In evaluating whether a possible action is too risky for a psychopathic predator to engage in, such as driving past the police station with 2 freshly abducted girls in the vehicle, it is important to keep in mind that psychopaths do not perceive risks in the same way that normal people do.
Research shows that psychopaths have a much less pronounced reaction in anticipation of discomfort than normal people do.
For instance, in one experiment the subjects placed their hands on a metal plate. After the sound of a tone, the metal plate would heat up to levels that were highly unpleasant but not actually damaging while their brains were scanned.
The normal people in the group showed increased brain activity in parts of the brain that are involved with anticipation of fear (the amygdala, for one) at the sound of the tone before the heat was applied to their hand. Just anticipating the discomfort of the heat was enough to get a noticeable reaction from the normal people.
The psychopaths in the group showed a very muted response to the tone even though they showed the same level of response as the normal group when the heat was actually applied.
In other words, they felt the same level of pain but they did not have an emotional reaction to anticipating the pain.
In Dr Robert Hare's book, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, he describes an experiment conducted during WWII by the military to deliberately select psychopaths as fighter pilots on the theory that their lack of fear would be a great asset to a fighter pilot.
It turned out to be a failure. They discovered that the psychopathic fighter pilots didn't really care if one or more of the other pilots was killed, even though it endangered their own lives during air combat. They would deliberately do things that carried a high risk of causing their own aircraft to crash even when they easily avoid doing so.
So when thinking about whether some risk is too risky, try to view it through the eyes of a person who could deliberately do something that would cause his own death, just for the fun of it.
Is there much that qualifies as too risky for such a person? I don't think so.
