The psychopath in you | Lucy Foulkes

Psychopathic traits are not reserved for prisons or psychiatric hospitals - we're all somewhere on the spectrum

There is a questionnaire, the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, which assesses psychopathic traits in the general population. There are twenty-nine statements, and the respondent indicates the extent to which each statement applies to them, from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". Early in my PhD, a friend asked if he could see the questionnaire. He read out one of the items: 'I sometimes tell people what they want to hear.' He looked concerned. 'But I would agree with that - I do that sometimes,' he said. 'Does that make me a psychopath?' I reassured him no, it did not - only someone who scored very highly on most of the statements might meet criteria for what we think of as a "psychopath". But he had hit on something important: very few people score zero on the questionnaire.

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