[1][2] He advises the FBI's Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center (CASMIRC) and consults for various British and North American prison services.
He then moved to the USA to study for a PhD program in psychophysiology at the University of Oregon, but due to his daughter falling ill the family returned to Canada.
[6][4] His research led him to The Mask of Sanity by American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley, which played a pivotal role in the concept of psychopathy he applied and developed.
Further, following Cleckley, Hare investigated whether the fundamental underlying pathology is a semantic affective deficit - an inability to understand or experience the full emotional meaning of life events.
While establishing a range of idiosyncrasies in linguistic and affective processing under certain conditions, the research program has not confirmed a common pathology of psychopathy.
[13] Hare has defined sociopathy as a condition distinct from psychopathy, caused by growing up in an antisocial or criminal subculture rather than being marked by a basic lack of social emotion or moral reasoning.
[22] Hare was involved in a controversy in 2010 in which he threatened legal action if a peer-reviewed psychology article on the PCL was published that he claimed misrepresented his views.
The PCL-R and PCL:SV have been found to be strong predictors of recidivism, violence and response to therapeutic intervention, though some studies have attributed this largely to the inclusion in the measure of past offending history.
The ability of Hare's concept of psychopathy to explain or predict crime has also been criticised, for example by Glenn D. Walters a long-serving US forensic clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Criminal Justice.
One philosophical review described it as having a high moral tone yet tending towards sensationalism and graphic anecdotes, and as providing a useful summary of the assessment of psychopathy but ultimately avoiding the difficult questions regarding internal contradictions in the concept or how it should be classified.
This is by contrast with the type of psychopath whose lack of social skills or self-control would cause them to rely on threats and coercion and who would probably not be able to hold down a job for long.