The Weirdest Job Interview ever conducted

 Continuing a search from my previous post, I came across this from the APA. At one point I was laughing so hard with Charlie's responses, that I nearly fainted. It should be noted that his final evaluation was completed after his death and comprised from previous evaluations, interviews, etc.

Charles Manson takes a personality test.

If you've ever taken an online personality quiz and discovered you're 73% golden retriever and 27% Tax Accountant, Congratulation! You've experienced a tiny fraction of what happened when psychologists decided to give Charles Manson a full psychological workup in 1997. Only instead of finding out if Charles Manson preferred beaches or mountains, they spent 24 pages trying to answer a much bigger question:

Was Charles Manson actually schizophrenic, or was he simply the most exhausting person in America?

Welcome to Pelican Bay:

In 1997, Manson found himself at Pelican Bay State Prison, California's version of "the principal's office" for inmates who had already proven that they couldn't behave in a regular prison.

At 63 years old, Manson had spent most of his life either in prison, reform schools, juvenile facilities, or generally making poor life choices. By this point, prison officials needed to determine whether he belonged in a psychiatric treatment unit or disciplinary housing. 

SO...psychologists do as psychologists do.

They brought out every test short of asking him what kind of tree he'd like to be. 

The IQ surprise:

One of the first surprises was that Charles Manson wasn't unintelligent. His scores suggested average intellectual ability, despite reading roughly at a third-grade level.

Think about that for a moment:

For decades, people imagined some criminal mastermind conducting elaborate manipulations from the shadows. Instead, the evaluation suggested someone who could reason fairly well but read instructions about as enthusiastically as a middle-schooler confronted with homework.

Then came the Rorschach Test:

Ahhh yes, In all things Charles Manson, THIS is when things got weird.

Most people who look at inkblot and say

"A butterfly"

"A bat"

"A flower"

But not Charles Manson. Charlie looked at an inkblot and apparently thought:

"Two Klu Klux Klan members with wings sitting on top of two black men while a boot hangs underneath everything"

Psychologists, maintaining the professionalism of saints, dutifully wrote this down. The responses from Charles Manson continued:

*Dancing beetles holding up the Eiffel Tower. 

*Blue elves waving flags from flowers

*Robots with anatomy (references to said anatomy attached in pdf below)

*Skinheads

*Dragons

*Witches

*Hippies wearing sunglasses 

At one point, Charles Manson essentially announced: "I can see anything I want" to which the psychologist probably replied in a sigh under their breath "Yes, Charles, we noticed" 

The Great Schizophrenia debate

For years, many professionals had assumed that Charles Manson suffered from schizophrenia. After all the man spoke in riddles, jumped from topic to topic, made bizarre associations, and could transform a simple question into a ten-minute lecture about society, the environment, race relations, cosmic consciousness and possibly even lawn maintenance. 

However, when modern experts reanalyzed the data years later, they reached an unexpected conclusion. The problem wasn't that Charles Manson couldn't organize his thoughts, which happens with people who are schizophrenic. The problem was, he didn't often want to. His strange speech appeared less like genuine psychotic confusion and more like an intention smoke screen.

Imagine asking someone:

"Did you eat my sandwich?"

And receiving this response:

"Well, sandwiches are a good social construct. The bread belongs to the earth. The earth belongs to nobody. Therefore, who really ate it?"

That's not confusion. That's evasion with extra steps.

The Diane Sawyer Theory:

Researchers later reviewed television interviews and noticed a fascinating pattern. Whenever interviewers asked questions that Charles Manson didn't want to answer, he became dramatically more bizarre. 

The psychological equivalent of:

"Please stop asking me questions while I aggressively recite Beatles lyrics."

In other words, Charles Manson may have been using confusion as a weapon. 

And frankly, anyone who has ever sat through a particularly long and painful meeting has seen a version of this tactic. I know I'm guilty of it.

The Psychopathy Score:

Then came the Psychopathy checklist. Charles Manson scored a 36 out of 40. For context, that's the psychological assessment equivalent of bowling a 290.  You don't accidentally achieve numbers like that. researchers concluded he displayed extreme levels of manipulation, grandiosity, exploitation, lack of empathy, and antisocial behavior. 

What they are trying to say is that if psychopathy were an Olympic sport, Charles Manson was competing for a medal. 

But was he actually playing a game and actually manipulating the psychologists? Yes, you can actually do that. Despite the training, psychologists are human beings that are susceptible to the same cognitive biases, blind spots, and social engineering tactics that the untrained are susceptible to. Something else to ponder....

The Final Verdict:

The modern review of the evaluation arrived at a conclusion that surprised man observers. The evidence did not support schizophrenia. Instead they painted a picture that they claim was arguably more unsettling. A highly manipulative individual with severe psychopathic traits, narcissism, grandiosity, bizarre thinking patterns, a talent for controlling others, a lifelong habit of turning every conversation into a one-man performance art piece. 

Charles Manson wasn't detached from reality, he often seemed determined to create his own version of it. 

Bizarre behavior and mental illness are not always the same thing, sometimes a person says strange things because they are psychotic. Sometimes someone says strange things because they enjoy confusing everyone in the room. Sometimes someone says strange things because they want attention. 

And occasionally as the 1997 evaluation suggests, someone can spend five days convincing trained psychologists that every inkblot in existence contains Nazis, dragons, elves, beetles, robots, hippies and....well...lets say reproductive anatomy-- all before lunch. 

Behind decades of mythology, sensationalism, and cultural fascination stood a man who may have been less "mad prophet" and more a manipulator or attention seeker who never missed an opportunity to make himself the center of attention. 

In every prison.

Even in handcuffs. 

Even while staring at an inkblot and somehow finding the Eiffel Tower. 

It's safe to say that without a shadow of doubt, Charles Manson knew how to play the game. By saying that I'm not removing him from any of his criminal responsibilities, he simply knew how to play the game and play it well.

For those that can't access the APA here is a PDF of the last evaluation here