Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
Topics: Health, Mental Health
Lucy Devine
A riddle about a funeral might reveal if you could be a psychopath or not.
According to Healthline, while 'psychopathy' is not a clinical diagnosis, the term 'psychopath' often refers to symptoms of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) which can include a lack of empathy and remorse and 'manipulation tendencies'.
"A personality disorder is a lifelong mental health condition that affects how you behave and feel about others and yourself, often causing a high degree of distress or impairment," the site explains.
"It may affect aspects of your life, like the way you think, how you feel, how you interact with others, and your ability to control your impulses."
Advert
While very difficult to diagnose, some researchers looking into personality disorders have suggested that there could be ways of identifying psychopathic behavior.
Meanwhile, a study from 2011, published in the journal Cognition, assessed how people responded in certain disturbing scenarios.
The research saw scientists from the Columbia Business School and Cornell Universities provide a group of participants with a series of dilemmas and personality tests.
One of the scenarios was about funerals.
As per Business Insider, it said: "While at her own mother's funeral, a woman meets a guy she doesn't know. She thinks this guy is amazing - her dream man - and is pretty sure he could be the love of her life. However, she never asked for his name or number and afterwards could not find anyone who knows who he was. A few days later the girl kills her own sister - but why?"
Did you guess the correct answer? Well, there is no right and wrong answer, but if you thought it might be because the man would turn up at her sister's funeral, you've apparently 'thought like a psychopath'.
The second scenario is equally as unsettling: “A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people. Would you push the man?”
If you chose to push the man, despite saving more people, apparently it's still the answer that most aligns with a psychopathic thought process.
It's important to note that these scenarios absolutely do not diagnose psychopathy - and the team at the Columbia Business School points this out themselves.
"Although the study does not resolve the ethical debate, it points to a flaw in the widely-adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas to identify optimal moral judgment," said Daniel Bartels, one of the study authors at Columbia Business School.
"These methods fail to distinguish between people who endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (like those captured by our measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse them out of genuine concern for the welfare of others."