• Your harsh boss or rude coworker aren’t necessarily psychopaths.
• You must meet a certain set of criteria in order to be considered a psychopath.
• Only a professional should diagnos psychopathy, but there are certain tell-tale signs that someone is a psychopath.
The word psychopath gets thrown around quite a lot sometimes.
Famous movie villains are often incorrectly labeled as psychopaths. You might even call your rude neighbor a psycho. And who hasn’t complained about the psychopaths on the road today after getting cut off in traffic?
But how can you tell if you’re working with a legitimate psychopath?
Psychopaths aren’t simply jerks or bullies — they must meet a certain set of criteria, as outlined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.
While only a professional should diagnose psychopathy, a psychopathic coworker or boss may demonstrate some of these signs.
SEE ALSO: 21 signs you have a terrible boss
DON’T MISS: 7 signs you can’t trust your coworkers
They have sadistic motives and intents
“I think the most telling sign is their sadistic nature,” Andrew Faas, a former senior executive with Canada’s two largest retail organizations and author of “The Bully’s Trap,” told Business Insider.
A psychopath motivates others through fear, rather than respect, he says, and they intend to destroy rather than correct.
This one characteristic is what separates psychopaths from a boss or coworker who is simply “firm,” he said.
“I’ve led and managed workforces that are in the thousands, and I’ve always been and still am a very demanding leader, but I motivate through respect because I want people to improve,” Faas said.
They’re glib and constantly turn on the superficial charm
Psychopaths are masters at presenting themselves well.
They are great conversationalists who can easily sprinkle chit-chat with witty comebacks and “unlikely but convincing” stories that make them look good, said psychologist Robert Hare, creator of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, in a post on Psychology Today.
Confronted with such charm, you may believe that the psychopath is a decent — delightful, even — person by the end of the conversation.
Hare writes that one of his raters once interviewed a male prisoner who threw in some compliments about her appearance, and by the end of the interview she felt unusually pretty.
“When I got back outside, I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for a line like that,” she said.
They have a grandiose estimation of self
Psychopaths see themselves as the center of the universe, according to Hare’s article in Psychology Today. They are so important in their minds that they believe other people are just tools to be used.