A riddle involving a funeral might be an intriguing method to assess whether someone could possess psychopathic tendencies.
Healthline notes that although ‘psychopathy’ isn’t officially recognized as a clinical diagnosis, the label ‘psychopath’ is often associated with traits of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Characteristics of ASPD can include a lack of empathy, remorse, and a tendency to manipulate others.
“A personality disorder is a lifelong mental health condition that affects how you behave and feel about others and yourself, often causing a high degree of distress or impairment,” Healthline explains.
This disorder may influence various aspects of an individual’s life, such as their thought processes, emotions, social interactions, and impulse control abilities.
While diagnosing psychopathy is quite challenging, some researchers specializing in personality disorders suggest potential indicators of psychopathic behavior.
In 2011, a study published in the journal Cognition investigated how individuals responded to certain unsettling scenarios.
Researchers from Columbia Business School and Cornell University presented participants with a range of dilemmas and personality assessments.
One of these dilemmas involved a funeral.
According to Business Insider, the scenario described the following: “While at her own mother’s funeral, a woman meets a guy she doesn’t know. She thinks this guy is amazing – her dream man – and is pretty sure he could be the love of her life. However, she never asked for his name or number and afterwards could not find anyone who knows who he was. A few days later the girl kills her own sister – but why?”
If you speculated the answer might be because the man would attend her sister’s funeral, then you have apparently ‘thought like a psychopath’.
The second scenario is just as disturbing: “A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people. Would you push the man?”
Choosing to push the man, even if it results in saving more lives, is said to be a thought process that aligns more closely with psychopathic tendencies.
It’s crucial to understand that these scenarios are not diagnostic of psychopathy, a point emphasized by the Columbia Business School team.
“Although the study does not resolve the ethical debate, it points to a flaw in the widely-adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas to identify optimal moral judgment,” stated Daniel Bartels, one of the study’s authors from Columbia Business School.
“These methods fail to distinguish between people who endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (like those captured by our measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse them out of genuine concern for the welfare of others.”