Hedge fund managers with psychopathic tendencies make for worse investors (2018)

“When choosing our leaders in organizations and in politics, we should keep in mind that psychopathic traits—like ruthlessness and callousness—don’t produce the successful outcomes that we might expect them to.”

ten Brinke, L., Kish, A., & Keltner, D.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(2), 214-223.
Image: Pixabay

“It is widely assumed that psychopathic personality traits promote success in high-powered, competitive contexts such as financial investment. By contrast, empirical studies find that psychopathic leaders can be charming and persuasive, but poor performers who mismanage, bully, and engage in unethical behavior.

“By coding nonverbal behaviors displayed in semistructured interviews, we identified the psychopathic, Machiavellian, and narcissistic tendencies in 101 hedge fund managers, and examined whether these traits were associated with financial performance over the course of 10 diverse years of economic volatility (2005-2015).

“Managers with greater psychopathic tendencies produced lower absolute returns than their less psychopathic peers, and managers with greater narcissistic traits produced decreased risk-adjusted returns.

“The discussion focuses on the costs of Dark Triad traits in financial investment, and organizational leadership more generally.”

The authors of the paper spoke with Society for Personality and Social Psychology, saying:

“When choosing our leaders in organizations and in politics, we should keep in mind that psychopathic traits—like ruthlessness and callousness—don’t produce the successful outcomes that we might expect them to.”

Follow the link to the paper (requires login): Hedge fund managers with psychopathic tendencies make for worse investors