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Are you a psychopath?
- Yhippa 13y agoOh 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 13y agoOr the blog post citing it as proof that you really must be crazy to use PHP...
- caseyohara 13y agoCan someone please explain why one's favorite programming language would have any bearing on whether they're a psychopath?
- ByronT 13y agoBecause blog views.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- peejaybee 13y agoI'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 13y agoI 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.
- nollidge 13y agoI don't think it does, it's probably being stored for later demographic analysis.
- troels 13y agoMaybe it's not, but they would like to see the correlation between psychopathy and programming language.
- bradleyland 13y agoThat's the question they're asking -- albeit in a flawed way, IMO. "Is there a relationship between psychopathy and programming language, phone selection, sex, age, etc?" They've packaged some pretty standard questions (probably) based on DSM IV criteria that they think will tell them how psychopathic the survey responder is, then they're going to correlate that data with the demographic information at the bottom to say: "Look, Android/iPhone users are, on average, eleventy percent more psychotic than iPhone/Android users!" It will be dumb, and only people who repost stupid text-on-image-wisdom stuff to their Facebook wall will believe it has any bearing on reality.
- vinceguidry 13y agoI 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 13y agoFirst 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 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10497804
- n3rdy 13y agoI like how it asks what type of phone I use on a scientifically validated test.
- smurph 13y agoSo 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.
- glaugh 13y agoHere's Robert Hare, the expert on this stuff: "We refer to individuals with a very high concentration of these features (perhaps 1% of the general population) as psychopaths" [1] So there's no clear cutoff, it's not a bimodal distribution, but if you are in the top 1% (of a professionally administered version of this test) you might be considered a psychopath. [1] http://www.psychopathysociety.org/images/hare%20commentary%20on%20ronson%20april%2017%202012.pdf http://www.psychopathysociety.org/images/hare%20commentary%2...
- ambiate 13y agoI saw top 5% and did not know how to interpret that either.
- yoster 13y agoMe too! Let's go chop up some people! Hehe J/K... or am I? DUN DUN DUN!
- beachstartup 13y agothe 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).
- jimmaswell 13y agoTest 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
- Millennium 13y agoIf you actually worry about the possibility of being a psychopath, then you almost certainly are not.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoGood point. Although some people might be worried of having some traces of it. Self-knowledge is important.
- senorprogrammer 13y agoI believe the original quote to that effect was by Robert Hare and the basic premise of it is that if any part of you worries you might be psychopathic, you're probably not psychopathic enough to worry about it. The worryingly psychopathic don't see psychopathy as something to worry about. Everyone places somewhere on the spectrum, the question is only where.
- RivieraKid 13y agoWhy do you think so?
- Millennium 13y agoPsychopaths are notoriously difficult to treat. Most of the reason for this is that, by and large, they simply don't want to be cured. This isn't to say that they're enthusiastic about being psychopaths, but they don't see it as being problematic enough to be worth the trouble of changing. In other words, while they may not necessarily want to be psychopaths, they don't particularly want to be not-psychopaths either. If you're actually worried about being a psychopath, then clearly you want very badly to be a not-psychopath. If it's that important to you, then you're missing one of the critical markers of psychopathy.
- nostrademons 13y agoOne 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.
- ignostic 13y agoI 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?
- _pmf_ 13y ago> 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? Psychology is a science, just like pizza is a vegetable.
- glaugh 13y agoOP here, totally agree with this. That question is almost "How honest are you with yourself?" Takes a bit of scrolling down the page of results[1], but people are actually pretty honest on that one, the mode response is "Agree somewhat" (this finding is from our initial, seed sample). Also agree about the ease of getting around this. Particularly if you're a psychopath, and are therefore good at being manipulative. The version of this test used in parole settings[2] deals with this by having professional interviewers who use the person's history and records to make assessments, in addition to the interview. (Note that I'm not actually defending that process; part of the point of this and NPR's recent discussions about psychopathy is to stimulate thinking about whether stuff like this should actually be used for important decisions like parole) [1]: https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/6beda395392cc4b0115e04ced2f458cd0f361dff#workspaces/3712 https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/6beda395392cc4b0115e0... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist edit: clarified that results from [1] are from initial seed sample of respondents, not the HN sample.
- guylhem 13y agoSo 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?
- glaugh 13y agoJust want to be really clear that we're not doing any diagnosis, and no matter what you responded we'd never say "That's it, you're a psychopath." Also perhaps 'demographic' is probably the wrong word on our part, point taken :)
- brudgers 13y agoThe phone question is a complete non-sequitor...or maybe owning a Windows phone makes someone a psychopath?
- glaugh 13y agoAll 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.
- joshrotenberg 13y agoYeah, I was confused when I got to the phone and language questions as well, and was expecting the result to be a joke or something that completely ignored the first set of questions and called me a psychopath for using Android and writing Clojure.
- Someone 13y agoThose questions made me worry for a moment whether this was some social engineering thing. I don't think they would collect some dangerous info on those who do the survey, but, for instance, it could be an effort to provide targeted ads to my IP address.
- steveklabnik 13y agoSelf-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!"
- steveklabnik 13y agoSelf-diagnosis, especially of mental illness issues, will always lead to a poor result. "Do you have a heart condition? Take this online questionnaire and find out!"
- corresation 13y agoFew 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.
- hosh 13y agoHuh, some of those questions have built-in assumptions that are just ... wrong.
- ljd 13y agoI 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- EliRivers 13y agoThis feels like clickbait to get people to fill out the details about your job at the bottom.
- RivieraKid 13y agoI 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.).
- arithma 13y agoFor 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.
- Skoofoo 13y agoAlternatively, just read the first line of Wikipedia's page on psychopathy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
- Kluny 13y agoGreat 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.
- yoster 13y agoI made the top 5% of respondents. I am a psychopath...
- gallinaponedora 13y agoAfter seeing the results, that must be wrong because women have more psychopathic minds.