How Psychopaths Can Be Identified By Analyzing Their Speech
15. October 2011
Ted Bundy: Infamous Psychopath. (Photo: wikipedia.com)
A psychopath is a person who shows absolutely zero empathy towards people in general and who shows no remorse in harming them in anyway. While in the movies, psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs or Patrick Bateman from American psycho are traditionally depicted as being charismatic albeit ruthless murderers who can smooth talk their victims, psychopaths in real life are much more complicated than their movie counterparts as for one, some of them are merely antisocial and not cold blooded murderers.
As for those who indeed are killers, must of them are social outcasts who have been long isolated from humanity and lack any form of charisma. The point being, psycho-analyzing the mind of these people has been a herculean task for experts for years, with none of them coming up with answers that are satisfying enough. However, a study embarked by the university of Columbia and Cornell university shows that speech pattern analysis are one of the most effective but overlooked methods, for psycho-analyzing.
For the purpose of this research, Dr Hancock from the university of Cornell and his colleagues, personally handpicked a team of 10 psychopathic criminals who have been awaited trails for gruesome crimes and 38-40 other non-psychopathic criminals. These researchers, then took each criminal separately and had a brief chat with them regarding their crimes.
After the session, the researchers realized that the psychopaths were more likely to use vindicating pronouns like ‘because’ or ‘so that’ and had the astounding ability to recall every trivial detail of their crime with great accuracy, suggesting that psychopath were more likely to justify their crimes, due to their peculiar sense of entitlement towards the crime itself.If things did not get any weirder, the researchers probed further and saw that these people were much more likely to give pompous and non-fluent answers to their questions, again possibly suggesting their desperation to impress others.
However, while this study does show that psychopathic murders have a distinct way of speaking than the rest of us, always remember that correlation does not result in causation, which means that judging someone by their way of talking is just plain wrong. Instead, this study paves way for new therapy methods to treat people from becoming into murderers.
(rockefellernews/yk)
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