Psychopath Study: Most are in Washington, DC, says a scientist

TAs they can, some states can not shake their reputation. Some are friendly (hi, Minnesota!), Others casual (sup, California), and still others are deeply disconnected (avoiding eye contact with you, New York). But hiding behind these stereotypes may hide a much darker geography of personality, suggests a study underway by Ryan Murphy, Ph.D., economist at Southern Methodist University. His research on the places that psychopaths tend to gather revealed a rather overwhelming list of states.

Murphy's article, which is still in its preliminary stages – it has not yet been peer reviewed – combines previous research from other scientists to estimate state-level psychopathy levels. In particular, his work is based on a great 2013 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study of "Big Five" personality traits by state and another unpublished study showing how to estimate psychopathy from these traits.

The highest on his list of states with high concentrations of psychopaths were Washington, D.C., Connecticut, California, New Jersey, and a link between New York and Wyoming for the fifth. The lowest concentrations were observed in West Virginia, Vermont, Tennessee, North Carolina and New Mexico. Murphy tells reverse that some of these results were more surprising than others.

"I did not expect the aberrational nature of Washington DC to show up so well in the data, despite my previous research," he said in an email, referring to his earlier work on the relationship between psychopathy and politics. "I also did not expect West Virginia to be" the best "(the least psychopathic) because it is almost never" the best "in the various state rankings."

What is psychopathy?

Psychopathy is often distorted in pop culture, but it is well defined in psychologists. In a 2012 article for io9, psychologist Maria Konnikova, Ph.D., exposed in full:

According to Robert Hare, creator of the standard diagnostic tool for psychopathic personality disorder and one of the world's leading experts on the subject, psychopathy is characterized by four main factors, or groups of traits: interpersonal , emotional, lifestyle, and antisocial. In the first bucket fall features such as glibness and superficiality, grandeur, pathological deception, and manipulative trickery; in the second, features such as lack of guilt or remorse, superficial affect, lack of empathy and refusal to accept responsibility for actions; the third, the predisposition to boredom, a parasitic lifestyle and a lack of long-term goals associated with impulsivity; and the fourth, poor behavioral control, childhood problems, parole (or other parole) breakdown, and criminal versatility. Oh, and there are two other traits that do not fall into any category but are nevertheless important: promiscuity and many short-term relationships.

Murphy notes that his study's data is based on psychopathy treated as a spectrum rather than a binary categorization; in other words, although there are "true psychopaths" in a given state, the average level of psychopathy may differ from one region to another.

A geographical theory on psychopaths

Murphy's findings on the dense states of psychopaths, while preliminary, are consistent with existing theories of where they might tend to congregate. "It is difficult to generalize from a single sample of data, but the importance or proximity of large urban centers in each state seems to strongly match data on psychopathy," he says.

Indeed, the five states that dominated the list of psychopaths are full of big cities. "This stems from the theory – psychopaths prefer the opportunities of power and the anonymity that a city can offer." This observation – that the percentage of the population in the state living in an urban area is correlated with the proportion of psychopaths in this state – was the only close relationship that Murphy found in the data.

While it might be tempting to correlate the high density of psychopaths in Washington, DC with some political groups, Murphy points out that he has already established a link between psychopathy and politicians in general. His previous work "suggests a broader connection of politicians to psychopathy, not a connection of political parties peculiar to psychopathy," he says.

Disproportionate psychopathic professions

It's one thing to say that there are a lot of psychopaths in one state, but it's unclear if this translates into cultural or social trends. To explore the possible connections, Murphy compared his results to data on homicide rates and occupations previously related to psychopathy. He found no clear correlation with one or the other variable, but his study uncovered a list of "disproportionately psychopathic" professions described in a book published in 2012 by Robert Dutton, Ph.D., research psychologist at Oxford University. called The wisdom of psychopaths.

Murphy's study used the list of professions related to Dutton's psychopathy: CEO, lawyer, media, salesman, surgeon, journalist, police officer, clergyman, chief and official. The least psychopathic professions, according to this book, are caregivers, nurses, therapists, artisans, beauticians / stylists, charity workers, teachers, creative artists, doctors and accountants.