Overview
- The peer‑reviewed study published Thursday found that Jeronimus Cornelisz met all ten core traits of corporate psychopathy when researchers applied a contemporary management checklist to archival records.
- After the 1629 wreck of the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, Cornelisz consolidated power among survivors, ordered roughly 100 murders, and oversaw sexual violence while justifying killings as resource control.
- A rival survivor, Wiebbe Hayes, organised searches that located fresh water and food, built cooperative defenses, and successfully resisted Cornelisz’s assaults, creating a stark contrast in leadership outcomes.
- Author Clive Boddy frames the episode as a natural experiment that links Cornelisz’s tactics—rewarding loyalists, eliminating rivals, creating fear—to harms seen in modern workplaces and urges greater focus on ethics in leader selection.
- The study is presented as the first systematic application of a corporate psychopathy framework to this case and is published open access in the Asian Journal of Business Ethics, with mainstream science outlets reporting the findings and no substantive academic rebuttals so far.