Every time I see an article about spotting a psychopath I always end up reading it, and my worst fear is that the first paragraph is going to say that the first sign that you’re insane is that you like to read articles about spotting psychopaths. Other than one poorly written article on Huffington I haven’t really come across anything yet, so at this point I’m going to assume I’m perfectly sane.
This particular article is a pretty interesting read, and it even includes a quiz to see if you too are a pschopath! It’s the infamous Hare test, and here are the first ten of the twenty items that are used to rate a subject:
Item 1 Glibness/superficial charm
Item 2 Grandiose sense of self-worth
Item 3 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Item 4 Pathological lying
Item 5 Cunning/manipulative
Item 6 Lack of remorse or guilt
Item 7 Shallow affect
Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy
Item 9 Parasitic lifestyle
Item 10 Poor behavioural controls
When tested you’re rated on a scale of 0-2 and if you score more than 30 – apparently you’re dangerous to society (or not, you can read the article for more information on that).
The full piece is an abstract from Jon Ronson’s new book (he wrote ‘Men Who Stare at Goats‘), and mostly details the plight of one man who avoided prison by feigning insanity only to find out that once in a mental asylum he couldn’t prove he was sane.
Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you’re 17 and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don’t need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That’s what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he liked sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was a bullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you’d go straight to hell.
Plagiarising a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off. Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and David Cronenberg’s Crash. Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him feel normal.
(Click here to read the article at guardian.co.uk)
And here is one more segment about alternative testing (most of the article is about the author’s interactions with Tony):
In the mid-60s, Hare was working as a prison psychologist in Vancouver. He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers for tests. He strapped them up to various EEG and sweat- and blood pressure-measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and explained to them that he was going to count backwards from 10 and when he reached one they’d receive a very painful electric shock.
The difference in the responses stunned Hare. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock were just the penance they deserved. They were, Hare noted, scared.
“And the psychopaths?” I asked.
“They didn’t break a sweat,” said Hare. “Nothing.” The tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear to the central nervous system, wasn’t functioning as it should. It was an enormous breakthrough for Hare, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains.
Prior to reading the article I would have wholeheartedly endorsed the plan of faking madness to get out of even a short prison sentence. Hell, I would be willing to feign madness to avoid going to my room as a child. Now, I’m not so sure though. Despite every effort we find out that the more normal Tony acted the more indicative it was of his insanity.
Also, we find out in the article that many psychopaths walk amongst us and pose no danger at all and most of them are running our country or acting as CEO’s of large companies (very comforting) – none however are authors of seldomly updated blogs on WordPress!











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