The exploitative psychopathic personality: a conceptual outline

In studying economic exploitation and inequality, it is important to look at those in leadership positions who have the power to create organisational cultures and impose intensified work conditions that lead to the exploitation of employees. Such research will inevitably find itself, inter alia and from time to time, at the intersection of commerce, business ethics, and personality. This current paper, therefore, aims to describe one personality that may frequently be engaged in the destructive and fraudulent exploitation of others; that of the psychopathic personality. Furthermore, we aim to outline some of the ways in which exploitation may occur.

Psychopaths are deceptively amicable, seemingly capable, but absolutely pitiless people (Boddy, 2024a). With their complete lack of morals (Boddy, 2024c; Glenn et al., 2009), lack of love (Boddy and Boulter, 2022; Cowan, 2014) lack of conscience (Hare, 1993b) and predatory, self-oriented approach to life, it has long been theorised that psychopathic managers would be associated with decisions of questionable legality, involving worker exploitation, employee mistreatment, environmental damage, high staff exit levels, and short-term decision making (Boddy, 2006). Additionally, they have been hypothesised to be involved in abusive behaviour at work, including bullying, yelling, political decision-making, and fraud (Boddy, 2006) creating a stressful emotional maelstrom in the workplace (Boulter and Boddy, 2021). This abusive behaviour may leave the employing organisation open to legal proceedings as employees seek redress for the abuse, harassment, stress and victimisation they have suffered (Sheehy et al., 2021).

Nonetheless, there is a tendency in societies and organisations to depersonalise toxic leadership because people (and many management academics) prefer to focus on group and organisational dynamics (Allcorn and Duncan, 2023). Thus, corporations are deemed to be psychopathic at the level of their DNA, or in their essential nature and legal makeup (Bakan, 2004), rather than because they are being run by psychopathic leaders.

Similarly, the world is reported to be ruled by sociopathic capitalism (Rollert, 2016), and Western capitalism is deemed to be psychopathic in its entirety (Priels, 2023), rather than being prone to allowing the emergence of psychopathic managers and leaders (Boddy, 2025c). This depersonalised approach avoids the disturbing reality that a significant minority of individuals are dysfunctional and ruthlessly toxic toward others. Focussing on group and organisational dynamics overlooks the instances where a leader, a person in a position of power over others, is a predator and harmful to other people, the organisation, and larger society (Allcorn and Duncan, 2023).

Indeed, the idea of a leader behaving in a way that is exceedingly self-interested and exploitative of others is a recurring notion in the destructive leadership literature (Schmid et al., 2017). Similarly upper echelons theory holds that the personality traits of senior managers can help predict organisational results, decisions, and performance (Hambrick and Mason, 1984) and corporate psychopathy theory predicts that the psychopathic are adept at getting promoted to leadership positions within organisations (Boddy, 2006; Babiak and Hare, 2006). Thus, business leaders such as Donald Trump are deemed to be adept at spotting and exploiting the vulnerable and threatening their weaknesses, while using bravado and displays of power to play up the advantages of reaching an agreement on their terms (Kogan, 2019; O'Harrow and Boburg, 2016). Therefore, some sociologists argue that purely sociological approaches to studying problems within society may be insufficient in gathering a total picture of events.

A corresponding view involving self-interested leadership is that the common treasury, since the financial deregulations introduced by Thatcher and Regan, underpinned by a broader neoliberal ideology, and followed by the subsequent global financial crisis of 2008 (Basham, 2011) has been captured by psychopaths, whom governments bailed out of their self-created debt crisis (Taibbi, 2010). It is argued that this is why much of the Western world is almost bankrupt (Monbiot, 2011) and unable to invest in the socio-economic infrastructure of hospitals, schools, roads, water, and sanitation, which is needed to replace exhausted and out-of-date facilities.

Psychopathic traits, especially those linked to fearless dominance, are positively associated with holding leadership and management positions (Lilienfeld et al., 2014), and psychopathic leaders are skilled at reaching senior positions (Babiak et al., 2010; Babiak, 1995).

Perhaps because toxic leaders and psychopaths are adept at attaining senior organisational positions, many of the heroes of 20th-century capitalism had distinct psychopathic traits and personalities, including Albert Dunlap of Sunbeam Corporation, Bernard Madoff of Nasdaq, Robert Maxwell of Mirror Group newspapers, Kenneth Lay of Enron, and others (Boddy, 2025a). These examples were all marked by the exploitation of gullible financial journalists, conning of employees and investors and the eventual collapse, through fraud, of the organisations managed by the psychopathic leaders. Fraud and psychopathy are strongly linked (Perri, 2011; Perri and Brody, 2011; Ramamoorti, 2008), the psychopathic are expected to be fraudulent (Boddy et al., 2024; Manning, 2018), and the majority of auditors report coming across corporate psychopaths in their careers, largely in relation to fraud (Jeppesen et al., 2016).

Psychopaths are those people who, while charming, poised, friendly, extraverted, and apparently well-qualified, have no conscience, no empathy, and no emotional connectivity to others. Additionally, the psychopathic are bold, dominant, mean, and disinhibited (Patrick, 2010). In corporations, they have been referred to as corporate psychopaths, executive psychopaths and industrial psychopaths and have been identified using Cleckley-based measures (Cleckley, 1941, 1941/1988) of primary psychopathy, such as Levenson's and Boddy's (Levenson et al., 1995; Smith and Lilienfeld, 2013).

Psychopathy can manifest in two main forms, one involving the embodiment of the essential traits of the psychopath (but not the violent, anti-social elements) and known as sub-clinical psychopathy or primary psychopathy and another involving overt, violent, anti-social behaviour and often referred to as secondary or clinical psychopathy. Thus, Levson's measure of psychopathy has two parts to it, one measuring primary psychopathy and the other secondary psychopathy (Levenson et al., 1995).

People with higher psychopathic traits behave in an exploitative manner and often use various forms of aggression, such as coercion and manipulation and a disregard for social norms, to achieve their interests (Atanassova et al., 2025). This social predator hypothesis claims that people with psychopathic traits are capable of and often engage in the exploitation of others for their own advantage (Hicks, 2025). Additionally, psychopaths are described as intra-species predators (Hare, 1994) because they prey on those whom they deem to be easy to exploit, such as the vulnerable.

With no emotional attachments to other people, psychopaths demonstrate a fearless and sensation-seeking lifestyle unfettered by worry or concerns about the rights and feelings of others (Reid Meloy and Shiva, 2008). Motivated by money, power, and control, they are avaricious and hedonistic (Glenn et al., 2017). Individuals scoring higher in psychopathy put more value on seeking power, financial success, and the acquisition of material possessions (Glenn et al., 2017). They use this power to help them exploit others (Khalid and Yazdani, 2025) and are prepared to harm and exploit others in pursuit of their own enrichment (Boddy, 2025d).

The categorically psychopathic are about 1% of the adult population (Coid et al., 2009) with a further 22.5% of males and 15.6% of females (Boddy, 2024b) being partially psychopathic in that they endorse half or more of the elements in Levenson's measure of primary psychopathy (Levenson et al., 1995). Levenson's own figures for partial psychopathy were 23% for males and 6% for females, but this was from a student sample. Logically, higher levels of psychopathy would be expected from corporate samples of adults, as utilised in Boddy's research. It is argued that if these partially psychopathic people are led by ruthless, callous, and unemotional leaders (i.e. categorical psychopaths), this will allow their own psychopathy to emerge and flourish. Furthermore, Levenson states that there may be a great deal of primary psychopathy existing within the general population of adults, which may easily be overlooked, especially in elite groups (Levenson et al., 1995).

The research for this conceptual article is based on an extensive and critical literature review on the topic, focussing on papers that link psychopathy to exploitation and exploitativeness. A search within the search engine “Google Scholar” for papers linking psychopathy to exploitation and exploitativeness was made in August 2025. The terms “psychopathy and exploitativeness”, “psychopaths and exploitation” and “psychopaths exploit” revealed five refereed papers.

To augment this structured literature review, one of the current authors, therefore, drew upon his knowledge of the psychopathy literature and his database of articles stored in referencing software to conduct an expert literature review to identify ways in which the psychopathic may be exploitative towards others. Within this database, the same search terms, e.g. “psychopaths and exploitation”, were used as were used to interrogate the search engine. In the referencing database, an additional 25 articles were identified containing both the words “psychopaths” and “exploit” in any part of the paper. Where relevant, these 30 papers are discussed in this current research paper.

Psychopaths, who tend to be optimistic and ego-centric, can be beguiling, with enough self-presentation skills and upward impression management skills to present a good self-picture, which enables them to deceive and use other people, while captivating their superiors. Such socially skilled psychopaths, who can appear fun-loving, charming, interpersonally attractive, and likable, can gain the trust of others and thereby exploit them (Mahaffey and Marcus, 2006). Human resource professionals, for example, can easily mistake the charming, sociable, and self-confident psychopath for a promising leadership position applicant (Hill and Scott, 2019; Holland, 2019). This mask of normalcy can mean that operating within society, psychopathy may go ignored, unrecognised, and even encouraged (Smith, 1985), especially among the privileged (Levenson et al., 1995).

Furthermore, neoliberal reforms are also characterised by the weakening of collective protections at work, such as trade unions and collective bargaining, employment rights and welfare systems (Paraskevopoulou et al., 2016; Paraskevopoulou and McKay, 2015), giving psychopathic and other ruthless leaders more leeway to be exploitative.

Psychopaths have a natural advantage in any superficial recruitment process due to their lower inhibition against claiming qualifications, experience, and competencies they don't have, and for taking credit for work they didn't do (Sheehy and Boddy, 2021). Indeed, in this current neo-liberalist environment, which is dominated by a free market global economy (Piketty, 2020), increased privatisation, and the reduced role of the state (Harvey, 2005) and has an emphasis on individual responsibilities, their traits may even be celebrated when comparing them with those often seen as essential traits of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO), as people prepared to make tough decisions and be ruthless (Holland and Donohue, 2019).

This ruthlessness is to the extent that capitalism has recently been described as being criminally psychopathic in its entirety (Priels, 2023), with arguments that capitalism within individualistic societies allows the emergence of psychopathic managers who capture the processes of capitalism and thus facilitate a form of exploitative capitalism that has no conscience, and no care or regard for anyone or anything but profit (Boddy, 2025b, d). Exploitative behaviours of corporations, such as cutting costs so deeply that accidents such as massive oil blow-outs and spills happen, or world heritage sites are destroyed, are consistent with psychopathy (Pardue et al., 2013a, b; Schwenkenbecher, 2024).

Psychopathic traits exhibit large positive correlations with measures of entitlement, exploitation, and short-term mating orientation, and with vengeance and aggressive tendencies (Book et al., 2016). Thus, psychopaths can be expected to engage in multiple forms of exploitation. Psychopaths can also appear to be more genuine and trustworthy than non-psychopaths, and this may help them to gain the trust of, and then exploit others (Brazil et al., 2021). The psychopathic are associated with cheating behaviour and the willingness to exploit others (Book et al., 2016). Psychopathic individuals tend to deceive others, exploit vulnerability, and target victims in pursuit of self-gain (Fritzon et al., 2020).

In a meta-analysis conducted to provide a quantitative summary of the empirical literature on the relationship between psychopathy and exploitative behaviour in economic games, Doyle found multiple evidence supporting the notion that psychopathy was related to exploitation (Doyle, 2025). The psychopathic are deemed to be exploitative across multiple domains of human existence, including being sexually coercive and exploitative (Harris et al., 2007), financially exploitative in the form of intra-personal fraud (Perri and Brody, 2012) and fraud against organisations (Ramamoorti, 2008; Sheehy and Boddy, 2021), bullying, abusive, and exploitative towards subordinates (Babiak, 1995) and exploitative to the extent of illegality towards the environment (Ray and Jones, 2010).

The psychopathic have no care towards others and no conscience over what they do (Hare, 1993a; Stout, 2005). They are theorised to be involved in the ruthless treatment of others and to take part in activities such as the illegal and immoral treatment of workers (Boddy, 2006), human sexual trafficking (Okeke et al., 2020), and creating burnout and distress in those they manage (Oyewunmi et al., 2018; Mathieu et al., 2012; Boulter and Boddy, 2021).

Psychopathic and exploitative leadership behaviours can thus be observed in various activities in contemporary society. For example, human trafficking and trafficking for labour is a global phenomenon that represents a grave violation of human rights and dignity (Paraskevopoulou et al., 2016). Defined by international and U.S. frameworks, trafficking involves the exploitation of individuals through fraud, force, or coercion for purposes such as labour, sexual exploitation, or organ harvesting (Sidun, 2025). Human trafficking offenders have significantly higher rates of psychopathy and psychopathic traits than non-offenders (Hargreaves-Cormany et al., 2022).

Exploitative authoritarian regimes, such as that of Pinochet in Argentina, may also be supported by psychopathic colluders in senior positions. An examination of the senior military and police officers who were imprisoned for crimes against humanity in Argentina displayed a pattern of psychopathy scores that was consistent with an extreme disposition for self-serving, callous, and ruthless treatment of others, without any demonstrated remorse, and in the absence of prior histories of severe antisocial behaviour (Hare et al., 2022). In this 2022 study, the higher the rank of the imprisoned officer, the higher the level of psychopathy that was found. This finding supports corporate psychopathy theory, which posits that the psychopathic are adept at gaining promotion and advancement (Boddy et al., 2021). Other political psychopaths who were convicted of crimes against humanity included the Nazi leaders Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. Hess was diagnosed as a psychopath in 1941, and Goering in 1946 (Gilbert, 1948; Boddy, 2021). The Nazis exploited prisoners and other populations by forcing them into slave labour (Dimsdale, 2016; Rees, 2012).

In another study, incarcerated dealers in illegal drugs and their enforcers were found to be psychopaths across the entire range of psychopathy (criminal and non-criminal), while money launderers fit more closely into a description of “successful psychopaths” (Ostrosky et al., 2012). Successful psychopaths are those who fit into society without being identified or institutionalised (Du and Templer, 2021; Lilienfeld et al., 2014).

With the arrival of the means to generate and disseminate fake, sexualised images of other people for financial gain, blackmail, harassment, or sexual gratification, there is a need to assess and understand such behaviour (Fido et al., 2022). Pornographic deep-faking uses technology to superimpose one image, often of a celebrity, onto that of another, typically a porn actor, to make it look like the celebrity is engaging in the activity (Fido et al., 2022). Psychopaths have an impersonal and ruthless approach to sexual behaviour (Visser, 2018). As an example, in a study exploring people's penchant to make and distribute “deepfake” pornographic images, the authors noted that those higher in psychopathy are more likely to commit revenge pornography offences (Fido et al., 2022). Additionally, it was found that higher levels of interpersonal and antisocial psychopathy predict a greater proclivity to produce and distribute deepfake pornographic images (Fido et al., 2022).

Psychopathic people also engage in predatory and coercive sexual behaviour (Bouffard and Miller, 2022), are promiscuous (Burtăverde et al., 2021), but do not use contraceptives (Zara et al., 2021) and are interested in illegal sexual activities (de Roos et al., 2024). Thus, the psychopathic may be undesirable and exploitative tourists, because they may be expected to engage in practices which undermine sustainability, such as exploiting vulnerable populations, spreading disease, and polluting geographies. An area in which psychopaths are exploitative is in the area of environmental exploitation. The psychopathic are willing to dispose of toxic waste illegally by dumping it (Ray and Jones, 2011), thus exploiting the earth's natural resources for profit. Indeed, environmental sustainability and psychopathic leadership are deemed incompatible (Boddy, 2023).

The psychopathic are associated with such a wide range of exploitative activities that future research should take their presence into account. For example, it could be studied whether, under conditions of work intensification, the presence of psychopathic managers exacerbates and compounds the effects of the intensification. The question of whether psychopaths and the highly psychopathic congregate in harmful or exploitative sectors of the economy may also be explored.

In terms of methodological approaches, our expert's database of papers surfaced more relevant papers than a search via an online search engine did. Further research into the relative strengths and weaknesses of structured literature reviews versus expert literature reviews (carried out by a subject matter expert) may be warranted.

We may extrapolate from current findings in the literature to suggest a generalisable theory. The psychopathic are involved in human trafficking, illegal drug production and distribution, conning investors and employees, supporting exploitative political regimes, and crimes against humanity. Theoretically, economic sectors that are exploitative and destructive in the making, distribution, and provision of products and services that are harmful to people involved in the manufacture, consumption, and service provision elements of these transactions may be replete with psychopathic owners, managers and employees.

Examples may include the production of coercive and illegal pornography, human sex trafficking, the use of slave labour, the illegal drug trade, gambling, and the production and distribution of products known to be harmful, such as tobacco or addictive pharmaceutical products. Within other economic sectors, the psychopathic may be involved in environmental destruction, fraud, nepotism, work intensification, paying salaries that are below regulatory minimums, and other forms of workplace and employee exploitation. This current paper recommends that researchers investigating economic exploitation and inequality should be cognisant of the personality-related aspects of this behaviour.