What proportion of the population are psychopaths? A common answer is that 1% meet the definition, but that this is higher in prisons and in corporate boardrooms.
It’s not just that this answer is wrong, but that the question is meaningless too. If I asked, what proportion of the population is smart, you’d not give me a percentage, but you’d first ask what counts as smart. It’s even worse than that with psychopaths. While it’s reasonable to imagine intelligence falling on a spectrum, there is no single dimension that measures psychopathy. There is no threshold for which we can say that someone falls above it is a psychopath. That’s because there is no single set of symptoms that defines a psychopath.
This essay by Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, a professor of forensic epistemology, states the point eloquently. For a more entertaining treatment, I recommend The Psychpath Test by Jon Ronson.
Nehaveigur 