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Could Testing Block Psychopaths From Senior Management?
Freshly Exhumed writes "Dr. Clive Boddy believes that increasingly fluid corporate career paths have helped psychopaths conceal their disruptive workplace behavior and ascend to previously unattainable levels of authority. Boddy points out psychopaths are primarily attracted to money, status and power, currently found in unparalleled abundance in the global banking sector. As if to prove the point, many of the world's money traders self identify as the "masters of the universe." Solution? Screening with psychological tests. Who would pay for it? The insurance industry." The tech world has plenty of company heads who've been called psychopaths, too — but would you want to actually change that?
First Motherfuckers!
Would be great to see such a test for forum or internet users. Imagine how useful youtube comments would be if the psychopaths couldn't register.
Picked them up from the printer's yesterday. That's Bone. Lettering is something called Cillian rail.
Just another way to bash someone's success
Just note the current administration. When we are losing our countrymen to a bunch of crazy radicals, they go off campaigning in Las Vegas. Then when people ask them about it, they duck and cover and say they are conducting their own investigation. So much for "the most transparent administration in history...."
Finally, First... After all these years of trying, I've managed to get it.
So we don't want people to take chances, I guess we should throw away half the inventions we have today.
it should probably pick less karma-whore targets for it. First of all, investment banks and insurance companies are indistinguishable. They are essentially in the same business. But to answer the actual question, why wouldn't you want a banker to be attracted to money? Not everyone should be socially conscious as a job requirement. Only if it is in fact part of the job. I mean I wouldn't want a nurse or doctor who were sociopaths. But a banker? Why not? If it makes them better bankers, then more power to them.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
No... I think they'd promote them. Just like now.
Damn straight we want to change it. If companies are getting so big that they become "too big to fail" and governments would rather throw money at them then watch them collapse, then some other mechanism must be found to mitigate the destructive behaviour of higher-ups. I wouldn't care, if not for the fact that their screw ups can wreak massive amounts of havoc against innocent people.
Of course, this all depends on if the tests are actually reliable.
is a pseudoscience!
There have been studies posted about on Slashdot that state a ridiculously high percentage of all CEOs have significant mental problems. I think it was close to 50%. They're definitely more driven than clock punchers with no real motivation. They better watch their ass for business owners like me though. I operate lean and mean in a customer centric way and are super motivated to take out my competition by simply doing better instead of just running the company with my balls as a status symbol and building a $50,000 fountain out front with my face on it, lol.
I've worked with enough people who are nuts to think that if we're going to test the leaders, we should test everyone and put the psychopaths out of the workplace entirely.
One bad person on a team can not only make life miserable, but ruin the work output of the team, drive away anyone competent and damage everyone else's careers when they're associated with the failed team's product.
Futurist Traditionalism
Yes, it's a bad one. But we don't condemn somebody because he has no legs, or something...
Yes, that person won't be able to do a management job properly. But such a person needs to be cured too! If it's genetic, then with a gene therapy, if it's the environment, then fix that, if it's a mental trauma, a good primal / behavior combination therapy (with a very intense primal part) can absolutely fix that too. (If the therapist has the balls to go that intense.)
In other words: Being a psychopath doesn't make you a "second class citizen". It's a illness, just like any other.
It can make you unsuitable for jobs, just like any other. You can fix that, just like with any other.
(No, if you think and spread that outdated bullshit about "cannot be cured" or "needs jail and/or meds" or think those primitive idiots that call themselves "therapists" but actually never studied it, would be what psychotherapy is... then go fuck yourself.)
If they can do the job, you would be illegally discriminating against someone with a mental illness, and probably looking at a big fat lawsuit.
Hold them to the same standard as everyone else.
Admittedly, in investment banking the standard is:
- Do you make money for the firm?
- Did you get caught breaking the law?
would take advice from the voices in his head then the money I spent building that transmitter was worth it.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
... if it works of course.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
many of the world's money traders self identify as the "masters of the universe." Solution?
I would guess that 90% of these people became psychopaths because of cocaine abuse. A simple urine test would be much cheaper, and quite efficient...
But good luck getting the head honcho to agree to put himself on the chopping block.
Many social solutions require cooperation from the same people they seek to oust.
I'm a type 1 diabetic, which prohibits me from flying aircraft. Same thing for someone who is color blind. Is it because we're bad people? No, but it's been judged unsafe to others that we do these things. Psychopaths running corporations could also be deemed unsafe to others.
The problem is in the system, not in the individuals, however the system gives incentives for psychopathic behavior
...they go off campaigning in Las Vegas. Then when people ask them about it, they duck and cover and say they are conducting their own investigation. So much for "the most transparent administration in history...."
Well you saw through them didn't you?
Screen politicians with psychological tests
Well, depends if you are talking about criminal activity. Yes, traders can earn their money by front trading and other dirty tricks, but generally, they are very well monitored and are NOT allowed to invest any personal money. Instead, they are given very good bonuses dependent on... guess what... how much money they have earned for their clients !
Reward and benefit of the clients is very closely coupled here - if you make profit, you get paid more, your clients gain more. There is no conflict of interests here.
Now, you have to differentiate between clients and clients. Or actually, 'our guys' and 'losers'. If you are stockholder of my company, you are 'our guy'. If you give you money for us to invest, you are also our guy. If you are person coming from the street looking to buy structured product, you are loser. Yes, officially you are our 'client', but thats just the name - you are the victim which will give the money to real clients.
I suppose that a lot of confusion comes from that. Think about it as a auction house. People putting antiques in auction house are clients. Auction house tries to sell antiques for maximum money, without worrying if they are worth that much, as long as anybody is willing to buy. People buying antiques are not clients - they are targets.
And there is a big difference between investment banking and insurance business - in insurance, EVERYBODY is a target to cheat at any cost.
Isn't it generally illegal, under the ADA, to discriminate on the basis of mental illness, unless it can be shown said illness directly hinders job performance? It seems to me that being a psychopath not only doesn't hinder job performance if you're a banker, it might make you better at it, in the same way being somewhat Asperger's tends to make you better at jobs in the technical field?
Indeed it is terrifying - it's clear that their spelling is already invading Canada. We already seem to have lost our centre, we'll soon be colourless and before you know it Thanksgiving will be in November.
As if psychopaths won't be able to ace those kind of tests. By definition they are very smart and adaptable. You don't need to "feel" right, you just need to know how one is supposed to answer
This probably sounds all fine and dandy to the vast majority of the population, because they could never imagine in a million years that they'd ever be branded a psychopath.
But if such psychological screening becomes widespread and people do start being branded psychopaths, you can bet they're going to scream bloody murder!
Such widespread psychological screening is going to bring all the problems of IQ tests, DNA tests, and drug testing along with it.
There are going to be false positives, privacy issues, reputations ruined, etc. Right now there are some places that publish lists of sexual offenders and pedophiles in their neighborhood. There will probably be pressure to publish lists of people labeled psychopaths as well.
It might sound fine to you now, until you happen to be labeled a psychopath due to some psychological test you took. And then what recourse do you have? Could these tests be wrong? How much trust do you have in the people who design and administer them?
This could effectively be a scarlet letter that brands you for life, and results in ostracism from the society. Perhaps it will be well deserved, perhaps not. Who's to say?
I, for one, am not sure whether to welcome our new psychological overlords.
One of the main features of psychopathy is detached emotions.
If you go around killing folks without remorse, then you're pretty messed up in the head and a psycho as well. The movies like to use this form of being a psycho since he's so rare and exciting. This psycho is a jerk and needs councelling based on logical arguments; perhaps by studying Game Theory and statistics ("what are the odds that they meant to hurt me"). Forms of councelling where someone simply listens probably won't work since the psycho won't care that you care.
If you've managed to grow up well enough to control other symptoms of psychopathy, then detached emotions just becomes a useful tool to you. Perhaps you're better able to analyze a situation without clouded judgement. Perhaps you're better able to act out a role in a movie since you've likely been studying emotions and the roles people play since you were young. This is the type of psycho that who saves lives by the numbers, who cleans a mess even if it's not theirs, and who understands right from wrong just as well as anyone else. I meet these folks every day and see nothing wrong with that.
Our culture currently latches on to the psychopath tag as the root of all evil, but it would be nice if we got over it and stopped trying to turn them into the Bogeyman. Find something else to force fear into the news because this fad is getting old.
Nuff said.
Fuck. YES!
Have you ever worked for a psychopath? I believe have. His name was Jackson. I know it's noble to think that you would catch psychopaths this way, but I know for a fact that Jackson's smart enough to pass most any psychopath test. And at best, he's only a B grade psychopath, in my opinion.
What is the definition of insanity?
Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
What's the definition of sanity?
Doing the same thing over and over again and getting different results.
SOA. It's sanity's organizational architecture....
Psychopaths are people too..
They test for psychopaths when selecting managers. How else would we get the psychopath managers we have now?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The Community Reinvestment Act and other regulations pressured lenders to make mortgage loans available even to high risk lenders. The taxpayers would guarantee the loans. Next, opportunistic bankers began to push loans on people who were no creditworthy, and people who wanted to profit off of real estate appreciation used "creative financing" (interest only loans, variable interest loans with balloon payments, etc.) to buy much larger homes than they could afford, betting on continuing rise in values. This over-leveraging at both ends of the market - the bottom end and the top end, fed the crisis.
Next, investment bankers bundled together bunches of these junk loans, slapped a triple A rating on them, divided them into tranches, and sold them to investors who wanted to make a killing on mortgage-backed securities.
The Financial Crisis was a perfect storm: misguided good intentions and unintended consequences got the ball rolling, then greedy mortgage bankers, home buyers, and investment bankers, pretty much greed and malfeasance at every level, not just restricted to a single economic stratum, all set the Financial Crisis in motion. It became the whirlwind we are all reaping today.
Even this grossly over-simplified summary is probably too long-winded for today's attention spans. Sorry, but this sort of stuff can't be expressed in 140 characters or less.
Only works for Americans
rewriting history since 2109
Would this even be legal? Psychopathy is a recognized disease/disability if you test for it and use it to restrict caree path would that not be against the ADA?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Let me guess ... the submitter works in tech, not in banking?
Why is it OK for tech companies to be run by psychopaths, but not banking?
In my view, psychopathy is not a mental illness, illness of any kind or abnormality. It's an inborn trait.
The society has plenty of room for psychopaths, and they should be able to find fulfilling lives. However, lacking consciences, they are potentially dangerous to other people because the social fabric is based on trust, and you can't trust a psychopath. Tests that label people psychopaths are obviously fraught with danger, but in princple being able to identify psychopaths might make the society a better place for everybody.
For example, you might want to make sure your future spouse is not a psychopath. On the other hand, psychopaths might be exempted from all contractual obligations; if you make a deal with a psychopath, you have only yourself to blame.
Psychopathy is also not a binary trait. Not all of us lose sleep over a civil war in Mali. Doctors lose their sanity if they are overly empathetic. There should probably be a empathy/psychopathy scale from 0 to 100, where women tend to score higher on empathy and men higher on psychopathy (psychopathy is the biological norm; empathy grew out of the maternal instinct).
"Testing" is not for senior management. Like "austerity" and "cost-cutting" and "right-to-work", such things are meant for the less important, less productive members of our society (aka "the 47%" as described by a member of the senior management set not long ago). We can't expect the job creators to submit to something as demeaning as testing. It's just not done, and we run the risk of them deciding to deprive those of us who are the takers, the mooches, the leeches of their singular talents by "going Galt".
Plus if they started screening CEOs for psychopathy who would we get to run the engine of our wonderful and beneficent economic system. which is based entirely on merit and hard work?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The expected behaviour for any corporation is to maximise profits at the expense of nearly anything else. Certainly corporations are not expected to show empathy or compassion (except as PR exercises in the service of greater profit). In a person such complete narcissism and lack of empathy would be indicative of tendendcies towards sociopathic personality disorder.
Is it any wonder then, that psychopaths are drawn to, and probably well suited to, senior positions in corporations, where their natural tendencies towards such behavior are rewarded rather than punished.
It's somehow indicative of our complete lack of self-awareness as a society that we create these psychopathic institutions, and are then suprised and appalled when psycopaths end up running them. The problem isn't individual psycopaths as such, it goes far deeper than that, and testing managers for psychopathic tendencies will change nothing.
Such tests would be used to *ensure* that psychopaths are chosen for senior management, so that no one unsuitable (i.e. non-psycho) slipped through by accident. As other posters have noted, just take a lot at senior management of large corps if you don't think this is true.
Although they are highly capable leaders, Masterminds are not at all eager to take command, preferring to stay in the background until others demonstrate their inability to lead. Once they take charge, however, they are thoroughgoing pragmatists. Masterminds are certain that efficiency is indispensable in a well-run organization, and if they encounter inefficiency -- any waste of human and material resources -- they are quick to realign operations and reassign personnel. Masterminds do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don't, aren't, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency.
By definition, INTJs do not want power. They want results and efficiency. If they take power, they try to get out from under it as soon as they can. But do you really want to replace the psychopaths with masterminds? The only group whose personality type is usually preceded by the adjective "evil?" Doesn't sound like a good plan to me.
There is a new science started by a Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Lobaczewski called Ponerology - it deals with the origin of evil, implying all imploding societies throughout the history became pathocracies, ruled by essential psychopats. All societies oscillate between "happy times", when the people become ignorant/oblivious to psychopats removing all moral people from government, silently paving the way to "unhappy times", when the pathological nature of leaders is revealed. One could wonder if we are now at the tipping point before the power demonstrates its pathology fully in the open. The ingredients are there, people don't care or find a value on being a psychopath, removing any traces of empathy from decision making. If you are interested, read about it more in the book that was blocked both by Zbygniew Brzezinski as well as by someone in Vatican.
I am all for eliminating psychopaths from a workplace. I had two asocial bosses, both driving some of their people to mental problems or hospitals, and were promoted soon after those facts were made known to HR.
Because the people giving and scoring the tests are in Corporate HR and they are hands down the worst of the bunch.
They'll then cry discrimination and sue, gaining money and power through the courts.
It might have prevented our president from getting re-elected.
no. only works for people who have read american psycho.
i imagine our literary culture output still extends beyond our borders, yes?
Maybe we should have a test to keep azns off the road?
Or one to keep blacks from getting good jobs?
How about we lock up all the fat people so they don't clog up the lines at the supermarket?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
If there is a specific behavior that is dangerous to others, or the economy or whatever, just punish that behavior.
This just looks to me like the start of some kind witch hunt.
Not all psychopaths end up serial killers, and they should have the same rights as everyone else.
(multiple choice) before starting as a permanent member of UBS Warburg in London as a software engineer around 1996 IIRC. what's changed?
one question struck me as odd - 'do you like tall women?'
Non-psychopaths should not be placed in positions that require them to make important decisions because they are easily influenced by their emotions.
Actually - its definately worth reading this book on the subject http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Psychopaths-Killers-Success/dp/0374291357
but even though he notes there are strengths to Psychopaths... There is a huge hidden toll. I have worked for several bosses over the years with personality disorders ( I have a partner that allows me state this based on a professional's judgement ) and although they may get things done - Ive seen them destroy entire organisations, seen them drive other companies out of business, and seen many of my staff on medication and years later still bear the scars of working for them. One organisation I know of opened another office in a physically seperate building to keep people away from that boss - and in the end it was 3/4 of the company handing in their resignation that got HR to finally act. Part of the danger is they know how to push buttons and they do it in a way that is hard to make it clear to a non professional just how effective what they are doing is at damaging people. And so Companies - or rather people within them - who find it hard to believe that other people ARE really evil - dismiss stuff - time and time again - and it becomes a meme - oh its JUST soandso - thats they way they are - and they get away with doing enormous damage - because people cant concieve of another person actually deliberately setting out to deceive and maim etc etc,,,,
Great, does that mean we can get psychopaths out of government? Like the police, prison guards, politicians, middle management, union leadership and teaching?
Oh, wait, apparently this definition only applies to private sector executives and entrepreneurs. Asylums have traditionally been a way to silence political opponents by discrediting them, are people so stupid as to believe that this "psychopathy" epidemic is not just more of the same?
In middle management
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I'd be happy if we can block them from moderating /. Is there a test for that? :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I daresay it could, but probably not. At anyrate I'm more frightened by sharks.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
By "Masters of the Universe", do they mean that they're cheap, plastic people only taken seriously by 8-year-old boys, 30 years out of date and the subject of cheesy nostalgia nowadays?
I think I saw one of those guys on YouTube covering that Four Non-Blondes song...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine.
Third article in as many days. Gattaca! Gattaca! Gattaca!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
under such circumstances is to point out that a) most successful CEOs of large companies exhibit behavior often associated with psychotic conditions, so it rather obviously isn't interfering with the job, and b) it's a recognized medical condition, and the company itself has acted on the assumption that the diagnosis is correct.
He would point all this out to his attorney, who would then file a massive Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit, and he'd be given the CEO's job to make it go away.
if you had some, it might.
rewriting history since 2109
I think you mean Silian
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Steve Jobs is that you? Oh wait, I recall now you prefer AppleMyriad, a special version of Adobe's Myriad Pro.
See "The Psychopath Test," by Jon Ronson.
Good luck "detecting" these rats.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
You single out the "super conservatives" as the radicals?
There are so many nutjobs to choose from. I guess we can tell where you come from.
No mainstream politician has any interest in reducing the national debt. Reagan was the first president to raise the national debt after WW II, close to tripled it. Clinton actually started it down the road to lessening it, then Bush II also came close to tripling it, although Obama's own contribution could also be said to nearly triple it, but Bush II and Obama are so intertwined in the debt department that it's hard to tell how to divvy that up.
Of course neither party is even willing to admit that we are spending too much. The Republican plan, if you can call it that, was to balance the budget in 2061 or so; Obama hasn't even submitted a budget for three years, and his talking points grudgingly accept the possibility of maybe trimming growth by $1T over ten years, when that isn't even the full deficit from a single year's budget. Cheney must have been speaking for both parties when he said deficits don't matter.
Then the left refuses to accept the science of GMOs and refuses to admit there's any uncertainty in the degree of global warming, let alone how much man causes, while the right plugs their ears when anyone mentions evolution or any human contribution to global warming. Both have tons of nuts (Obama and Rubio being the latest) who won't even cop to the simple scientific fact that the earth is 4.5B years old.
Republican platform was to actually increase military spending, while Democrats merely howled that any decrease would be a disaster. We could cut the military budget in half and still be spending as much as 10 years ago in inflation adjusted dollars.
Civil rights? Oh yeah, they've heard of them. Both parties are racing to be the most Orwellian government in our history. Obama thinks it's just great that he can pick people to kill with drones, without any judicial inquiry, even if the targets are American citizens in countries where we are not at war. Yet they had so little foresight that eben wile being scared of Romney winning, they never considered how he would have handled the secret kill authority.
And you pick "super conservatives" out of all that as the radicals? It's the moderates in charge who are doing what was unthinkable just a few years ago.
Infuriate left and right
Well, you recognized it.
I think I'd call them sociopaths (or a combination of the two).
There is a movie version. It stars Batman... err Bruce Wayne.
I worked with a genuine psychopath; no hyperbole; a true psychopath. This guy could charm the pants off anyone. If you met him you loved him; that simple. But after around 6 months you wanted him dead. After a while I learned some key skills to working with him. One was to nail everything down in an email and I mean everything. If you didn't have everything nailed down he would change the past. If you said you could have something done by the 30th and didn't put it in an email then around the 20th he would announce at a meeting that you were going to be late with your promise to have it done by the 25th like he told the client and put in the contract, a contract he would swear on a stack of bibles that you had looked over. The key here was that you probably did look over a contract that said the 30th and he had an email from you saying that it looked fine. So as I said, everything must go in an email so the trick was if he handed you some paper you scanned it and attached it to the email replying that you had read the contract.
Most people were unwilling to go to such lengths and thus would be screwed over and over until they quit. The key to understanding this guy was that he simply had zero empathy. Not little but zero. So if he hurt you for some tiny gain of his own so be it. But this is different from someone who is say mean as in a bully, for them being mean is the goal. For my psychopathic co-worker you had to understand that he had his own desires and that was it. He didn't weigh pro and cons in any normal fashion. If you quit then you could be replaced with a fool who might be easier to screw.
I long ago left working with him but in the years since I have encountered really nice person after person who clench their fists and say horrible things about this guy. They all say the exact same basic thing; wow charisma coming out his ass until he sets you on fire to warm his hands.
On a superficial basis a company might justify that having someone like this around is useful for the moment that you need to charm some upset client. This might work in theory but what you forget is that the moment it is advantageous for this type of person to screw you they will screw you. Your company might say, "they wouldn't do something so stupid as this industry is too small" but keep in mind that there are two incomprehensible factors at play. This is a person who does not give the tiniest of craps what anyone really thinks as long as they can't actually do anything. The other factor is that they will be able to charm themselves out of almost any situation. So if you say that they will never work in this industry again you are wrong. You will make a solid case to other people you know really well who also respect you and your opinion but the psychopath will meet them and turn their opinion 180 degrees and land on their feet.
This might seem a bit long winded but after dealing with a true psychopath it is hard to believably explain the functioning of someone who simply is incapable of sympathy and has 100% confidence that normal consequences don't apply to them. Take any situation where a normal person might say ooh this might blow up in my face, or I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy and remember that a psychopath will do it and would do it to their mother if there was even a tiny chance of them somehow benefiting.
So when I see the whole banking crisis and people are suggesting that these guys inadvertently destroyed trillions of dollars of the wealth in the US along with their own companies and I just remember my psychopath and think that if he was getting low on gas and could push a button that refilled his tank but destroyed a company all he would think is "cool Free gas" while the rest of us would frown about what kind of dick would even create such a button.
And mostly this part. Moody's didn't know what they were rating. Literally had no information about the component parts of the derivative. Are 20% of these loans bad? 80%? Don't know, but someone will buy them if they're rated right, so we'd better rate them just to stay relevant.
It really had nothing to do with homeowners and everything to do with Wall Street. Banks don't just give out cash they're never going to get back, just for the hell of it. It's not like all the homeowners woke up one day and decided to lie about their credit ratings, or that the bank managers' union(??) collectively decided to try for higher sales targets. This was a top-down crisis, a crime of ineptitude and fraud. Wall Street decided it could turn shit into gold, and then did this as much as possible until the first wave of defaults broke.
The triple-A rating was all Wall Street needed in order to not do any research into what they were buying. The rating agencies didn't create the crisis, but they certainly enabled it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
most business decisions are made by the boss telling you in a strict and stern manner that here's the goal, here is what needs to be done, those are the people you need to work with, just get it done and don't bother me with complaints about being underfunded, undermanned, or poor working conditions. so the supervisor would then think of creative way to use their position in leveraging the ability to promote/demote someone, put someone they like in a good position, someone they don't like with all the work, gauge someone's need for the job as the only way to make it happen. which is what happened with walmart from top down it is about cutting costs and it trickled down to the supervisor level of suppressing unions and the lawsuits of unpaid work and bad working conditions.
No.
The fact that they know they are being tested for psychopathic traits, and that they are a psychopath, is a catch-22. They can fake the test to appear as if they are not.
If they can't fake the test and pass it with flying colors, then they are not a true psychopath.
You can only catch the ones that have sympathy and empathy. That in and of itself negates psychopathic tendencies.
Problem with the idea of testing management for psychopathy is that they'll just deliberately HIRE the psychopaths they find as "more competitive". I recall hearing rumour that some financial companies have already started doing this, however that's pure anecdote. XD
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
many people will go ahead and assume that the people in authority have empathy.
Speaking about democracy, leaders job's is not to make empathetic decisions, but to seek the general interest. Many factor may trouble their judgement: their empathy, psycopathy, moral and religious opinions, personal experience... This is why nobody should be in charge alone, and this is why separation of powers is important.
I can't imagine it would be that difficult to convince the psychopaths in management to institute mandatory testing that would find and remove psychopaths from management positions...
They help clear the mines.
We masters of all we survey sit back and...survey.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Because they don't have to: when such people wreck companies, often the government steps in and bails everybody out. In addition, stock holders have an incentive to select ruthless executives because their risk and liability are limited no matter how much misconduct management is guilty of. And the ability to buy and sell shares at the drop of a hat means that corporations have a incentive to go for short term success.
We don't need rules for screening for psychopaths, we just need to change the incentive structure. Corporations and their management simply are doing what we incentivize them to do.
Interesting post in an otherwise duff discussion thread full of awful stereotyping. Yes, I believe in the brain's ability to rewire itself. Born without empathy? Some of them will discover that this is why their life sucks so badly, and train themselves empathy. And I mean genuine empathy, not learning how to fake it. It's probably not the easiest thing to do, going by testimonies of people forced to rewire part of their brain after an accident, but a lot can be done with perseverance. As a much more extreme case study, I give you the well-published story of Mary Bell: at very young age, a heinous archetypical psychopath - just reading about the things she did makes your hair stand up. Now, reportedly, a 55 years old grandmother who has an unremarkable life and carpingly raised a daughter who is now ~28 years old and has a child of her own that should be ~4 years old by now.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/bell/index_1.html (very long read but it's really worth it)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110123/Child-killer-Mary-Bell-grandmother-51-But-I-left-grief-says-victims-mother.html
Granted, not all of them do change and those that don't should probably be kept away from positions of power. All I'm saying is that having a childhood diagnosis of Autism, Asperger's or Psychopathy does not necessarily doom these people to harm others and live at odds with society. This is also why I am against the dead sentence: the person you'd be executing today is not necessarily the same person you'd be releasing 12 years from now.
The selection criteria and signaling already are a good clue as to who the psychopaths are. Perhaps they would just use this to tweak the results?
The inmates are running the asylum.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Psycopaths need to work just as others do. But the very nature of their condition suggests that they should never be in charge of other employees or work in situations where their behavior can not be closely moderated. For example a sales person doing outside sales is not a place for a psychopathic employee nor is management.
Don't touch the watch! your complement was enough.
but would you want to actually change that?
Uh... yes? I miss something, what is there to lose there?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
This is one of the most important ideas we'll see in our lifetimes, and one of the best.
Consider the effect on your career if the psychopath in the next cubicle is no longer making your life a living hell. Consider the amount of law enforcement resources society will save if the psychopaths are prevented from ascending the corporate hierarchy. Consider the personal destruction attributable to this 1-3% of the population and that it could be largely mitigated using this technology.
This kind of ability along with the ability to tell with 100% certainty when someone is lying by looking at their involuntary brain activity are a terrific force for making society a more humane place.
I just know /.'ers will bring up some idea like "psychopaths may be bad people but they make a great CEX. " Wrong. They make bad decisions at every level and what's more can't be trusted with anything especially the well being of a corporation. The CIA won't have them and screens heavily for them and this is based on their past experience. You can't trust them- full stop.
You may think that you're willing to put up with the careers and lives they ruin on their way to the top-because of the benefit the a psychopaths's "dynamic personality" and "leadership skills" bring to the table, but you'd be wrong. The collective LOSS of highly qualified candidates who would otherwise be contributing to the corporation FAR exceeds anything the psychopath is going to bring. Yes, that includes people like Steve Jobs. The truth about Jobs is he shameless stole everyone's ideas around him and claimed them as his own, often in within a minute of having heard the idea and in a room full of people who were sitting there watching him do it. Their own career trajectory constrained them from mentioning the obvious- "uh Steve, that's what Helen just said....".
It's to the point where I just take it as true until proven otherwise that people who aggressively agitate for the myth of the "sole genius inventor" and especially those who prop that myth up against the efforts of a dynamic collective of experts are themselves somewhat psychopathic and are basically looking to legitimize the fantasy narrative they would see applied to themselves. This is especially true of the whole Ayn Rand type myth of the "superman" or "master of the universe " or "job creator" or whatever name is being bandied around these days. Ayn Rand was as good an example of the psychopathic - sociopathic personality type as you're likely to find and her philosophy reads like the textbook definition of anti-social personality disorder.
I don't believe in Freudian psychoanalysis, even though it might sometimes provide interesting insights, and neither do I believe in the modern notions that people throw around like "psychopath", "bipolar", "schizophrenic" or even "depressed". Of course all these notions capture some cluster of correlated symptoms, but that is all that they do. The moment we start believing that they are more than that, e.g. that people can literally be classified as being a psychopath or not, we have strayed far beyond the realm of science, and might as well believe in "qi" or magic spirits.
At the end of the day, some people are less empathetic than others, some surprisingly so, but that's all it is. And maybe its also context dependent, so that one person might become a "psychopath" in certain circumstances, even though they normally weren't.
As for the global financial crisis, if you believe this had anything to do with "greed" or "sociopathy" then you need to pick up a textbook on economics now. There were a lot of mistakes made, and even some immoral decisions, but mostly it was just a giant bubble, everyone thinking the future was brighter than it really was, and when it burst the financial system turned out to be more brittle than people had imagined.
A psychopath who couldn't get around a simple test isn't much of a psychopath.
At the intersection of computation and biology.
What a wonderful movie. The part about returning videos might be a little difficult to grasp for kids these days. Now get of my lawn
US has a wonderful framework of brutal oppression directed toward people who are psychologically incapable of fulfilling certain roles in society -- it's how it treats diagnosed pedophiles and people convicted of sex crimes. All that is necessary, is to apply it to the diagnosed psychopaths and people who exhibited psychopathic behavior while being in positions of control or authority.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If that's your goal, then you have to get rid of the psychopaths in government, because without them the private industry cannot do any of the stuff that you are complaining about.
Maybe it's not impossible, but it surely isn't likely for private banks to construct a scheme where they all lend money to people who they know cannot pay the money back, but they lend to them anyway because the government guarantees the loans and passes laws that push banks towards making those types of loans (setting quotas on how many loans must be made in subprime market and guaranteeing those loans with 'free', sorry, public money. Doing all this while the Federal reserve gives out free credit to the banks and destroys the interest rates in the process, pushing bankers to search for yield not in normal business but with extremely risky stuff).
What would you do as a banker if you couldn't find yield no matter where you looked, because the gov't manipulated the money supply and interest rates?
What would you do if the government provided you with enough rope (fake insurance) to hang yourself and your customers in the process? The system is rigged by government to inflate and implode.
You don't need to be a psychopath to do what the bankers did actually, you just have to be desperate for yield in an economy that no longer provided any legitimate economic activity and the only activity that was provided was by the Federal reserve creating and giving you fake money and by government pushing you into specific sectors like stock market and housing (and now government debt, treasuries).
Bernanke came out couple of days ago, telling the government to absolutely not reduce government spending and not to raise taxes (to avoid the so called nonsensical 'fiscal cliff', going over which would actually be a tiny step towards solving the problem of deficit and debt), so he advised the government to create more debt, which he promised to monetise.
He said all that while yapping about 'making sure that the world knows that USA is serious about solving its debt problem'. Ok.
You can't handle the truth.
Hey Bateman! Check out Paul Allen's card, it even has a watermark.
...no more managers then?
The tech world has plenty of company heads who've been called psychopaths, too — but would you want to actually change that?
YES.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I'm all for the testing of psychopaths, but how do we test for them? Last time I checked, the psychopathy test is a secret test, and you need to be a psychologist in order to access it. This type of secrecy put some serious concerns on whether being a psychopath is really something that can be verified scientifically.
Just so there is not misunderstanding: I do not doubt the existence of psychopaths. I just wonder whether we have a better test for it than what amounts to a secret procedure that is only known to people *who have a stake in having these tests done* in the first place.
They are not going to block them, they are going to promote them. Psychopaths make them more money.
Most probably all the F500 managers will make sure that the screening process does not screen them out, so it will probably only detect people who are either in such a sorry state that they where in no shape to get the credential necessary to get the job, or people who are just marginally weird but who would actually do a good job, and maybe even help to alleviate somewhat the uselessness of the psychopaths who adorn our industries...
The main issue being that all people have a certain level of available time and energy, and if you allocate it to progressing in your chosen profession you can either:
a) be a good guy and try to provide more value to your clients/colleagues/society/etc... by innovating, good management, etc...
or
b) be a psychopath and try to finesse the office politics to get up the corporate ladder.
Obviously the most efficient way to progress toward success and power is option "b", and the people who are the most liable to execute this correctly are the ones who are not hindered by pesky issues like, empathy, morals, common decency nor slowed down by intellectual curiosity or creative insights...
The consumers of course, with higher costs of goods. And workers, with their jobs, who while can perform the job perfectly fine are unfairly black listed due some silly test that doesn't relate to job performance at all..
if you think 'the insurance company' ( or some other arbitrary disliked group of the day ) is going to pay, you have a lot to learn about economics.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you haven't read about this fascinating personality disorder I recommend the following books:
Dr. Hare is an expert on psychopathy and Dr. Babiak an Industrial Psychologist. Dr. Stout is a clinical psychologist.
Perhaps psychologists and technologists together will be able to develop a test like the one used in "Blade Runner" to expose a replicant.
E Proelio Veritas.
Is being a psychopath a disability? You know there is a psychopathic lawyer out there who would tie this thing up in the courts from now till doomsday.
When I worked at Cabela's, the IS/IT team I was on got a new manager, the first thing he did was call us all into his office and say "Your job here is to make me look good!". It all went down hill from there! This guy went out of his way to screw over his own people for his own gain - in fact he would work in conjunction with another manager in IS/IT to screw his people over. He would act like he wanted to be your best friend and then stab you in the back as soon as he saw an opening. One of the people on his team was working on their bachelor's degree. This guy actually offered to let him "borrow" any of the papers he wrote for his degree to use. Thankfully that individual was smart enough to know A) that was plagiarism B) The manager would "out him" and screw him over quickly - and the individual nicely told him "no thanks". Our team had a higher turnover rate than the Call Center - which is an amazing feat in itself. When I left all that was left were the H1B's and a couple "old timers" with the company. All the -real- talent left and went onto bigger and better things - including myself.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
[Note: USA-centric]
Employment opportunity may be a right only to the degree that a corporation is a creature of the state wherein it was incorporated and subject to the federal constitution and its amendments as held by relevant federal case law via the incorporation doctrine. Many US states have laws that prevent those who were involved in the mental health system from lawfully possessing firearms. Since the damage from improper financing is just as a legitimate societal concern as firearms, the same scrutiny that is applied to the process of lawful firearm possession should be applied to those entering certain positions in the financial industry under the rubric of ''federal interest'' institutions. Therefore, testing for such positions would be in the public.
Psychopathy is not an expression of rational self-interest because it fails the "rational" part.
Randroids, you are now clear to pop a collective circuit-breaker.
Organisational Psychopaths destroy lives.
Whilst I am not qualified to say whether my experience was with a true OP I got my hands on reading material written by a specialist in the field who's job as a consultant was to assist organisations, at a management level, diagnose and identify OPs and eject them from the company. OP do not care for the welfare of the company or it's employees and will drive a business to bankruptcy and then move on.
The two areas I remember were the skilful lying, identified in the book, which made you question if you had a sincere grip on reality. How people around you were manipulated to work against each other and see the OP as the true source of the "truth". I directly witnessed an OP deliberately hide the completed work of a team to invoke the penalty clauses of a corporate contract to position himself in better control of the team, much to the bewilderment of the team.
The final straw, for me, was when the OP described to me how, as a child, he tortured peoples pets in the most gruesome way, and whilst on the inside I wanted to run away and never return, I somehow realised that if I showed any sense of abhorrence towards his behaviour he would target me even more. I planned to get away as quickly as possible.
There is no doubt that these people are talented, but in a way that is completely destructive. If you are unfortunate to encounter an OP and come to understand what I mean you will recognise them immediately and steer well clear. One of the most telling things in the book was how psychopaths were able to identify sexual abuse victims just from the way they walked. An OP is as adept at finding their victims, highly talented individuals with solid sense of self and morals. Computer geeks are a prime target for these type of predator.
So yeah a method to limit the damage they do to an organisation is very wise.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's not easy keeping the wrong sorts of people away from power, but we could definitely do better. If testing can help, we ought to do it.
Given the sort of people that corporations tend to employ at their top levels, I don't think psychopathy tests would be used the way you would hope. I think they'd be used to identify people who "have upper management written all over them." That is, borderline psychopaths. Not so horrible that you can't trust them even under your supervision, but definitely the kind ready to take ruthless advantage of their subordinates and customers.
I think people are confusing psychopaths with sociopaths. While the share some of the same traits (http://voices.yahoo.com/sociopath-vs-psychopath-there-difference-1906224.html), I have found more sociopaths in upper management than psychopaths. Unfortunately sociopaths are EXACTLY what upper management is looking for and often rise to positions of authority in organizations. Their ability to manipulate people and to lay blame for every problem at other's feet is rewarded. They are actually often VERY good at getting people to do what they want.
"would rather throw money at them THEN watch them collapse"
So you don't understand what the word 'then' means.
Like "I'd rather kill my son THEN see him join the army". What the fuck? Why are Americans so stupid? Why do you KEEP writing 'then' instead of 'than', or 'that' instead of 'than'? It isn't rocket science. You fucking idiot. Do you not know what the word 'then' means? Go and ask a non-American three year old, they'll know. But you, apparently, do not. Nor do millions of other Americans, judging form the daily occurrence of this stupidity on the internet.
What about those with Aspergers? One of the original diagnostic criteria for Aspergers is a lack of empathy. Same goes for Autism too. Shall we ban these people from management?
A man who is rapidly becoming one of my best friends has recently been diagnosed with Asperger. What he is lacks is an ability to read people's emotions (although you'd hardly notice, he learned to compensate for that surprisingly well), what he has in abundance is an ability to feel for other people. And he is perfectly honest and trustworthy. A psychopath would be the opposite: perfectly capable of reading emotions but not feeling them himself, making it easy to exploit others. That is why they are charming manipulators.
I don't think my friend would be a good manager though, but that has to do with him being overwhelmed by situations far too easily.
his name was bateman ffs =P
"Could Testing Block Psychopaths From Senior Management?"
No, as while few in number, the professional psychopath is too good at masking his true nature. Can usually be found hiding out in one of the professions. as psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse, prison guard, policeman or cub scout leader. Can only be detected by the inexplicable amount of mishaps that occurs to those in their immediate vicinity.
AccountKiller
"One bad person on a team can not only make life miserable, but ruin the work output of the team, drive away anyone competent and damage everyone else's careers when they're associated with the failed team's product."
..
And then get promoted to management, as they're the only only left of the original team
AccountKiller
A true-blue nutcase will always think of themselves first, and so they will always cover their own asses or make their own errors appear as successes.
Thus, often management will look from above or look at metrics and conclude that the psychopath is the most competent team member.
Have seen this happen a few times too...
Futurist Traditionalism
A CEO acts to maximize his profit by maximizing the companies. Just because they are pyschopaths does not mean they are stupid. If we could reliably test for it, company would require it in the senior staff because not giving a chit about others makes a good CEO.
Who couldn't learn to fake it? Isn't that what the article is claiming that psychopaths do? In addition, the majority of dishonest behavior in every institution is performed by perfectly ordinary people. Milgram and Zimbardo and many others in 1000s of studies have shown that most people take their cues from superiors and peers. We evolved, after all, in groups of 20 -- 200 where everyone knew everyone else's capabilities, decisions were mostly out in the open, group concensus was generally pretty 'right', and go along to get along thus was a good strategy for survival. Which is why it is so very easy to corrupt any institution, and why any dishonesty in a CEO is rapidly copied throughout their organization. Further, I don't think that psychopaths can get to the top in organizations that value honesty : people compare notes and rapidly detect dishonesty. Psychopaths depend on dishonesty, so if you want to protect an organization against them, a culture of bend-over-backwards, open-kimono honesty is better than garlic on vampires (or whatever creature garlic works against, I am a bit weak on that technology.)
If you screen out all psychopaths, where do you plan on getting your senior managers from? Liquor store? I've worked for bosses who were clearly "Master of the Universe" types. Didn't know dick all about computers, but claimed the world (all claims fell when rubber met road), but that didn't stop one idiot I worked for, from spending 5 weeks locked in his office, creating a mission statement for the team (we were a team of 2, he was the team leader, and I was the team, till I left). Psychopath? No shit Sherlock! The thing is: psychopaths are manipulative and careful liars. They are also good at blackmail and threats. If they can't get there by bullshit alone, they will use intimidation, illegal tactics, immoral tactics, even murder to get what they believe to be their 'place'.
It may be better used for testing the political class
It is the modern performance management practices which cause psychopaths to get to the top. A lack of empathy is very handy when you want to ream out a subordinate for not meeting the standards that you have given him.
Please test this out in Washington DC first. No shortage of ambitious psychopathic executive types there.
Organization? You must be joking..
Is there some way we could screen out Larry Ellison, maybe send him to another planet? (Gosling didn't refer to him as LPOD for nothing)
At least Steve Ballmer is having the courtesy to fade into irrelevance, but he seems more loopy than being a genuine psychopath.
As a former employee of HP? FUCK YES.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Look at all the people defending these mentally-ill animals.
Looks like we got some sociopaths among us. :)
Treating your employees or clients wildy different from how you would treat your partner = you're a sociopath piece of shit. Do society a favor and kill yourself before we have to do it for you.
Known Sociopaths:
Owners of:
Best Buy
Target
Wal-Mart
Disney/Hollywood
Insert Bank here
Insert Financial Institution here
Military complex
Coca Cola
Pepsi
Insert major candy company here
Insert major media company here
Insert major multinational here (I suppose this includes most of the above)
I mean, what do people think is the end-game as wages remain stagnant, the population continues to explode, and all the money continues to concentrate at the top?
Sorry, people. I don't think the Walton's built their bunker with room for any of their loyale employees. Just them and their equally criminal family/friends. Just like their animal brain told them to do. Survive survive survive with zero calculations as to the long-term effects of their actions.
That's nothing. Look at this: Eggshell with Romalian type.
Re:
The might look at the ability to prevent 50% of automobile related deaths for $1 a car and decide they can save $1 a car at the cost of a 25% increase in automobile related deaths, and choose that option.
.
That's why the automobile industry has regulations imposed upon it in the USA at the governmental level: if there were not regulations requiring the placement of seat-belts and airbags in cars/trucks, the auto industry would be quick to save the $1-$2 per vehicle by leaving those safety devices out. That's why corporations can be thought of as greedy sociopathic individuals: the primary goal of corporations is to maximize profit. If there is not a check or balance on that with laws that regulate this type of greedy sociopathic behaviour on the part of the corporations, then they would continue to act that way.
.
It's also the same with costs: if you can get your costs shuttled off to a different division or a different heading / column on the ledger where it's no longer counted as a "negative" in your sum, then you've done well regardless of where the cost was shifted to. The blame can be shifted there along with the cost. That's the same for taxes being relabeled as use-fees, or taxes at one level being turned into taxes at a different level. You can say "we've reduced X" while simultaenously shuffling the balls around and playing keep-away with the increase that occured in Y hoping that no-one notices.
Just get rid of everyone who has what it takes to manage millions of dollars worth of assets and other people's lives, and replace them with spineless politically correct morons. That will make the company work just great.
Here's a documentary about psychopaths in the workplace. The password is: fhmovie
http://www.fisheadmovie.com/watch-the-movie