What compels a 16 year old boy to arm himself with two kitchen knives and rampage his school hallway, leaving 21 students and faculty members injured in his wake? The same malfunction that drove Ted Bundy to rape and murder what was eventually estimated to be over 100 women and girls, decapitate many, and maintain their severed heads as mementos of his repulsive crimes? Is there a switch in the brain that, once flipped, ignites a senseless desire to cause destruction and harm?

According to Professor Robert Hare, no. Hare is the creator of the PCL-R, a psychiatric test which measures psychopathic tendencies and determines when an individual merits professional evaluation, and, in extreme cases, the diagnoses of psychopathy. The PCL-R evaluates patients according to the presence of 20 baseline qualities, each ranked on a scale of zero to two. Many would be surprised to note the list includes a tendency to boredom, promiscuous sexual behavior, and irresponsibility. Each trait, if scored as being present in the individual, advances them closer to psychopath status.

I’ve come to realize that a great majority of people imagine psychotics as a foreign species; they are born mentally unsound, grow up wreaking havoc and kicking puppies, and lead adult lives speckled with abominable murder and other crime. Although the examples which I referenced introductorily do for the most part suit this stereotype, a great number of those who are diagnosed as psychopaths do not. I believe that the publicity of the PCL-R scale is vital to our understanding of the human condition.

We must adjust our understanding of psychopathy, as well as a number of other psychological abnormalities, to a reality that is much more fluid and far less generalized than we now perceive it to be. As is true with most taboo topics, we find comfort in reducing the complication of gray to the certainty of black and white. And reasonably so; to realize that in being prone to boredom we are one point of 40 closer to being labeled a psychopath is a terrifying thought.

The truth is that a state of psychopathy is most likely a result of a complex cocktail of biology and environment. To our knowledge, there is no single gene that stirs psychotic tendencies in an otherwise healthy person, nor is there an environmental interaction that will unconditionally transform a mentally sound person into a psychopath. And, like most things, psychopathy comes in degrees.

I’ve certainly known and befriended peers who I judged to have a distinct lack of empathy, or irresponsible disregard for the lives of others; two of the key characteristics of psychopathy. And as strange as that sounds, you most likely have too. If you’re wondering which friends they are, it’s most likely the one who took that off-color joke just a little bit too far, the one habitually watches horror movies predicated on torture, or the one who guiltlessly broke up that long-term relationship.

Am I asserting that these people are psychopaths? Of course not. But I do assert that they possess many key traits of a disorder that we’ve reserved for “crazy people.” This particular diagnosis is determined by a combination of traits, and the degree to which they extend. And, frighteningly enough, we and many people we know have mutual traits with the people who frighten us the most. It’s a disquieting thought, but it could be the very thought that silences bullying, perhaps that prevents tragic crimes like those aforementioned.

If environment does not exclusively cause the development of a psychopathic disorder, it may certainly aggravate it. In putting ourselves in a class of being that stands separate from and above psychopaths, we further isolate those who could be in the midst of a formative period psychologically.

We take solace in segregating ourselves from those who are determined, after a lifetime of experiences and cultivated traits, to be psychotic, knowing that once we do it makes it impossible for us to ever think or act in the way that we think they do. They are not like us, they are another species; a species that kills thoughtlessly, which we would never do. Hopefully.

It’s time to set aside our insecurities and fear, and examine the human race for what it is: a fluid, unpredictable and overlapping pool of experience and biology, nurture and nature. We can then give all humans the understanding, justice, and grace that they deserve.