I've never seen or read about a crime in the newspaper and thought, "Wow, there is no situation under which I would ever do that."

Influence is full of people behaving in weird, manipulate ways, which naturally made me start thinking of sociopaths, so I began reading Martha Strout's The Sociopath Next Door: a book about how 4% of the population is clinically evil and the rest of us are basically alright. That's the part of the whole sociopath thing that's never resonated with me. I…