From a friend of mine:

A couple of interesting things about those terms: (a) they're synonymous ("sociopath" is a name that's less used, but I find it more descriptive), and (b) the psychological condition they refer to wasn't usefully defined until 1980-85 when a standardized diagnostic tool (the PCL and then the PCL-R) was created by Bob Hare.

Here's a couple of relevant articles:

Psychopaths Among Us

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

And here's the nub of a thought that could benefit from a lot of refinement: All organisms affect the environment in which they live. The effects they have on their environments may be positive or negative. A classic negative case would be the early bacteria on Earth that created our oxygen-rich atmosphere, for those species that didn't evolve to cope with it along the way, poisoned themselves out of a major ecological niche: the surface of the planet. But what if the organism is conscious and actively modifying its environment to suite the needs of particular instances of the organism (not the species)? What if those organisms are human psycopaths? What kind of society best suits their needs, as they perceive them from one day to the next? What aspects of our society are indicative of psycopaths altering it to suite their needs? And, like the bacteria that excreted all that toxic oxygen, what's the prognosis for our society (even our species) as our environment (in either the social or ecologic sense) is changed by them?

Just to provide one specific example along this line of thought, it seems to me that a psycopath would need to eliminate objective reality, in the sense that incontrovertible facts must be eliminated (think, in particular, of the facts relating to the psycopath's own behavior that, if recognized, would impede its ability to function). Thus, for instance, a media must be created that deals in opinions and fluff of ever flavor. Might that be, for instance, how an organism like Rupert Murdoch creates an environment that suits his needs? Which other organisms will benefit, and which will suffer, from this modification to the environment?

These lines of thinking become especially important if you suspect that a trait like psycopathy might predispose its bearers to seek-out positions of power, and make them disproportionately likely to achieve those positions.