Analyzing Tweets To Identify Psychopaths

nonprofiteer writes "Researchers presenting at Defcon next week have developed a psychopathy prediction model for Twitter. It analyzes linguistic tells to rate users' levels of narcissism, machiavellianism and other similarities to Patrick Bateman. 'The FBI could use this to flag potential wrongdoers, but I think it's much more compelling for psychologists to use to understand large communities of people,' says Chris Sumner of the Online Privacy Foundation. Some of the Twitter clues: Curse words. Angry responses to other people, including swearing and use of the word "hate." Using the word "we." Using periods. Using filler words such as 'blah' and 'I mean' and 'um.' So, um, yeah."

Comments

There's a rumor going around

[Dunbal]

I hear that if you measure their skulls you can also spot murderers. I will call this science phrenology!

Re:There's a rumor going around

[Charliemopps]

No, this system tries to predict the future by reading posts on twitter. Could a certain percentage of people who commit violent crime share the common trait of psychopathy? Certainly. Do all? No. In fact, a rather large percentage of the population are psychopathic, yet lead normal, non-violent lives. Far more people that are not psychopathic commit crimes than those with psychopathy.

The end result of this research is rather clear: Watch what you say on the internet, the FBI might flag you. And that's a far more dangerous threat than a few psychopaths walking around. If you look at the biggest mass murders in human history, every single one of them was a government official. Think about that for a while.

Re:There's a rumor going around

[ivoras]

Of course, the real insight is Reverse Phrenology! Kicking people in the head to make them better people!

Re:There's a rumor going around

[fatphil]

> Do all? No.

That's actually not the failure that makes this useless. The failure is that the dangerous psychos are such a small minority of the population that even if you throw away 99% (and I'm being generous) of the relatively normals, you're still left with a huge pool of normals with just a few pschos in it. You've not made the problem of actually finding the psychos significantly easier. Now 99.99% of the people who seem suspicious are dangerous rather than 99.9999%.

This is exactly the same flaw as the face scanner tech they were proposing at airports which Bruce Schneier et al. ripped to pieces when it was first proposed.

Re:There's a rumor going around

[AngryDeuce]

But how many people have an online persona that is vastly different than they're real life one? I have friends that act like they're Che Guevara on their social media postings that, in real life, will bitch and cry and complain for an hour if the person at Starbucks takes too long to prepare their non-fat mochaccinolatte, and don't even get me started on all the people that bitch and complain about "freeloaders" and "people living on the government teat" that I know for a fact are collecting government services themselves or have benefited from them in the past....that's another particularly LOL-worthy demographic these days. And then, of course, there's the "I'm ME and I don't care if anyone likes my opinions or not!" posts I used to see all the time, written by people that are, without a hint of irony, obviously searching for positive reinforcement from their social group.

The number of people I know that are actually 'themselves' on the internet, and not some idealized version of themselves that they invented to be popular, is quite slim. I don't bother with social media anymore because I got tired of dealing with cartoon characters and hypocrites. If people actually had to be themselves on the internet, warts and all, I bet the number of social media junkies out there would plummet overnight...

For those reasons, I fail to see the value in this...

Re:There's a rumor going around

[Maxo-Texas]

I've been using a lot of voice recognition to IM lately.

SO I called someone and got voice mail.. and I said...

"Okay, I got your call and I'll see you later today PERIOD".

I was face slapping as soon as i hung up.

Oh and for the benefit of NSA and twitter type scanners...

I don't know what this shit is. Fuck that. I HATE it when they scan my posts. Period.
I mean blah blah blah, yada, yada. I mean, I don't give a flying fuck, um, what they think.

Thanks--- I was, ah, feeling psychopathic, and um, didn't want to put that in a separate post.

Re:There's a rumor going around

[bill_mcgonigle]

Could a certain percentage of people who commit violent crime share the common trait of psychopathy? Certainly. Do all?

Right. There are psychopaths who are perfectly fine and functional members of society. People often regard them as 'a bit off', but there is more to the psychology of a dangerous psychopath than just being a psychopath.

Check out this BBC Documentary about the neuropsychology of it. The documentary turns out more interesting than would be initially expected (not going to give it away).

That said, when designer babies are feasible, I doubt anybody is going to consciously select for psychopathy. Well, outside of the dystopian scifi realms anyway.

Re:There's a rumor going around

[s.petry]

Most psychopaths are not dangerous, the desire for a so called pseudo-science of trying to cure something obviously not broken is odd. Just like most people have some type of phobia, have narcissistic tendencies, some type of rational paranoia, etc... We don't run around trying to make magic bullets trying to fix it all for several reasons.

First, most of those traits are healthy and responses to the environment. Second, most people do not experience those tendencies for extended durations of time. If the environment is messed up, so are the people.. it's called a coping mechanism. Trying to fix the "problem" without really fixing the problem is something us humans have an extremely poor habit of doing, and the results are often much worse than working on the root cause (environment, education, social influences, etc...)

Instead of trying to fix symptoms, we should be trying to fix the problems...

Really?

[WrongSizeGlass]

The ability to predict psychopaths in under 140 characters? What have all these mental health professionals been doing? All these face-to-face interviews, "sessions" and observations. Maybe if they submitted their reports in only 140 characters they would have figured all this out a long time ago. /sarcasm

Re:Really?

[reub2000]

Probably is bullshit. The twitter responses where compared to a survey. In other words they calibrated their instrument by simply asking people if they're a psychopath. Lets see, one of the most well known trait of psychopaths is their tendency to lie.

Re:Really?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Lets see, one of the most well known trait of psychopaths is their tendency to lie.

Is that true ... or are you just a psychopath?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The ability to predict psychopaths in under 140 characters?"

***Psychopath test***
You think your crap is worth following? Check!
You follow the crap of strangers you have never seen? Check!

If one or more of the above are checked, congratulations, you're a Psychopath.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see, one of the most well known trait of psychopaths is their tendency to lie.

And that's why many of them become politicans.

Don't dare to mod this as funny.

Analyzing myself

[KiloByte]

> Curse words.
Hardly any, but mostly due to many years on a MUD with strict rules. Abusing "damn" and so on, though.

> Angry responses to other people
Hell yeah.

> including swearing and use of the word "hate."
Got a bigger vocabulary, but yeah.

> Using the word "we."
Check, to a big extent.

> Using periods.
You mean, so those with no punctuation are not morons but normal people? Blah. Check.

> Using filler words such as 'blah'
See above.

> and 'I mean'
Check.

>and 'um.'
"hrm", "hmm" and "ghrmblah" (see also two paragraphs above)

So, you mean, is there any hope for me?

Re:Analyzing myself

[WrongSizeGlass]

So, you mean, is there any hope for me?

Sure there is. First, you'll seek twitter therapy and twitter assimilation resistance resistance. If that succeeds your tweets will be indistinguishable from 99% of the population (and most of your followers will finally be able to understand them).

If your TT&TARR fails you'll have to go to twitter court (most trials are very short) or simply go to twitter confessions and throw yourself on the mercy of 12 randomly selected twitter addicts. Once you're sentenced to twitter prison (where all you say and read are tweets) you'll be able to start paying your debt to the twitterverse. When the time comes for your parole review they'll analyze your tweets during your sentence to determine if you're ready for early tweetlease or if you need to try harder.

So yes, there is hope for you ... though not much hope for society at large if we're making DSM-V quality diagnoses based on twitter (unless we're determining that those who use twitter really have too much time on their hands).

Re:Using Periods?

[cheekyjohnson]

What are you, some sort of psychopath? Flag him!

Re:Good-Bye Civil Rights

[craigminah]

Try doing this with skin color, religion, race, sexual preference, etc. and you'll quickly find an angry torch-wielding mod at your front door. Switching things up to look at parameters perceived to be under the control of the person and it's ok. Kind of ironic people don't see this as an even bigger potential threat to civil rights than anything else. Like anything, this will start of with good intentions and be limited in scope (e.g. Twitter) but soon, if funded, it will be used for evil and be linked to Google's database to refill prisons around the USA. Yay.

Re:Narcissism?

[jaymemaurice]

My awesome facebook profile is narcissism free. I only use facebook to show others me doing the awesome things I have done so they can comment in ways that make me feel good... but the band Carcass is good, just not interesting as me.

I Fucking Hate...

[Anonymous Coward]

I fucking hate stupidity like this being passed off as "sciency". I mean, next up they'll claim to use palm scanners to determine my future actions. Blah! We need to vote these types of articles down. It's worthless shit!

I guess the only thing between me and a psychopath is that I don't use The Twitter.

Idiots!

So, basically, speaking English.

[Arancaytar]

Some of the Twitter clues: Curse words. Angry responses to other people, including swearing and use of the word "hate." Using the word "we." Using periods. Using filler words such as 'blah' and 'I mean' and 'um.

Speaking English either formally or informally and either without emotion or with emotion. I have also heard that almost all of them breathed regularly and wore clothing. Those are relevant clues that might help recognize the next one early.

On the other hand, that they all owned assault weapons is purely a coincidence.

Re:Using Periods?

[__aaltlg1547]

i think the lack Capitalization and lack of Proper punctuation may be more Useful in Finding people suffering from Various Mental Disorders on the other hand it may merely Indicate a shortcoming In the posters education isn,t it obvious that when some one fails to Use punctuation and Capitalization correctly that they are a Tragedy in Waiting clearly the fbi is Onto Something or at least they Think They Are it cant be simply a case of people Being too lazy to punctuate their sentences or find the fucking shift key many messages on twitter come from mobile devices where it can be pretty damned inconvenient to apply capitals and punctuation marks as compared to a proper keyboard

Re:Using Periods?

[CanHasDIY]

i think the lack Capitalization and lack of Proper punctuation may be more Useful in Finding people suffering from Various Mental Disorders on the other hand it may merely Indicate a shortcoming In the posters education isn,t it obvious that when some one fails to Use punctuation and Capitalization correctly that they are a Tragedy in Waiting clearly the fbi is Onto Something or at least they Think They Are it cant be simply a case of people Being too lazy to punctuate their sentences or find the fucking shift key many messages on twitter come from mobile devices where it can be pretty damned inconvenient to apply capitals and punctuation marks as compared to a proper keyboard

What you did: it's there, and I see it.