WHERE DO PSYCHOPATHS TEND TO LIVE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I always liked to see regional differences, right what states
have the most depression or what states have the most
lung cancer. Today, we're going to be looking at a
study that was done at states that have a higher
likelihood of psychopaths and narcissists. This was a study done
by scientists from Copenhagen. Not sure why they did one
in the US, but they did. The researchers published their

(00:23):
findings found that an individual's surroundings and upbringing play a
significant role in shaping so called dark personality traits. Areas
plagued by poverty, corruption, and violence tend to foster these traits.
So some of the states that have the highest concentration
of dark personalities included Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Nevada, South Dakota,

(00:46):
and New York. Oddly enough, some of these cities, some
of these states have some of the more violent cities,
like Louisiana with New Orleans and New York of course
with New York City and other places. But Nevada, says
to cut in Texas, not really not as much, not
relative to other places like Baltimore or the state of

(01:06):
Maryland or Illinois. But conversely, the states with the lowest
rates where Utah, Vermont, and New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Alaska,
and they do tend to be safer cities overall. To
reach these conclusions, the researchers analyzed FBI homicide rates, data
from the Census Bureau and Justice Department corruption convictions in

(01:29):
order to make these comprehensive comparisons. The more adverse conditions
in a society, they found, the higher the level of
the dark factor of personality among its citizens. This applied
both globally and within the US. The study also discussed
strong evidence for the existence of a single disposition and
allowing all adversive traits. The dark factor of personality offers

(01:49):
a clear conceptualization of the disposition, defined as the general
tendency to maximize one's individual utility, disregarding, accepting, or relevantly
provoking the util for others, accompanied by both beliefs that
serve as justifications. So let me do this again. Basically,
it looks like selfishness, the general tendency to maximize one's

(02:10):
own individual utility while disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility
for others. This is a company by beliefs that serve
as justifications in societies where rules are broken without consequences,
or where the conditions for many citizens or bad individuals
perceive and learn that one should actually think of oneself. First,

(02:32):
the study goes on humans differ in their levels of
reverse of dark personality traits such as egoism or psychopathy.
So this is a dimensional trait, building upon theory suggesting
that social psychological factors co shape the development of personality traits. Now,
this is a lot of this as correlational studies, so
I want to make sure the study did find countries
like Indonesia and Mexico have higher dark factor levels than

(02:53):
Denmark and New Zealand, which enjoy better societal conditions, which
is interesting because Mexico would be considered a collectivistic country
or in Anesia. I'm assuming Denmark might be too, I
don't know about New Zealand. The researchers admit that the
study has some limitations, noticeably that the data does not
account for how long participants resided in certain countries or
if they were from there at all. Maybe they weren't

(03:13):
from there or states before their personality tendencies developed. A
criminal mastermind in New York could have moved from Ohio
just a few years ago. It was a lot of
limitations in the study, but it does make it interesting
to do psychopaths aggregate in one particular area. Are they
developed there or do they move there for opportunity. It's
an interesting thought.