The Wisdom of Psychopaths

Are You a Psychopath?

Carefully consider this riddle. Your solution might give you some indication of whether you’re a psychopath. A young lady attends her mother’s funeral. She encounters a strange man – her true soul mate – with whom she falls immediately in love. He leaves before she can learn his name. She spends days trying to find out who he is, but all anyone can tell her is that her lost love is a friend of the family. Soon after, she kills her sister. Why?

While you might imagine any number of hypotheses, a psychopath might shrug and say: “Because the man attended the mother’s funeral, it stands to reason he might attend the sister’s funeral.” If this was your hypothesis, well, congratulations. You may or may not be a psychopath, but you certainly can reason like one.

Are you cool under extreme pressure? Are you extraordinarily persuasive? Are you a risk taker? Do you possess laser-like focus to the extent that you can ignore emotion, even pain, while performing tasks? Would you kill one innocent person to save several? Do you feel other people’s pain but also take pleasure in inflicting it? The degree to which you answer yes to these and similar questions...