Following Betteridge's Law of Headlines, the answer the article answers is "no", but it is a qualified "no". Homo Economicus according to the article "is a cre

Following Betteridge's Law of Headlines, the answer the article answers is "no", but it is a qualified "no". Homo Economicus according to the article "is a creature of coldly calculated selfishness, dispassionately maximizing its best interests even if that comes at the expense of others". The researchers concluded: "We see a person who is intelligent, driven to excel and to dominate other people, and capable of impulse control and of working toward long-term goals. In other words, Homo economicus is the prototypical member of the social and economic elite." I wish the researchers went further and went back to the biographies of their participants to evaluate whether or not their conclusion fit the participants' social and economic standings. Nonetheless, this is one of the few better-controlled and quantified studies I've seen about the over-representation of sociopathic and psychopathic traits in leadership. Keep this in mind the next time you work under/alongside them. Many hackers tend to have a meritocratic ideation of how the world should work, but the reality is sociopaths and borderline psychopaths are mostly the ones that rise to the top, and many a hacker is easily taken advantage of until they learn how the world really works (for now, at least).