Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test! | Kevin Dutton | Big Think
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Published 2012-11-25
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Psychologist Kevin Dutton presents the classic psychological test known as "the trolley problem" with a variation. Take the test and measure you response on the psychopathic spectrum.
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KEVIN DUTTON:
Dr. Kevin Dutton is the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. Dutton is a research psychologist at the Calleva Research Centre for Evolution and Human Science, Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
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TRANSCRIPT:
We all know about the psychopath’s enhanced killer instinct, their finely tuned vulnerability antennae. But it may surprise you to know that there are some situations in which psychopaths are actually more adept at saving lives than they are at taking them.So let me give you an example of what I mean by that, okay? Imagine you’ve got a train and it’s hurtling down a track. In its path, five people are trapped on the line and cannot escape.
Fortunately, you can flick a switch, which diverts the train down a fork in that track, away from those five people, but at a price. There is another person trapped down that fork and the train will kill them instead. Question: Should you flick the switch?
Now, most people have little trouble deciding what to do under those circumstances; though, the thought of flicking the switch isn’t exactly a nice one, the utilitarian choice as it were, killing just
the one person instead of the five represents the least worst option, okay. But now let me give you a variation. You’ve got a train speeding out of control down a track and it’s gonna plow into five people on the line. But this time you are standing behind a very large stranger on a footbridge above that track. The only way to save the people is to heave the stranger over. He will fall to a
certain death, but his considerable bulk will block the train, saving five lives. Question. Should you flick the switch?
Now we’ve got what we might call a real dilemma on our hands, okay. While the score in lives is precisely the same as in the first scenario, five to one, one’s choice of action appears far
trickier. Now why should that be? Well, the reason it turns out, all boils down to temperature, okay?
Case one represents what we might call an impersonal dilemma. It involved those areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the posterior parietal cortex, in particular, the anterior para
singular cortex, the temporal pole and the superior temporal sulcus - bit of neuroanatomy for you there - primarily responsible for what we call cold empathy, for reasoning and rational thought. Case two, on the other hand, represents what we might call a personal dilemma. It involves the emotion center of the brain known as the amygdala, the circuitry of hot empathy. What we might call the feeling of feeling what another person is feeling. Now, psychopaths, just like most normal members of the population, have no trouble at all with case one. They flick the switch and the train diverts accordingly. Killing just the one person instead of the five. But, this is where the plot thickens. Quite unlike normal members of the population, psychopaths also experience little difficulty with case two.
Psychopaths, without a moment’s hesitation are perfectly willing to chuck the fat guy over the rails, if that’s what the doctor orders. Now moreover, this difference in behavior has a distinct neural signature. The pattern of brain activation in both normal people and psychopaths is identical on the presentation of the impersonal moral dilemma, but radically different when things start to get a bit more personal. Imagine that I were to hook you up to a brain scanner, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, and were to present you with those two dilemmas, okay. What would I observe as you went about trying to solve them? Well, at the precise moment that the nature of the dilemma switches from impersonal to personal, I would see the emotion center of your brain, your amygdala and related brain circuits, the medial orbital frontal cortex for example, light up like a pinball machine. I would witness the moment in other words when emotion puts it money in the slot. But in psychopaths, I would see precisely nothing. And the passage from impersonal to personal would slip by unnoticed.Because that emotion neighborhood of their brains, that emotional zip code has a neural curfew. And that’s why they’re perfectly happy to chuck that fat guy over the side without even batting an eye.
Directed / Produced by:
Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd
All Comments (21)
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If he's fat enough to stop the train I doubt that I could push him
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''Recommended for you'' - Thanks Google.
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If he's big enough to stop a train, then I'm not strong enough to push him onto the tracks.
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Why do psychologists alway look like the biggest psychopaths themselves?
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Would a reasonable person really believe that tossing a very large stranger onto the tracks would be able to stop a train?
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the feeling of feeling what someone else is feeling my brain cells died
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I would not intervene at all. It's unfortunate, yes, but I will not take part in it.
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If I could sling a dude heavy enough to stop a train over a railing, I'm not a psychopath. I'm a super hero at that point.
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my reaction to those questions in my head: "i dont want to go to prison, i dont want to be in trouble, i rather do nothing and walk away slowly"
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This is Charlie Sheen's best character.
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flicking the switch and killing the guy on the safe track is murder, not doing anything is an accident.
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Do not use this video to self diagnose!
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I'm not a psychopath. I'm a high functioning sociopath.
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Surely a real psychopath would do nothing and watch all the people die for his entertainment
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Seems Jethro Tull was right “Don’t want to be a fat man”
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0:51 should you flick the switch? Me : An intellectual "flick the switch but once the front wheels of the wagon are on the other track flick it again, MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING"
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You Tube posted this video on my page saying, “Recommended for you.”
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That is a great explanation. I have had to deal with at least one psyopath in my life. He had no empathy at all. His boldness and desire to hurt people's feelings and positions eventually led to hos downfall.
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I’m at the opposite end of the continuum from a psychopath. Life can be overwhelming for me; at times, barely livable. I have almost unrelenting anxiety and depression. But between my current state and psychopathy, I’d choose my current state. It’s because I get to feel love. Psychopaths may not feel emotional pain, but they don’t feel love either. Not that they mind. If I was a psychopath, I’d probably feel the same way I do now, but in reverse.
