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sister screamed when he wanted her to, and now he has gone on to bigger and better games. In a world where people struggle just to make a living, Skip convinced others to make him rich before he was thirty. He can make fools of his well-educated employers and even his billionaire father-in-law. He can cause these otherwise-sophisticated people to jump, and then laugh at them behind their backs. He influences large financial decisions on an international playing field, can turn most such arrangements to his own advantage, and no one protests. Or if someone does complain, he can cut that person off at the knees with just a well-placed word or two. He can frighten people, assault them, break an arm, ruin a career, and his wealthy colleagues will fall all over themselves making sure he never pays the penalties any ordinary person would pay. He believes he can have any woman he wants, and manipulate any man he comes across, including, most recently, everyone at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
    He is Super Skip. Strategies and payoffs are the only thrills he knows, and he has spent his entire life getting better at the game. For Skip, the game is everything, and though he is too shrewd to say so, he thinks the rest of us are naïve and stupid for not playing it his way. And this is exactly what happens to the human mind when emotional attachment and conscience are missing. Life is reduced to a contest, and other human beings seem to be nothing more than game pieces, to be moved about, used as shields, or ejected.
    Of course, few individuals equal Skip in the level of his IQ or in his physical appearance. By definition, most people, including sociopaths, are average in intelligence and looks, and the games that average sociopaths play are not in the same elite league as Super Skip's global competitions. Many contemporary psychologists, myself included, recall first learning about psychopathy from an educational movie on the subject, viewed when we were college students in the 1970s. The nebbishy case study in the movie is remembered as “Stamp Man,” because he devoted his whole life to the unlikely project of stealing postage stamps from United States post offices. He was not interested in possessing the stamps, or in selling them for cash. His only ambition was to execute a simple break-in at night and then find a spot a little distance from the post office he had just robbed, where he could watch the frenzy of the first employees to enter the building in the morning, followed by the emergency arrival of the police. Skinny, pale, and mouselike, the man interviewed in the movie was anything but scary. His intelligence was average at most, and he could never have played Skip's grand international game, with its masterful strategies and billionaire opponents. But he could play his own game, and psychologically, his simple stamp-stealing game was surprisingly similar to Skip's corporate one.
    Unlike Skip's, Stamp Man's plans were inelegant and transparent, and he was always discovered and arrested. He had been to court and then to jail countless times, and this was the way he lived his life—robbing, watching, going to jail, getting out of jail, and robbing again. But he was unconcerned, because the eventual outcome of his scheming was irrelevant to him. From his perspective, all that mattered was playing the game and seeing, at least for an hour or so each time, the irrefutable evidence that he, Stamp Man, could make people jump. In Stamp Man's opinion, being able to make people jump meant he was winning, and in this way, no less than phenomenally affluent Skip, he illustrates what a sociopath wants. Controlling others—winning—is more compelling than anything (or anyone) else.
    Perhaps the ultimate in dominating another person is to take a life, and the psychopathic murderer or cold-blooded serial killer is the first thing many of us imagine when we think of sociopathic deviance. Short of a sociopathic leader who