
Are you a psychopath? - glaugh
http://blog.statwing.com/are-you-a-psychopath/
======
ignostic
I always have problems with tests like this, and I imagine they work poorly
for highly-analytical people. Take this question: "Looking out for myself is
my top priority."

I know if I put "strongly agree," it'll be more likely to call me a
psychopath. At the same time, I'm thinking, "I look out for people I love -
sometimes at risk to myself - but ultimately that's only because they matter
to ME. Looking out for others is undeniably motivated by what matters to me."

Aside from the false dichotomies, surely any psychopath with even a shred of
intelligence could answer strategically and defeat the test's intended
purpose. And they use this in prison hearings?

~~~
clarkevans
A few years back I was tangentially involved in a very clever study involving
the executive ethics that was designed to address this concern.

Some of the questions were routine business questions, others were general
questions about the material they read, and, the meat of the questions were
ones on the moral consequences of executive decisions. It was expected that
executives would answer all the questions correctly. Instead, the study scored
based on how long it took them to answer the moral questions as opposed to the
general questions. These scores were then compared against respondents from a
control group of non-executives.

EDIT: Gosh! I hope I'm representing her study accurately... "Business
Experience and Moral Awareness: When Less May be More", Jennifer Jordan (2005)

~~~
gcr
So what happened? Citation? I'd like to read the study too.

~~~
samstave
Its a trick - hes seeing what type of responses he gets based on his waiting
for a set amount of time. We are being tested!

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ljd
I find these profiles amusing because it doesn't matter which way the results
turn out, you'll be happy.

Psychopath's don't care what the world calls them. They see it as an
advantage. So if you tell a non-psychopath that he isn't a psychopath he is
relieved, if you tell a psychopath that he is a psychopath he is also
relieved.

So the only way this test can change someone's paradigm is if it is erroneous.

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Millennium
If you actually worry about the possibility of being a psychopath, then you
almost certainly are not.

~~~
RivieraKid
Why do you think so?

~~~
nostrademons
One of the defining characteristics of being a psychopath is an inability to
feel shame or empathy. If you feel bad about being a psychopath, then a.) you
care what some online test thinks about you and b.) you are capable of feeling
shame, thus by definition you are not a psychopath.

The one exception is if that test or diagnosis makes it impossible for you to
achieve your goals. For example, if somebody broadcasts to the world that
you're a psychopath and that means you get turned down from jobs or the
government starts a manhunt for you, then a psychopath would feel bad. But on
a self-report questionnaire on the Internet? That has no consequence on your
actual life? If you feel bad about your psychopathy score there, you're almost
certainly not a psychopath.

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guylhem
So you are giving a DSM 4 diagnosis based on a self evaluation ?

I read the questions (Iphone vs Android? Is that a demographic question???
Really?) and I had a good laugh.

Regardless of the actual accuracy (which I doubt), what exactly is the
interest of the result for a person with enough instropection (fancy word for
self awareness) to care enough and take the test in the first place?

~~~
brudgers
The phone question is a complete _non-sequitor_...or maybe owning a Windows
phone makes someone a psychopath?

~~~
glaugh
All the questions that aren't part of that first big bunch are just fun things
we can cut the data on later. In retrospect we weren't terribly clear on that.

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vinceguidry
I loved the footnotes to the first statement.

> Complete the scientifically validated test below to see how psychopathic you
> are relative to others who have taken the test.

The validation given is the Wikipedia page on Psychopathy. Best laugh all day.

~~~
glaugh
First link of that footnote was just to describe the scale, via the Wikipedia
article.

Second link (on the word 'validated') was to this article:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10497804>

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Yhippa
Oh boy. Can't wait to see things from the results like "Android users are more
psycopathic" or "Ruby developers are less psycopathic than Java developers".

~~~
krapp
Or the blog post citing it as proof that you really must be crazy to use
PHP...

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caseyohara
Can someone please explain why one's favorite programming language would have
any bearing on whether they're a psychopath?

~~~
peejaybee
I'm not sure about psychopathy, but could you say with a straight face that
you can know that someone's favorite language is brainfuck, and simultaneously
not know whether or not they are insane?

~~~
gngeal
I like metalanguages more than I like languages, and I guess that fits nicely
with me having a schizoid personality disconnected from reality, as my mental
health specialist says. So yes, there could be a link.

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steveklabnik
Self-diagnosis, especially of mental illness, will always lead to a poor
result.

"Do you have a heart condition? Take this online questionnaire and find out!"

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beachstartup
the problem i have with these inventories (even the real ones) is that they
never ask about degree. the questions are binary and the 'response' is a
gradient, when it should be the other way around.

but then again i'm no doctor, i'm just some guy... who always scores really
high on these things. (top 5% in this one).

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arithma
For introspection purposes, I'd rather be given scenarios that I'd have to
imagine being through, and then try to feel what I'd honestly do. Then I could
possibly enjoy listening to some method of pinning down my internal
tendencies. "Imagine yourself with a child on a boat. You have to kill the
child for survival, or sacrifice your life for the child..." And then monitor
my heartbeat, and possibly do me an fMRI. Sorry if this is a ramble.

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RivieraKid
I think that the terms psychopath and sociopath are overhyped by media. It's
not even recognized by DSM-IV. I've read Hare's book about sociopaths and my
impression was that we simply don't have a very clear idea of what constitutes
a sociopath. IMHO, normal people can start behaving like sociopaths in certain
environments (Stanford prison experiment, members of SS in Nazi germany,
etc.).

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EliRivers
This feels like clickbait to get people to fill out the details about your job
at the bottom.

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jimmaswell
Test put me as "a little psychopathic." I think this is bogus. The answers to
most of those questions were along the lines of "it depends on the specific
situation or persons involved" to some extent. Like where it asked if I

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hosh
Huh, some of those questions have built-in assumptions that are just ...
wrong.

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Skoofoo
Alternatively, just read the first line of Wikipedia's page on psychopathy.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy>

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Kluny
Great way to mine a bit of data from the HN crowd - the section on programming
languages and so forth.

Unless... I hope my choice of "Java" doesn't make me more psychopathic.

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smurph
So I got [number], but I don't really know if it's good or bad. There is a
percentile but no scale of where the psychopaths begin and end. Pretty
pointless.

~~~
ambiate
I saw top 5% and did not know how to interpret that either.

~~~
yoster
Me too! Let's go chop up some people! Hehe J/K... or am I? DUN DUN DUN!

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gallinaponedora
After seeing the results, that must be wrong because women have more
psychopathic minds.

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corresation
Few if any will answer this honestly, and given that smartphone choice was
oddly put in there people will game it to make other camps look bad.

Psychopaths _know_ that their driving traits are not perceived well, and they
will consciously veer away from such overt questions.

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yoster
I made the top 5% of respondents. I am a psychopath...

