How to Understand Psychopathy as a Personality Disorder

Firstly to define what psychopathy is for the purposes of this commentary; some experts, specialists and such talk about Machiavellianism and narcissism as being traits characteristic of psychopathy. Now although this is true in the sense that these “personality disorders” have a propensity to overlap with psychopathy, this isn’t always true. For example, not all psychopaths are charismatic, and not all charismatic people are psychopathic. Not all proficiently Machiavellian individuals are psychopathic, but almost all psychopaths are Machiavellian. Thus it seems that when psychologists, psychiatrists, CIA profilers and such talk about psychopaths, what they’re really referring to is “a dark triad individual.”