Interview: Jon Ronson, Writer

And he had a fair idea of where he might find them. Anywhere. In a boardroom or prison, holed up in a mansion or manning the reception desk of a hotel... Psychopaths, he was starting to realise, are all over the place.

Ronson started to go through some of the people he had met over the years. As a writer and documentary-maker with a fascination for the odd, outlandish, and downright disturbing he had interviewed KKK members, paranoid conspiracy theorists, extremists, all sorts.

As one critic put it "Jon Ronson is preoccupied by people who are bonkers". But could any of them have been psychopaths? He kept coming back to one man, Toto Constant, the founder of a Haitian death squad who in the early Nineties was responsible for the murder, torture and rape of many men, women, and children. Ronson interviewed him in 1997, after the US authorities had released Constant from jail on the condition that he remained in the New York suburb of Queens, living with his mother.

"I never did anything with that interview," he tells me. "He creeped me out. You want to empathise with your subject but the fact was there was no connection, nothing.... at one point he pretended to cry while protesting his innocence. No one has ever pretended to cry in front of me before." Ronson recalls the jolt of fear that passed through him as he left Constant that day.

"When I drove off and looked back his face had changed and he was just staring at me..." he says, which makes me shudder. Ronson, however, continues chatting away about what happened when he tracked him down again, 15 years later, for his chilling and bizarrely entertaining book, The Psychopath Test.

"I found him in a maximum security prison in upstate New York, where he was two years into a 12-37-year sentence for mortgage fraud," he explains, which in the book immediately makes him think of the "criminal versatility" criterion on the checklist. "He said how glad he was to hear from me, how he put on a special green shirt and got his hair cut because he never gets visitors, how he would get strip searched afterwards but it was worth it. Oh God," laughs Ronson.

"I was melting. I felt sorry for him. I felt like a terrible person."

They talked for hours. And then came a change. "He kept saying he really wanted people to like him," continues Ronson. "After a while I asked him whether he thought that was a weakness, which is a good way to root out a psychopath because they hate weakness. And he said no, if you can get people to like you you can manipulate them into doing whatever you want. My mouth just dropped open."

After that, everything Constant said fit the 20-point checklist, the gold standard test for psychopathy that Ronson had been studying. "It was as if I'd pulled off his mask," he says. "The funny thing is I still hope I didn't hurt his feelings, even though someone said to me that you can't because there are no feelings to hurt. And his squad in Haiti were responsible for unspeakable horrors so why should I care?"

At least the fact that he does means he's not a psychopath, I joke, which isn't funny but talking about these things blackens your sense of humour. Ronson giggles. "I'm definitely not a psychopath," he agrees. But then he tells me that becoming a psychopath spotter did make him a bit more like one.

We meet in Ronson's home in London. He asks me not to divulge any more details because he doesn't want people knowing where he lives, which seems fair enough considering some of his interviewees. Suffice to say, it's a stunning flat, and Ronson, his wife and son moved here following the huge success of his last book, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

A bestseller about paranormal and psychological techniques used by the US military (including, yes, staring at goats to kill them), it was made into a film starring George Clooney, in which Ronson is played by Ewan McGregor.

His wife answers the door along with the couple's two dogs, who bark incessantly, which makes conversation tricky. Ronson is wearing jeans, a stained white T-shirt and perfectly round spectacles. He comes across as mild-mannered, kind and a bit nervy though I already know about his anxiety levels from reading The Psychopath Test. After he has made coffee – an entire cafetiere for me, a microwaved giant cup of Cafe Nero for him – we head upstairs to his immaculate study to talk about madness.

On the walls are a photo of Ronson staring at a goat, some framed magazine covers of his journalism, and a photo of him standing with members of the KKK. He sees me staring at it. "That was a moment of great anxiety when they let me wear the robes not knowing that I was..." his voice drops to a whisper and he grins... "Jewish."

Ronson's journey through the madness industry began with another book – a beautifully produced work full of writings, pictures, and blank pages. A neurologist randomly got in touch with Ronson because she had been sent a copy, anonymously, in the post as had academics all over the world. They wanted Ronson to solve the mystery. Without giving too much away, it is the attempt to do so that leads him to the subject of psychopaths.

He jumps up to give me a copy of the mystery book, which in the end he also received. I turn the small padded envelope over in my hands, open it, and leaf through the pages. "It's quite beautiful, isn't it?" he says. "In some way it's the moral conclusion of the book: look at what obsessiveness and madness can produce. Maybe it's our madness that leads us to do interesting things. Maybe we shouldn't be judged by our maddest edges and maybe we shouldn't have it all medicated out of us." He pauses and then adds hastily, "not that I'm a mental illness denier. I find those people abhorrent."

When Ronson started researching psychopathy, his anxiety levels were skyrocketing. On one occasion he had been so anxious on a Ryanair flight that he jumped involuntarily and shouted a nonsense word – "YEAL" – out loud. He was feeling paranoid that he was going to be sued, and panicked about life in general. In the book he reflects that seeking out psychopaths probably wasn't the best activity for someone with an anxiety disorder.

"And sure enough it wasn't a good thing for me," he says when I ask him why he did it. "Then again, is any adventure? I would never leave this room in a perfect world. But it's the only way I can write well." So he's at his best when he's in a state of anxiety? "Going on these mad adventures unlocks my muse," Ronson shrugs. "Being anxious is good and bad. I remember saying when I was younger that I wished I wasn't this good at spotting everyone's vulnerabilities because it's not nice. It's not nice to see the sadness in people all the time. But it does make you a good writer."

Ronson's first encounter was with a man called Tony (not his real name) who claimed to have faked madness, after committing GBH, to reduce his sentence. Unfortunately he made such a good job of it that he was sent to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, which was where Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, were incarcerated.

Twelve years later he was still pleading sanity. Ronson meets him (a Scientologist somehow gets him into Broadmoor, astonishing in itself) and he believes him. But then his doctor gets in touch and says that, yes, although Tony probably had faked a mental illness he was actually a psychopath.

The week I meet Ronson, he has just been informed that Tony has been given an absolute discharge. "He is definitely a grey area," says Ronson showing me a stuffed file of Tony's case notes that he keeps in his study. "For ages I thought either he was a psychopath or he was a miscarriage of justice. I think the conclusion I came to in the end is that both things are true at once."

Ronson ended up on a course run by Robert Hare, the eminent psychologist who came up with the checklist of 20 traits that is used by justice departments and parole boards all over the world. Hare argues that psychopaths often hold positions of power, that they could be behind the corporate crime and social injustices of the world, and that there is a greater chance of encountering one the higher you go up the corporate ladder.

The traits on the psychopath checklist – from cunning and manipulativeness to a grandiose sense of self-worth – are the same traits that are sought out in the cut-throat business world. Hare and his fellow psychologists estimate that while one per cent of society is psychopathic, the figure jumps to four per cent in the corridors of power.

Ronson went into the course a sceptic, and came out three days later a hardcore believer. Suddenly he felt like Hercule Poirot in his abilities to sniff out psychopaths. It was as though he had acquired a new power. He tells me quite matter-of-factly that he became a "fundamentalist psychopath spotter".

"I was a complete convert," he says in his soft, mild Cardiff accent. Everything about Ronson is soft and mild, and I can't really picture him interrogating potential psychopaths. "Friends of mine were saying 'Jon, you've changed. You've become hardened.' One friend told me I was turning into a kind of idiot." He giggles, "But I was thinking, 'You're the nave one. You don't know what I know.'"

And what did he think he knew? "Before, I thought that the notion that there are monsters living amongst us that we can identify by certain characteristics was ridiculous," he says. "I felt, like most liberals, that we're all basically the same, we're all basically good and that some people, through experience or circumstance, become bad or do bad things. But in writing the book I had an epiphany: that some people aren't like us, that some people are genuine, almost inhuman whirlwinds of malevolence. And there's nothing you can do about it. They won't change. That's Hare's position."

The checklist, at first, made Ronson feel drunk with the power of diagnosis. And then he started seeing madness everywhere. "I started to wonder whether madness is a more powerful engine in society than rationality," he says. "I saw it everywhere. It was kind of exciting at first because you get to see the world in a whole new way. I was getting into fights with people on Twitter and thinking they were psychopaths."

He also confesses in the book to suspecting that AA Gill, the food writer and television critic, might be one because he shot a baboon and slates Ronson's documentaries.

Eventually Ronson realised he might be taking it too far. He went to interview Al Dunlap, a notorious corporate executive whose "downsizing", closing down plants and towns all over America, garnered him the monicker of "Chainsaw" Al. Ronson met him in his ostentatious Florida mansion.

"Every time he closed down a plant the share price of his company rocketed," Ronson says. "And in response he would be photographed like Rambo, in a pinstripe suit with pistols in his hands. He definitely fit a lot of the checklist. It was funny. When I asked him if he had a grandiose sense of self worth we both looked up to the oil painting of himself he was sitting below."

But some aspects of Dunlap's personality didn't fit. For example he had been married to the same woman for many years (sexual promiscuity is one of the traits). Ronson found himself feeling a bit disappointed that he might not be a psychopath. And then he really started to worry. About himself.

"What I didn't realise at the time was that the list had made me more like them," says Ronson. "I became a more cold, inhuman, slightly manipulative person. Becoming a psychopath spotter turned me a bit psychopathic. Kind of nasty." He laughs at the absurdity – and perhaps the horror – of it.

The remainder of the book charts Ronson's attempt to come to terms with his own position in the madness industry. He meets a journalist who used to work in television, serving up vulnerable people who are just "mad enough" to cope. He meets former MI5 agent turned conspiracy theorist David Shayler, a criminal profiler, and a mother who has nicknamed her toddler Mr Manic Depressive (he has been diagnosed with so-called child bi-polar disorder and is on medication). He comes to the conclusion that too much diagnosis is every bit as dangerous as too little.

"And it made me question journalism," he admits. "Is this what we do? Do we just find the madness in people and serve it up as entertainment? So finally I came out the other side and regained my liberalism.

"And I do think we're beginning to wake up to this freak show as it gets more desperate and profound," he goes on. "What's happening with The Apprentice, for example, is exactly the same as what happened with Big Brother. It starts off as a fascinating insight into a world and ends up with fragile narcissists who are hand-picked to fall apart on television for our entertainment."

It's only the second time in Ronson's 20-year-long career as a journalist that his work actually changed him. The first, incidentally, was when he briefly became a paranoid conspiracy theorist. But that's another incredible story. And how are his anxiety levels now? "Bad," he sighs. "And getting worse. I don't know if it's this book... Well, yeah, okay, I think so.

It's not the anxiety of going off and meeting psychopaths and nothing bad has ever happened to me. But I was really worried, for example, that Robert Hare wouldn't like the book. Proper anxiety attacks. My legs would buckle when I thought about it. Then he emailed me and said it was great. Once again I have worried massively about nothing."

Ronson still uses the checklist, but he is more measured now. Every once in a while he thinks he might have spotted a psychopath but beyond feeling very, very wary he doesn't do anything. What is it, ultimately, that keeps him pursuing people who are living within their own maddest edges? Why does it fire him up as a writer? Ronson ponders this for a while.

"At the beginning of Them, my book about extremists," he says, "I say it's about going into their world and standing with them as they glare back at us. My books tend to be about why the world is in such a mess. It's always as much about our world as it is about theirs. In the end it's always as much about us as it is about them."

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson is out now published by Picador at 16.99 in hardback.

He's largely kept his sanity during a writing career devoted to researching extremists of all flavours, but Jon Ronson's latest project almost tipped him over the edge.

This article was originally published in The Scotsman on the 4th of June 2011