William Atkins
Saturday, 03 January 2009 22:12
Science -
Biology
Page 1 of 3
A Canadian study identifies the strategies of the office psychopath and discusses which employees are most vulnerable to their tactics.
The researchers in this study are Kevin Wilson and Sabrina Demetrioff, both from the Department of Psychology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and Stephen Porter, from the Department of Psychology and Computer Sciences at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada.
Their research was written up in the article “
A pawn by any other name? Social information processing as a function of psychopathic traits.”
It was published in the December 2008 issue of the
Journal of Research in Personality (volume 42, issue 6, pages 1651-1656).
They state in the abstract to their paper,
“Past research has linked psychopathic traits with the ability to manipulate others, either through deception or violence. Recent observations in corporate settings suggest that enhanced interpersonal assessments might underlie this process, giving psychopathic individuals the ability to detect useful and/or vulnerable victims.”
In order words, the Canadian researchers suspect that office bullies target the most vulnerable co-workers, possibly because they are the most useful for whatever they have in mind to do.
Wilson, a four-year graduate student in psychology, stated,
"It’s like what you’d see on Animal Planet—the lion goes after the most vulnerable, the one they have the best chance of getting.” [Dalhousie University: “
What attracts the psychopath?”]
Page two talks about the experiment and its conclusions.
