The Psychopath Capital of America?

Ryan Murphy, a Southern Methodist University economist, recently set out to determine which state, (including Washington, D.C. as a fifty-first locale) is the "psychopath capital of America."

His study used what is called "the big five" major personality traits as evidenced in people's actions.

According to Dictionary.com, a psychopath is "a person with a psychopathic personality, which manifests as amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc."

Murphy's study says that Washington, D.C. is America's most psychopathic place. One of the big reasons for this, per an article from Politico, is that the denser a population (denser as in more people per square mile, not denser as in thick-headed), the more psychopaths there tend to be. It's a simple matter of demographic odds.

But, Politico also points out that wherever there are more people deemed "successful," inevitably there will also be a higher number of people with psychopathic tendencies...you know, the kind of person who would walk all over their grandmother to get what they want.

D.C. must have a lot of grandmother-stompers, because Murphy's study says that it has twice the psychopathic rating as the next two states on the list, Connecticut, and California, combined.

Before any of us who live in flyover country start bragging about how nice we are, it should be pointed out that there's a tie for fifth in psychopathy between two states, New York and Wyoming.

The five least psychopathic states, according to Murphy, are West Virginia, Vermont, Tennessee, North Carolina and New Mexico.

I don't know if I buy all of this, although as a pastor through the years, I've observed that different communities have different prevailing personality traits and worldviews. Whether that bears a relationship to psychopathy, I wouldn't know.

But, speaking for myself, I like Washington, D.C., Connecticut, and California. And I love New York. Some of the friendliest and kindest people I've ever known were from these states. I've never been to Wyoming and spent little time in New Jersey, which also made the top five. But I'm sure that there are nice people there too.

But the Murphy study will give some people the fodder they need to criticize places and people they don't like.

By the way, Ohio is ranked the country's 21st. most psychopathic state, while Michigan comes in at 26th. Maybe Murphy's study is onto something. (Only a joke.)

To see, Murphy's paper, go here.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. I am a sinner saved by grace. I'm trying not to be a psychopath.]

'Which Professions Have the Most Psychopaths?'

That's the headline for a piece from TIME that got my attention when I saw it linked on Twitter a few weeks ago. I wondered: Does my profession have more than its share of psychopaths? I suspected that it did.

But before the TIME article gets around to revealing which professions have the most psychopaths, it defines what a psychopath really is:

...psychopath doesn’t just mean someone who cuts you up with a chainsaw — though the majority of people who do things like that are psychopaths.

[Then quoting Wikipedia, that last word in all human knowledge evidently, we're told that,] "Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has been variously described as characterized by shallow emotions (in particular reduced fear), stress tolerance, lacking empathy, coldheartedness, lacking guilt, egocentricity, superficial character, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity and antisocial behaviors such as parasitic lifestyle and criminality."

The ten professions with the highest incidence of psychopaths (designated with a + sign) and the lowest (designated with - sign), according to both TIME and The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, the book from which the following lists come, are:

And there's my profession, in at number 8, right after journalists and police officers, just before chefs and civil servants.

Frankly, it all looks like a bad case of "pop psychology" to me. Whatever it is, I hope that the lists are wrong.