Are you a psychopath?

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."<p>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."<p>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?

I find these profiles amusing because it doesn't matter which way the results turn out, you'll be happy.<p>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.<p>So the only way this test can change someone's paradigm is if it is erroneous.

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

So you are giving a DSM 4 diagnosis based on a self evaluation ?<p>I read the questions (Iphone vs Android? Is that a demographic question??? Really?) and I had a good laugh.<p>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?

I loved the footnotes to the first statement.<p>&#62; Complete the scientifically validated test below to see how psychopathic you are relative to others who have taken the test.<p>The validation given is the Wikipedia page on Psychopathy. Best laugh all day.

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".

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

Self-diagnosis, especially of mental illness, will always lead to a poor result.<p>"Do you have a heart condition? Take this online questionnaire and find out!"

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.<p>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).

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.

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.).

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

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

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

Alternatively, just read the first line of Wikipedia's page on psychopathy. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy</a>

Great way to mine a bit of data from the HN crowd - the section on programming languages and so forth.<p>Unless... I hope my choice of "Java" doesn't make me more psychopathic.

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.

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

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.<p>Psychopaths <i>know</i> that their driving traits are not perceived well, and they will consciously veer away from such overt questions.

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