronger negative link for antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder points the same way, since those diagnoses are defined mainly by rule-breaking behavior.

The link between narcissism and IQ follows a different pattern, centered on how people rate their own intelligence rather than on how they score.

Psychopathy is usually broken into parts. The most widely used clinical tool, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), groups its items into two broad factors. Factor 1 covers interpersonal and emotional traits such as superficial charm and lack of remorse. Factor 2 covers an impulsive, antisocial lifestyle. These are often split further into four "facets": interpersonal, affective (emotional), lifestyle and antisocial.

The 2019 meta-analysis found that the facets do not all point the same way. Its published abstract reports "significant positive (e.g. interpersonal facet) and negative (e.g. affective facet) associations" with intelligence. The authors' openly available version of the paper gives the detail:

• Interpersonal facet (charm, grandiosity, manipulation): a small positive correlation with full-scale IQ (r = .14).

• Affective facet (shallow emotion, lack of empathy): small negative correlations with full-scale, verbal and performance IQ (r = -.16, -.18 and -.12).

• Factor 1 as a whole: no relationship with full-scale IQ (r = .01).

• Factor 2 as a whole: a small negative relationship (r = -.09), larger for verbal IQ (r = -.16).

The pattern explains why both stereotypes survive. The superficially charming, manipulative side of psychopathy is, if anything, very slightly linked to higher scores, which the authors suggest may be what Cleckley noticed. The impulsive, antisocial side goes with somewhat lower scores, especially on verbal tasks, the kind of skills captured by the verbal comprehension part of an IQ test. The authors themselves stress that the positive interpersonal link does not put charming manipulators among the highest scorers, only that they show no broad cognitive deficit. That is also the honest answer to searches about the "high-functioning psychopath": the label describes a style of behavior, and the IQ data do not show a distinct high-scoring group.

Several features of this research make single studies easy to misread.

• Who gets studied: The PCL family of measures was designed for use with prisoners, and incarcerated men are heavily represented in this literature. O'Boyle and colleagues, by contrast, excluded psychiatric, child and incarcerated samples, so the two meta-analyses describe partly different populations.

• How psychopathy is measured: Clinical ratings and self-report questionnaires overlap but are not interchangeable. Sánchez de Ribera and colleagues note that one self-report scale did not measure the same thing in the same way in students and prisoners. Questionnaires completed by university students also depend on reading ability and candor, which can blur any link with IQ.

• Who is in the sample: In the openly available version of the 2019 meta-analysis, female samples showed a negative association between psychopathy and full-scale IQ (r = -.19), while male samples showed none (r = -.03). The authors call their moderator findings speculative and inconsistent, so treat this as a lead for future work.

• Small effects, big variation: The meta-analysis found significant differences between studies for most effects. A single study reporting a high-IQ psychopath group, or a low-IQ one, is expected noise around a small average.

There is also no such thing as an IQ test for psychopathy. IQ tests measure reasoning and knowledge, while psychopathy is assessed with structured clinical ratings or personality tests, and the two answer different questions. Psychopathy is not itself a diagnosis in the main psychiatric manuals; its closest diagnostic relative is antisocial personality disorder. Concerns about personality or behavior belong with a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, and forensic assessments are done by specially trained clinicians.

Research on children and adolescents offers a different angle, since these samples are not drawn mainly from adult prisons.

Allen and colleagues studied 361 young people aged 9 to 18 from samples with different levels of risk for antisocial behavior. Verbal intelligence was unrelated to "callous-unemotional" traits (the youth version of psychopathy's emotional core) after accounting for factors such as disadvantage and hyperactivity. Their conclusion was blunt: the results "contradict the widely held view that psychopathic traits are associated with better than average verbal or nonverbal intelligence."

Age may also shape the link with the antisocial side of psychopathy. In the openly available version of the 2019 meta-analysis, Factor 2 traits were negatively related to verbal IQ in adolescents (r = -.20) and adults (r = -.21), while samples of children showed no such relationship. That fits a picture in which impulsive, antisocial behavior and weaker verbal skills become more closely tied together as children grow into adolescence, although the authors caution that these age findings need replication.

There is no special psychopath IQ. Meta-analyses find that psychopathic traits have a near-zero, slightly negative relationship with intelligence, so people high in psychopathy score across the ordinary range like everyone else.

No. A meta-analysis of the Dark Triad found no consistent relation between intelligence and psychopathy, and a later meta-analysis found a very small negative correlation (r = -.07).

Only for one narrow part of it. The interpersonal facet of psychopathy (charm and manipulation) showed a small positive correlation with IQ, while the emotional and antisocial parts showed small negative ones.

No. IQ tests measure cognitive ability, and psychopathy is assessed by trained clinicians using structured rating scales such as the PCL-R.

"Sociopath" is a popular label with no body of IQ research of its own. The closest diagnosis, antisocial personality disorder, shows a small negative correlation with intelligence (r = -.13).

The psychopath IQ question has a clear answer from the research: psychopathic traits and intelligence are nearly unrelated, with a very slight tilt toward lower scores. The charming, manipulative side of psychopathy shows a small positive link with IQ, and the cold and impulsive sides show small negative links, so the evil genius is a fictional composite. If you want to see how intelligence itself is measured, independent of any personality label, you can take a full-length online IQ test that reports your result against a defined norm group.

1. Coid, J., Yang, M., Ullrich, S., Roberts, A., & Hare, R. D. (2009). Prevalence and correlates of psychopathic traits in the household population of Great Britain. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 32(2), 65-73. doi.org

2. Hare, R. D., & Neumann, C. S. (2008). Psychopathy as a clinical and empirical construct. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 4, 217-246. doi.org

3. O'Boyle, E. H., Forsyth, D., Banks, G. C., & Story, P. A. (2013). A meta-analytic review of the Dark Triad-intelligence connection. Journal of Research in Personality, 47(6), 789-794. doi.org

4. Sánchez de Ribera, O., Kavish, N., Katz, I. M., & Boutwell, B. B. (2019). Untangling intelligence, psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and conduct problems: A meta-analytic review. European Journal of Personality, 33(5), 529-564. doi.org

5. Sánchez de Ribera, O., Kavish, N., Katz, I. M., & Boutwell, B. B. (2017). Untangling intelligence, psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and conduct problems: A meta-analytic review [Preprint, version posted March 28, 2019]. bioRxiv. doi.org

6. Allen, J. L., Briskman, J., Humayun, S., Dadds, M. R., & Scott, S. (2013). Heartless and cunning? Intelligence in adolescents with antisocial behavior and psychopathic traits. Psychiatry Research, 210(3), 1147-1153. doi.org

Hero image: Brass Sock and Buskin Masks East Haven VT June 2018, by Artaxerxes, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). Via Wikimedia Commons.