This is a little worrisome. As Schneier says at the bottom, “I worry about people being judged by these criteria. Psychopaths make up about 1% of the population, so even a small false-positive rate can be a significant problem.”
On a complete tangent, the statistic that 1% of the population counts as psychopathic is disturbing. According to at least some people who’ve studied the phenomenon, people with autism only make up about 0.5%, one person in two hundred. Considering the number of other people with HFA or Asperger’s Syndrome I’ve met, I shudder to think what that implies about the number of psychopaths out there.
Someone said that they were scared that potential CEO candidates would be tested for psychopathy, not in order to eliminate it, but in order to hire a psychopath! (Psychopathic CEOs tend to make decisions that make stockholders happy.)
Also, this blog post makes me think of the OWS slogan “we are the 99%”, perhaps the 1% are the psychopaths. 😉
Smiley or no, there’s a lot of truth to that: I suspect that a much higher proportion of “the 1%” are psychopathic than in the general population. But we’ll probably never know for sure.