It is possible to detect psychopaths on Steem using linguistic analysis
Psychopaths have a tendency to have flat affect in language. Psychopaths also use certain patterns of speech more commonly than others. The viewpoint of a psychopath is to view the world in an instrumental manner. The psychopath in other words views all as tools to be used. Remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Psychopaths may in fact have different focuses. Psychopaths due to being narcissistic have no real need for self actualization and only focus on lower level goals like material gain.
- Emotional related language vs instrumental language.
- How often they talk about lower level things (food, money).
By FireflySixtySeven [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
- Psychopaths use less intense emotional language.
- Psychopaths tend to talk a lot about what they ate or drank that day.
- Psychopaths talk a lot about money.
By J. Finkelstein (I created this work using Inkscape.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
Everything we do in the digital space leaves a trail. This is even more true on the blockchain where every communication, every exchange, every comment, every post, leaves clues for the machine intelligence to analyze in the future. This means that psychopaths can be potentially identified by language patterns on Steem by simply using the Steem blockchain as a data set in the same way Twitter was used in this experiment.
Call for an experiment
This is an active request to both build out the analysis SMT idea that I mentioned in the past and as the first use case (show case example) we take the data from the Steem blockchain and allow everyone to apply the machine intelligence to determine which accounts are likely to be psychopaths. This will produce a controversial yet attention grabbing result and also show some of the power (and vulnerability) of the transparency of Steem. Transparency in my opinion can be a good thing when used for science and for constructive purposes. Transparency is not such a good thing when used for destructive or "punitive" purposes like how it's mostly used currently on Steem.
How could transparency this be practically useful for women and men? If you're considering whether you would like to date someone would you like to know whether or not they present themselves in digital space as a psychopath does?
References
Goodboy, A. K., & Martin, M. M. (2015). The personality profile of a cyberbully: Examining the Dark Triad. Computers in human behavior, 49, 1-4.
Wald, R., Khoshgoftaar, T., & Sumner, C. (2012, August). Machine prediction of personality from Facebook profiles. In Information Reuse and Integration (IRI), 2012 IEEE 13th International Conference on (pp. 109-115). IEEE.
Sumner, C., Byers, A., Boochever, R., & Park, G. J. (2012, December). Predicting dark triad personality traits from twitter usage and a linguistic analysis of tweets. In Machine learning and applications (icmla), 2012 11th international conference on (Vol. 2, pp. 386-393). IEEE.
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Well, I value my life a lot and I tell my friends and followers to do the same.
Physical training and taking care of your looks should be done by every person in the world.
It is a matter of self-respect.
I wonder if I am a narcissists according to that definition? Even if I was one, I wouldn't care because I don't care what society thinks is normal.
Who wants to be "normal" anyway?
There is a big difference between taking care of yourself physically and being a narcissist.
As just one example, Trump is a classic narcissist, and considers himself to be extraordinarily handsome. I'm not aware that he does much of anything to take care of himself, aside from screwing over other people in business; certainly he seems to do little to actually stay in shape. They are two different things.
"Who wants to be "normal" anyway?"
Right there with you here. Normality is highly overrated. "Normal" is only a range of behaviors, in any case, which people tend to forget.
Thank you for the clarification Cop.
You're welcome, Philip. Have a great day.
@dana-edwards, thanks for sharing.
Now that we have in a way know how to detect psychopaths on steemit, i wish you would do a follow up post on how to deal with them.
And i also understand that there is a major difference between being yourself physically and being a narcissist. Very few people are able to spot the difference.
You just said it in that sentence. You deal with them. How do you deal with people in general? You deal with people.
If the psychopath is violent, then you're not going to deal with that sort of psychopath in the way you would with a psychopath who is non-violent.
Very true. Thanks for the reply
It's only a problem if it's pathological. If you'd put a price on the head of even the people you claimed to love. If there are not people in your life, even if just your mother, who you view as priceless? Then you may be a psychopath.
If you're making a lot of money, but you're using it to care for someone else, then you're not quite as bad as some others who don't even do that.
Very interesting.. I definitely think that it is possible although I think that some of the points made could be slightly misleading. Due to current economic standings of the general population, a lot of people talk about money; a lot. Modern society brainwashes us to do so. As it does with our personal appearance. Health/diet is another issue; people are becoming increasingly interested in nutrition and due to social media, etc. it is easy to share people's progress in their effort to better themselves.
I do , however, understand how the way in which people talk about these things, very specifically, can indicate psychopathic tendencies. Really, all I'm saying is that I think you wrote a very good article and that I can see why some people could be mislead (i.e. some of the commentors).
But all in all, great article!
I talk about money so I am not im implying that talking about money or caring about health is at all a bad thing. When I talk about money it's in a certain context. Financial independence, financial freedom, happiness, for people like myself money enables a certain lifestyle and dignity as we grow old. Psychopaths have an entirely different relationship with money, where they do not seek any higher ideals, or think about the deeper more abstract reasons behind it.
So I do not blame anybody who wants to achieve financial independence, or who wants to live well, or who wants to just retire and provide for their loved ones. I do think there are some people who will turn on anybody for just a little bit more money. These people love money, and it becomes a problem if these persons love money and not other people.
Right! In no way was I implying that you thought otherwise. When I got to the bottom of your article I skimmed a few comments and it seemed as though a few people had taken it in the wrong context. I was just explaining that I could maybe see why, if someone read it without thinking more deeply about what you were trying to say.
My comment was halfway aimed at those commenters, as well, to clarify their misunderstanding. Thank you for getting back to me, not to mention the very generous up vote! I did really enjoy your article (I, admittedly, am quite interested in psychopaths, haha) so I look forward to reading more from you :)
Cheers!
Maybe you could add some transactional data to the analysis too.
To extrapolate the implications of such an experiment...
Imagine a future in which AI can identify psychopaths with 99% or greater accuracy by analyzing people's internet trails. Such individuals might be shunned by people in the real world, but what about the small percentage of false positives? Would psychopaths then develop new ways of communicating online? Perhaps they would begin to emulate "non-psychopathic speech". Interesting stuff.
We don't have to imagine it. The FBI and corporations do it right now. We can do it too.
ouch
Unless said psychopath is aware of their psychopathic nature, this allows the psychopath to better emulate the appearance of everyone else around them, thusly hiding themselves. It's very difficult to diagnose a psychopath, even when you're staring one directly in the face, it's even harder when the psychopath is aware of the condition.
Have fun with that knowledge. ;)
I think programming robots to detect psychopaths would be very Orwellian. A lot of loving people would be caught in the net. My father for example, was born into a poor family, and he was almost obsessed with food, not always having had much of it as a child. Food was one of his favourite subjects to talk about. He was an accountant and would often discuss money matters too. But he loved birds, animals and people and was very kind-hearted. A robot wouldn't understand the subtle differences.
I found this funny :)
I think that because of it nature steemit attracts higher number of interesting deviations. Maybe in few years the people will say “If you want to find voyeur, narcissist or psychopath just look in steemit”
Interesting - I understand the idea of recognizing psychopaths in person, but by their use of language, that's good now in this age of getting to know people online. Especially useful for people who want to use the internet to find the perfect person to have a relationship with. But we have to remember that psychopaths are very clever at adapting their behavior to suit the circumstances and so I'd expect the same with language. Good idea for an experiment, though.
Wow @katebenzin, you seem to have some extensive knowledge of psychopaths... you sure you're not one yourself?
Those would surely be some interesting results to observe, were such a project initiated to create a list of accounts...
very informatic post to eveyone & very good thesis of physiology.I appreciate your research.You express this thinks is goodly well.
Keep it up & thank you..