Assessing psychopathy using memes

The most common problem with psychometric tests is the subject giving false inputs. People hate being judged and enjoy it when they are perceived as their ideal selves. I know people who have rigged their Myers-Briggs Test just to make "friends" with someone from a different personality type.

Moreover, people are conscious when they are appearing for these tests and would, under normal circumstances, exhibit behavior that makes them likable. It's just like faking confidence during an interview.

There had to be a way around it so we decided to take an unconventional approach to this problem. For our data collection process, we added memes and humorous content that people of our age group engage with. We wanted the participants to have fun while filling the form, giving them an endorphin rush that would get their guard down. This has never been done before in the entire history of psychometric tests.

Our hypothesis: If people are relaxed they’ll reflect their true self.

We made the participants believe that we were gauging their social media consumption and trying to find a relation between that and their preferred career path. (yes, we lied)

Due to space constraints, we haven’t included all of the questions we asked in this article although you may access the google form by clicking here.

I and my friend Ankit Kumar are both connoisseurs of criminal fiction and thus we decided to move forward with assessing psychopathy in our colleagues.

From all the information I’ve gathered on this topic through reading blogs, we can broadly break down a typical psychopathic behavior into 3-character traits: 

1. Lack of Empathy (LoE)
2. Tendency to Lie/Manipulation (M)
3. Narcissism (N)

So we decided to create a test that would assess these. Kindly note that since we don’t have medical credentials, we can’t make an accurate claim about the reliability. But if someone scores high on this assessment, they may be a psychopath.

We started off slow by asking for the basic demographics – age, gender, etc, which we used for our analysis at a later stage. To build credibility we asked a few questions that we never intended to use for our analysis but they seemed like serious questions to the respondents.

 Then we moved on to the “fun” questions. The ones we actually used for our analysis.

We added this question to assess if people will make a malicious choice if there were no repercussions. Around 50% of people did not choose Track A. Some even went as far as to have a clear objective on whom they would hurt (last option) when they simply had the chance to not harm anyone.

Now, this was an interesting question because people who chose Arya Stark were proportionately higher, thereby ranking themselves as more competent than their peers. People who chose Bran Stark or Sansa are absolutely aware of their “influence” and still choose to consciously use the same for their gain. 

This was added to gauge if a person would indulge in violence if that resulted in some tangible gain, higher paycheque in this case. We got some interesting results here with more than half of people choosing Jade i.e., no violence of any form. So maybe killing a puppy is where we draw the line?

My batchmates LOVED the form although a few of them suspected that something was fishy. Three of my colleagues texted me something along the lines of “That’s quite an interesting form. Are you trying to assess career choices based on the memes people like?”

Anyways we used the information and found some interesting results.

The above is a distribution for psychopathy scores in an all-male population. This was administered by medical professionals.

This is the distribution for our sample which contains 70% male population. Quite a similar shape right? The skewness for both these experiments is moderately positive.

Similarly, if we compare the female and male scores we see:

In a general population, the female score is a bit less than the male score.

And that's the trend we see in our participants as well. The average score for female participants is 20% less than that of male participants.

We also found some good observations pertaining to age:

While the distribution was quite similar, the average 19-year-old score was as much as 16% higher than 18 and 20.

People who are clinical psychopaths would have a score of 3 standard deviations more than the normal population. We did find 1 response that fit into that category which makes sense because psychopaths make up about 1% of the total population and it was inevitable that they would crawl in our sample.

You'd think why we conducted this experiment in the first place. Well, there are plenty of reasons. Psychopaths may try to embezzle funds, cause harm to colleagues in physical and mental forms, and may ruin the culture of an organization by deviating from ethics. And going forward as we move towards a globalized world that DEMANDS more inclusivity and empathy it might become a hindrance. So if organizations could administer tests like these to find out which employee might harm their company they can be better prepared.

Limitations

• What we have characterized to be inherent psychopathy may as well just be learned sociopathy, or a temporarily induced psychopathy because of the environment of the participants. This can be very true since we saw that 19-year-olds had a significantly higher score than 18- and 20-year-olds and my institution has a fairly competitive environment.
• We might have mischaracterized confidence as narcissism. Maybe some small portion of the narcissism might just be reflecting self-belief. 
• Our data was small. We got only 69 responses.