My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
The PCLR, the Psychopathy Checklist Revised Test, is a prime example of everything that is wrong with psychological tests and structured interviews, and why they have very dubious, predictive and retrodictive power.
The second edition of the PCLR test, originally designed by the controversial maverick, Canadian criminologist Robert Hare in 1980 and again in 1991, this second edition contains 20 items designed to rate symptoms which are common among psychopaths in forensic populations, for instance, prison inmates or child molesters. The test is designed to cover the major psychopathic traits and behaviors, callous, selfish, remorseless use of others, known as factor one, chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle, factor two, interpersonal and affective deficits, impulsive lifestyle and antisocial behavior and so on. The 20 traits assessed by the PCLR score are glib and superficial charm, grandiose, exaggeratedly high estimation of oneself, need for stimulation, pathological lying, declining and manipulativeness, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, superficial emotional responsiveness, callousness and lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, sexual promiscuity, early behavior problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, many short-term marital relationships, juvenile delinquency, revocation of conditional release and finally criminal versatility.
Psychopaths score between 30 and 40. Normal people score between 0 and 5.
Last time I took the test I scored 13, 1, 3. Not exactly a psychopath but not exactly normal either.
But here himself was known to label as psychopaths, people with a score as low as mine, 13.
The PCLR is therefore an art rather than a science and it leaves much to the personal impressions of those who administer it.
As I said, even here himself contradicted his own teachings regarding the test.
The PCLR is based on a structured interview and collateral data gathered from family, friends and colleagues and from documents. The questions comprising the structured interview are so transparent and self-evident that it is easy to lie one’s way through the test and completely skew its results.
Questions are naive.
Moreover, scoring by the diagnostician is highly subjective, which is why the DSM and the ICT stick to observable behaviors in their criteria for antisocial or dissocial personality disorders.
Here’s woe is widely rejected by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Committee. His test and his distinctions between psychopaths and patients with antisocial personality disorders have yet to make the mainstream of current thinking.
The hope of the designers of the PCLR test is that information gathered outside the scope of a structured interview will serve to rectify any potential abuse, diagnostic bias and manipulation by both the testee and the tester.
The PCLR, in other words, relies on the truthfulness of responses provided by notorious liars, psychopaths and all the biased memories of multiple witnesses, all of them close to the psychopaths and with an axe to grind.
These are not truly good foundation for any scientific endeavor, let alone for a test who pretends and claims and aspires to diagnose an allegedly and ostensibly objective phenomenon, antisocial personality disorder.
