Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Plausible, but I'm skeptical... Psychopaths in prison are *literally* a captive population to study; psychopaths outside of prison are incentivized to stay out of psychopathy studies. If there's a sampling problem, it's going to skew results up on traits common in prison popshttps://twitter.com/sapinker/status/822504016731131906 …

I think this has also been found in samples out of prison (relation between IQ and measures of psychopathy along a scale)

If you are willing to participate in a study on psychopathy as an actual psychopath, you were either too dumb to figure out what the study was about or had too high an impulsivity:intelligence ratio to help yourself. Same traits, not yet in prison

And the study can disguise the real motive, as many do

Experimental psychologists should be skeptical of any results that rely on self-report from an uncooperative population for reasons that are super obvious, *especially* if they're measuring something for which "ability to successfully avoid being tricked" would be a strong filter

But you are assuming that people high in psychopathic traits will want to hide them in that test setting. Why would they?

Because their entire lives function on the basis of deception in service of clear incentives, and they don't get an extra cookie if they're honest with the guy in the lab coat

But neither do they lose one