Uh-oh Psychiatrists can detect our personality type based on our social media interaction.
Being as I seem to be having a day of blogging about blogging; I thought I’d continue the theme.
I must confess to having a strange penchant for reading things relating to psychopaths.
I even blogged about psychopaths becoming Christians and was somewhat surprised by the level of interest.
Anyway, I was busy reading a piece entitled: “How to spot a psychopath: Speech patterns give them away“, when I came across this quote:
And finally, while most of us respond to higher-level needs, such as family, religion or spirituality, and self-esteem, psychopaths remain occupied with those needs associated with a more basic existence.
Their analysis revealed that psychopaths used about twice as many words related to basic physiological needs and self-preservation, including eating, drinking and monetary resources than the nonpsychopaths, they write.
By comparison, the nonpsychopathic murderers talked more about spirituality and religion and family, reflecting what nonpsychopathic people would think about when they just committed a murder, Hancock said.
The researchers are interested in analyzing what people write on Facebook or in other social media, since our unconscious mind also holds sway over what we write. By analyzing stories written by students from Cornell and the University of British Columbia, and looking at how the text people generate using social media relates to scores on the Self-Report Psychopathy scale. Unlike the checklist, which is based on an extensive review of the case file and an interview, the self report is completed by the person in question.
So, our personality types even infiltrate our online discourse.
Isn’t this interesting; well at least my rather strange mind thinks so. I mean, it would surely be easy for a psychopath to feign online interest in spiritual matters wouldn’t it? And perhaps even thrive in such environment.
I found this concept fascinating and wonder what my psychiatrist would make of my online interactions.
In fact, I wonder what psychiatrists would make of the Christian blogosphere; full stop.
October 20th, 2011 at 1:44 am
Sorry I thought you said cycle path, wasn’t paying attention.
October 20th, 2011 at 10:12 am
According to Sam Harris, ALL Christians are psychopathic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUVXEmJRGns
October 20th, 2011 at 9:13 pm
My psychiatrist advised me to spend less time hanging around blogs! I blame you Stuart… You consistently create such interesting posts!
October 21st, 2011 at 8:06 am
I was thinking about you the other day when I wrote about surpassing 10,000 comments. There’s no doubt you have followed and commented the longest.
You were here right at the beginning; do you remember, when the blog was all black and a little sinister
October 21st, 2011 at 3:39 pm
I certainly do remember it Stuart. It was at a particularly dark period in my life and I was really drawn to the dark look and feel of your blog as it then was.
As I’ve mentioned before, participating in this dialogue has really helped me enormously. I sense that we’ve both changed quite a bit in the intervening period, mostly for the better!
October 21st, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Changed, gosh that’s an understatement.
Folks still often access my very old posts and I often cringe at some of the old rubbish I wrote.