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Journal of Personality Disorders, 1 1(3), 301-303, 1997
1997 The Guilford Press
For more than 25 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has
sponsored Advanced Study Institutes (ASIs), described as high level teach ing seminars in which "Lecturers' and "Students' meet in a relatively
secluded location for an extended period of intensive instruction, discus sion, and debate on specific topics of international interest. In September,
1975, Daisy Schalling and I organized and directed an ASI on psychopathy.
Held over a 10-day period in Les Arcs, France, the ASI was considered by
most to have been very successful. Certainly, the setting and ambience were
stunning, but from the scientific perspective the meeting was less satisfying
than we had hoped. As I have indicated elsewhere (Hare, 1996), the ASI was
a microcosm of the real academic and clinical world, a world that in 1975
produced much armchair speculation and uninformed debate, but rela
tively little empirical research, about the nature of psychopathy. Psycholo gists, psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, and criminologists all of whom were represented at the ASI operated from a variety of conceptual
frameworks and agendas. Some were ideological or political, while others
were concerned more with theories of personality, or with criminality and
social deviance, than with psychopathy. This convoluted state of affairs was
well illustrated by the contents of an edited book based on the conference
proceedings (Hare & Schalling, 1978); many of its chapters had only an
indirect or tenuous relation to psychopathy.
The current academic and clinical climates for psychopathy are much
different than they were 20 years ago. Now, an increasing number of
international researchers and clinicians are actively engaged in the study
of this clinical construct, and its implications for society. Indeed, the past
decade has seen a dramatic surge in research on psychopathy, with
findings that not only are replicable and theoretically meaningful, but
readily applicable to the mental health and criminal justice systems. In
large part, this strong interest in psychopathy is due to the development
and adoption of psychometrically sound procedures for...