Should Employers Screen for Psychopaths?

my wife left this article up on the desktop last night. an undergrad student learned about how psychos gravitate toward CEO type positions, and started to wonder how accurate that 3% figure actually was. she started to wonder how many psycho CEOs are able to fake it through the tests.

she hooked up a batch of certified psychos to electrodes, made them look at disturbing images, and measured their GSR. the smart ones had no measurable reaction, the stupid ones registered excitement.

The conclusion is that those with higher IQs had sufficient intelligence to fake their emotional response, making it more difficult to detect their condition...

She has contemplated the implications and whether or not it is important to develop new procedures to screen out psychopathic people who are in line for top business posts.

“Perhaps businesses do need people who have the same characteristics as psychopaths, such as ruthlessness. But I suspect that some form of screening does need to take place, mainly so businesses are aware of what sort of people they are hiring,” she says.

on the one hand, i get where she's coming from. employers can and do conduct extensive personality testing on their potential hires in order to reduce liability and ensure suitability for a job. where does a GSR test fall between a multiple choice personality test and a urine screen? if you wanted to cull the white collar criminals, and a simple personality test won't cut it, why not strap on the electrodes and plug in the slideshow?

on the other hand, it's discriminatory, and it sets a bad precedent.

a reply to: ATODASO

Here is a question; Does their ability to 'fake' the test mean they recognize this attribute and know to suppress this trait at all times or is it solely for the test?

Hard to determine without some sort of blind testing.

a reply to: ATODASO

You mean Psychopath not Psycho. Not all psychopaths are bad.

Psychopaths need jobs too.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
a reply to: ATODASO

Here is a question; Does their ability to 'fake' the test mean they recognize this attribute and know to suppress this trait at all times or is it solely for the test?

yeah, i guess that wasn't clear. the type of testing they're referring to in the article would be your standard MMPI type, maybe a couple of fluffier tests to determine how you operate in group dynamics. if you're exploitative, emotionally shallow and incapable of empathy, and you make no effort to avoid exposing those traits on a test, you're not gonna get hired.

the smart ones know the right answers to give, but they can't fake the physiological response apparently. so she's suggesting testing an applicant's physiological responses as a safety check against false reporting.

originally posted by: ispyed
a reply to: ATODASO

You mean Psychopath not Psycho. Not all psychopaths are bad.

that's why i left the question open. would you elaborate on that a little? in what way are psychopathic qualities potentially "good"?

originally posted by: Restricted
Psychopaths need jobs too.

yeah, but maybe not in finance.

One of my friends a Psychopath, well correct term from his psychiatrist is socio path. He has had to sit such tests for work and he can fake his way through them with ease.

These tests just weed out the stupid ones.

a reply to: ATODASO

EXCUSE ME?

DID I READ THIS RIGHT?

"Perhaps businesses do need people who have the same characteristics as psychopaths, such as ruthlessness....

If they need psychopaths, then they should be shut down, because no amount of money, no amount of wealth is worth the danger of allowing psychopaths to gain power for themselves. These people are the most dangerous, inhuman, and potentially lethal people you can imagine. We are not talking about people who are capable of compassion, love, concern for others. We are talking about people who would kill you outright if they thought for a moment they could get away with it, people who would set the world on fire for kicks, people who like to hear the screams of others, preferably as they die, for no reason what so ever.

I have an awful lot of love for my fellow human beings, but the reason I have love for them is that they are compassionate, caring, all full of positive potential, unless something goes badly wrong, and even then, they can be recovered from the darkness. But psychopaths have none of that, they do not possess that which makes the rest of us human. They are absent the basic building blocks of healthy person hood. They measure their worth by how infrequently they become bored, and slake their boredom in increasingly horrible ways until they either die from their excess, or get caught out and beat down. They make the lives of everyone they encounter far more difficult than they need to be, and they hold this entire species back.

These people feed on sorrow, and inflict it without remorse, without pity, without any feeling what so ever. These are people who only come truly to life, by causing damage to other peoples lives, their flesh, their livelihoods. They feed on POWER.

They should not be protected from identification and ought to be removed from any office greater than that of paperclip dispensing. They should be banned from management positions of any kind, denied power of every type, and when they seek it for themselves, they should be summarily incarcerated, permanently until death, because to give them the same benefit of the doubt offered to others, is to allow them to destroy the human race, by degrees and by greed. They must be stopped, cold and dead.

a reply to: ATODASO

Yes employers should screen for psychopaths. They can cause terrible psychological damage to other employees and have absolutely no conscience. They have no qualms about unethical behaviour and are often fraudulent. They lie about their qualifications and treat others badly and get them to do their work. I interviewed one for a job once and he did 3 bad things before he even came in the door for the interview !!!!! I hope this makes sense as it very late and I am tired.
Psychopaths are not good.

originally posted by: crazyewok

These tests just weed out the stupid ones.

right, exactly. the undergrad found that a skin response test then weeded out the smart ones, and suggested employers make it part of the standard testing process.

how would your friend feel about that?

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: ATODASO

They should not be protected from identification and ought to be removed from any office greater than that of paperclip dispensing. They should be banned from management positions of any kind, denied power of every type, and when they seek it for themselves, they should be summarily incarcerated, permanently until death, because to give them the same benefit of the doubt offered to others, is to allow them to destroy the human race, by degrees and by greed. They must be stopped, cold and dead.

employers who feel as you do (and probably how most do) are now able to get a better bead on that type than ever before, and there's nothing to stop them from adding it to the list of tests applicants sign off on.

but how long does it take before screening out the psychopaths turns into screening for neurotypical applicants exclusively?

a reply to: ATODASO
Employers, especially government employers, already screen for sociopaths. They usually hire the exceptional ones.

Test the employers!!!

Here's a very interesting vid
Strange answers to the psychopath test

Link to vid

Birds of a feather flock together. Why would they want to weed out their own kind? On top of that those psychopaths tend to work their asses off to move up in the world. It would not be in their best interest to bring normal folk into the fold.

a reply to: ATODASO



Who's hiring ?

Well that’s the thing, who dictates what a true sociopath is?

What, crack pot psychologists with their delusional superiority complexes and BS pseudoscience, who try to label anyone with a different perception of reality to themselves with some fancy condition, lol.

From my personal experience at least 50 percent of the western world would be out of the job if it became policy to deny so called “psychopaths” of meaningful employment.

Just go watch fox news or go to any church (although Christians main issue is clearly a self induced case of extreme psychosis) to see evidence of just how many people in society are clearly extremely sick with psychopathic tendencies.

These people rant, rave and even at times become violent if they are inconvenienced in the most benign way imaginable, yet they have no empathy whatsoever for others who are genuinely suffering who they perceive as different to themselves. They won’t even blink an eyelid when there government is slaughtering men, women and children in some far off country, yet kick up a storm if they so much as break a fingernail.

Imo, the human race is sociopaths by nature and if you don’t agree, then you’re probably one of these sick depraved individuals and have been indoctrinated and brainwashed with a delusional perception of reality. So it’s to for you now!

So no! I don’t think employers should screen for any mental illness. Because it would just be used as another tool by the real sick and depraved people within society (who have the ability to disguise there illness within the shadow of the masses), to deprive vulnerable individuals who are already discriminated against of any kind of quality of life.

a reply to: ATODASO


I look at it this way:

There is only one thing about a persons mental construction that an employer should be allowed to make decisions on, and that is whether or not they are a psychopath. People who hire and fire already make value judgements about applicants for work, which are based on the communication shared between applicant and interveiwer. Although these do not constitute a psychometric test of any kind, normally speaking, what they do, is allow an employer to get a feel for the applicant, and this adds to their information about that applicant. At the end of the interview process, employers decide which applicant they are to select, one presumes based on which applicant best meets the requirements of the job. This already happens.

However, weeding out the psychopaths from the world of work, and thereby the world, is necessary because psychopaths are by definition, capable of dissembling their way out of, or into pretty much anything, rendering that process utterly powerless to weed them out. This means that unlike people with many other dysfunctions, a significant number of which can be pretty obvious to someone with very little training, psychopaths can pass unnoticed into any work they please, at which point they ascend the ranks, develop a powerbase, and take things over, carving out their little fiefdoms and scouring all else with their inherant villany.

What I am getting at, is that ONLY psychopathic or sociopathic traits must ever be extensively tested for by employers. Any other psychometric testing would be discriminatory. Testing for psychopaths and sociopaths however, is necessary for the protection of the company from corruption, and the nation/planet from some of the most remorseless, relentless, and utterly soulless people ever to have walked on the face of this Earth.

originally posted by: Klassified
a reply to: ATODASO
Employers, especially government employers, already screen for sociopaths. They usually hire the exceptional ones.

funf act!

(the) APA (when putting together the first dsm) began with the military’s diagnostic criteria, expanded them to create one system that could be used for diagnostic and statistical purposes, and included a glossary of definitions for the different illnesses the guide encompassed.

the u.s. military wrote the book, literally. what makes you think they are screening FOR psychopaths?

originally posted by: theyknowwhoyouare
Birds of a feather flock together. Why would they want to weed out their own kind? On top of that those psychopaths tend to work their asses off to move up in the world. It would not be in their best interest to bring normal folk into the fold.

yeah, that's called negative selection, but it's hard to track it in practice. basically, if you want to pull some greasy #, you get yourself some greasy underlings.

but the gsr would weed the alpha psychos out too. is it ok to do that, is what i'm wondering?