‘Corporate psychopaths’ to blame for financial crisis

IT took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1% of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry”, lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people”.

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”