The Cultural Narratives around the Sociopath or Psychopath Executive

This Halloween, I’m posting a certain version of super super scary, and sadly, common.

Today’s Narrative of Corporate Executives as Sociopaths

The sociopathic personality is often misunderstood, and even being cited as a common personality trait of business executives, but how true is this, or rather, how long has it been true, and what consequences have we faced in collective culture in encouraging said stereotype?

The cultural conversation around sociopathy began shifting from a cinema and tv audience to the culturally accepted stereotype for villains, more-so, power. When scandals happened in the 1990s, the media began to play off this sociopath trope due to a failure in executive leadership, from presidential errors to Enron executives. For example, during the Clinton Scandal, President Clinton was often referred to as a sociopath, and when the long line of corporate executives was exposed for improprieties, they, too, were defined as sociopaths or psychopaths in response to grossly immoral behavior. It was during this era that the public sat outraged that their leaders had failed them and sought to stigmatize the villainy with monstrous descriptors. Thus, we have the cultural and…