The Psychopath Test
journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them. The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power. He spends time with a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud in Coxsackie, New York; a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been speculated about in the press; and a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane who insists he's sane and certainly not a psychopath. Ronson not only solves the mystery of the hoax but also discovers, disturbingly, that sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges"
Stats for nerds
15recommend
28mentions
27people
2011–2024years
54% recommend43% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I mean nothing personal by it but all I see when I see posts like yours (and many others in this thread), is that the average person understands nothing about psychopathy. What he did was premeditated. His brain is wired in such a way that killing his wife was always an option. No amount of neuroplasticity will override this baked-in reality of who this man is. Teaching psychopaths social skills will not provide them with the idealized "personal growth" you imagine. I highly recommend, "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson (of "The Mean That Stare at Goats" fame) as an amusing but on-point introduction.
- Jon Ronson has written several incredible books that all qualify as Gonzo Journalism. The only one I didn't like very much was the one about the adult film industry.
The Psychopath Test So You've Been Publicly Shamed Them: Adventures with Extremists
All great books and even better audiobooks that you'll like I think.
- 2022 was a year full of change for me and I am not looking for change but more of a complement to my life as it is currently.
In the process of reading:
Parable of a Sower’s Daughter by Octavia Butler
Read this year:
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- Does not surprise me, skilled practitioners of this dark art are sociopaths. If you have not, a great book to read " The Psychopath Test", where it talks about how a lot of CEOs mirror traits of psychopaths.
- That really is an atrocious article; they compared numbers which are loosely correlated at best:
>"The study of 261 senior professionals in the United States found that 21 per cent had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. The rate of psychopathy in the general population is about one in a hundred."
They should have applied the same standard to both groups, but instead used a very loose definition for the professionals, and a very stringent definition for the general population.
"The Psychopath Test" is a great book on this subject, and recommended reading on it; all these popular blog posts are just meaningless polemical drivel.[1]
- What books have you read in 2015 that you'd recommend to others, fiction and nonfiction both welcome.
I'll start with a fiction book of "A Fine Balance"- Rohinton Mistry and a nonfiction book of "The Psychopath Test"-Ron Jonson
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