Let's Talk About Kevin

by Bob Snowden, School of Psychology, Cardiff University

Work in my laboratory looks at a range of problem behaviours that include violence to others, sexual crime and self injury. In particular, we deal with how we can assess the risks, manage these risk public protection, and help with recovery and rehabilitation. Inevitably such work must also take into consideration mental disorders and their possible effects on these behaviours – these include brain injury, mental illness, and personality disorders. One of the most prominent (and misunderstood) constructs is that of the “psychopath” – inevitably whenever a terrible and violent crime occurs, as those of Kevin in this story, one is tempted to simply label him as “psychopathic” and hope that this “explains” what has happened.

Psychopathy is actually a constellation of personality traits that include grandiosity, callousness, lack of remorse, and shallow affect. These, in turn, may allow for the production of antisocial and violent behaviour. In particular it is thought that most (and nearly all) instrumental homicides (those killings done in cold-blood such as Kevin’s) are perpetrated by psychopaths. Crucially, the psychopath is aware that their behaviours are “bad”, but nevertheless they choose to do them.

Certainly the film suggests that Kevin has these psychopathic traits and would meet diagnostic criteria for psychopathy (such as a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist, PCL-R). However, there appears to be more to him than the unfeeling and uncaring prototype of the psychopath. There also appears to be something akin to “evil” in that from birth he appears to be deliberately going out of his way to inconvenience, upset and hurt people (with little gain to himself). These “sadistic” tendencies have been noted in some psychopaths (but far from all) and such people are known as a “lethal cocktail”.

The crucial question then is “where do they come from”. In the film we are certainly given the impression that Kevin is born this way. Recent research does appear to find a strong genetic influence on psychopathy, but this needs to be put in perspective. First, there is not a gene for psychopathy, but many of the traits (such as callousness) may well have some genetic inheritance. Second, just because something is genetic doesn’t mean it will be apparent at birth (my male pattern baldness, for example, failed to show until my 30s!). It is clear that the expression of many genes is dependent upon the environment. Hence, you may have a bad gene or you may have a bad parent, but what you really don’t want is both a bad gene and a bad parent. I will leave it up to you to think as to whether Kevin had a bad parent……