Well, my posts are a synthesis of a lot of reading that I’ve done & lectures that I’ve attended over the years. There’s been a lot written in mainstream journalism the last ten years about the CEO-sociopath/psychopath correlation. Less so about other careers, though most reporting focuses on a couple of assessment instruments and the norms that were used. So, a general googling will turn up some basic stuff on this - but a lot of what I learned about this topic came as asides in my HR days (career counseling and assessment) as well as my training as a psychologist learning about narcissism and treating personality disorders.
Deeper research on this topic involves differentiation between sociopathy, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder (APD). Some research and literature in the field uses these terms interchangeably, while some is very specific in the definitions. Most current research focuses on APD because that’s the DSM-IV & DSM-V diagnostic label that describes a kind of psychopathology (a mental illness, a general term not be confused with the specific term “psychopath”), which means that it’s a problem and, typically, these are people who usually end up going to prison or committing heinous crimes.
Sociopath and psychopath are not officially recognized diagnoses in the field of psychology - not anymore. In psychoanalytic psychology (a discipline of psychology) they are sort of understood to be personality types - particularly malignant or pathological narcissists. A sociopath is generally understood to possess a cluster of traits that include things like charm and manipulation. A psychopath is generally understood to possess the same traits as a sociopath, but prone to violence. Both tend to view other people as tools or obstacles.
A significant amount of research is focused on identifying traits that will allow for early intervention (crime prevention), which draws on known offender populations to create measurement tools. These tools were then “normed” on a variety of populations and some were discarded because the measures weren’t showing strong correlations between crime and suspected traits. What they did show was correlations along broad categories of people, meaning that people across all walks of life exhibited sociopathic/psychopathic traits, and some weren’t criminals or in leadership roles. That’s how we got books like “The Psychopath Next Door.” For a very long time, the bias was that women couldn’t be sociopaths/psychopaths, a lot of these measurement studies called that assumption into questions.
Now, as I alluded to above, there hasn’t been a cohesive body of research about why maybe people with these traits end up in certain professions, but there have been studies about why high profile careers attract people with these traits. So lots about CEOs/business people, politicians/civil servants, MDs/surgeons, police/military, etc., and less about professions and people that have social reputation as altruistic (like therapists and teachers). A lot of confirmation bias when the data has been a lot more complex than that.
I know that this response isn’t a bibliography of peer-reviewed research, but I don’t even know where to begin to share primary literature on this topic - it’s vast, contradictory, and doesn’t directly address your question or my statements. I guess just take my info with a grain of salt?
