Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test! | Kevin Dutton | Big Think
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KEVIN DUTTON:
Dr. Kevin Dutton is the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. Dutton is a research psychologist at the Calleva Research Centre for Evolution and Human Science, Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
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TRANSCRIPT:
We all know about the psychopath’s enhanced killer instinct, their finely tuned vulnerability antennae. But it may surprise you to know that there are some situations in which psychopaths are actually more adept at saving lives than they are at taking them.So let me give you an example of what I mean by that, okay? Imagine you’ve got a train and it’s hurtling down a track. In its path, five people are trapped on the line and cannot escape.
Fortunately, you can flick a switch, which diverts the train down a fork in that track, away from those five people, but at a price. There is another person trapped down that fork and the train will kill them instead. Question: Should you flick the switch?
Now, most people have little trouble deciding what to do under those circumstances; though, the thought of flicking the switch isn’t exactly a nice one, the utilitarian choice as it were, killing just
the one person instead of the five represents the least worst option, okay. But now let me give you a variation. You’ve got a train speeding out of control down a track and it’s gonna plow into five people on the line. But this time you are standing behind a very large stranger on a footbridge above that track. The only way to save the people is to heave the stranger over. He will fall to a
certain death, but his considerable bulk will block the train, saving five lives. Question. Should you flick the switch?
Now we’ve got what we might call a real dilemma on our hands, okay. While the score in lives is precisely the same as in the first scenario, five to one, one’s choice of action appears far
trickier. Now why should that be? Well, the reason it turns out, all boils down to temperature, okay?
Case one represents what we might call an impersonal dilemma. It involved those areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the posterior parietal cortex, in particular, the anterior para
singular cortex, the temporal pole and the superior temporal sulcus – bit of neuroanatomy for you there – primarily responsible for what we call cold empathy, for reasoning and rational thought. Case two, on the other hand, represents what we might call a personal dilemma. It involves the emotion center of the brain known as the amygdala, the circuitry of hot empathy. What we might call the feeling of feeling what another person is feeling. Now, psychopaths, just like most normal members of the population, have no trouble at all with case one. They flick the switch and the train diverts accordingly. Killing just the one person instead of the five. But, this is where the plot thickens. Quite unlike normal members of the population, psychopaths also experience little difficulty with case two.
Psychopaths, without a moment’s hesitation are perfectly willing to chuck the fat guy over the rails, if that’s what the doctor orders. Now moreover, this difference in behavior has a distinct neural signature. The pattern of brain activation in both normal people and psychopaths is identical on the presentation of the impersonal moral dilemma, but radically different when things start to get a bit more personal. Imagine that I were to hook you up to a brain scanner, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, and were to present you with those two dilemmas, okay. What would I observe as you went about trying to solve them? Well, at the precise moment that the nature of the dilemma switches from impersonal to personal, I would see the emotion center of your brain, your amygdala and related brain circuits, the medial orbital frontal cortex for example, light up like a pinball machine. I would witness the moment in other words when emotion puts it money in the slot. But in psychopaths, I would see precisely nothing. And the passage from impersonal to personal would slip by unnoticed.Because that emotion neighborhood of their brains, that emotional zip code has a neural curfew. And that’s why they’re perfectly happy to chuck that fat guy over the side without even batting an eye.
Directed / Produced by:
Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd
@bigthink
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
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@KevinKobielush
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
I pushed someone off a skyscraper because I wanted them to break the fall of someone on the street who was about to trip. Glad I'm not a psychopath.
@PeaceMaker669-c1i
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
Im not flipping any switch nog my problrm
@ChetanSai-m8p
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
I don't do nothing that's not my problem
@AndreeaCe
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
A wise psychopath? Such adjective attributed to a psychopath? Damn, he is delusional
@AndreeaCe
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
Imagine psychos pushing normal people to suicide…oh wait, that's real fact.
@AndreeaCe
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
😂 how he imagined it? He stalked those people
@AndreeaCe
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
He and his dumb imagination. He proved the point by imagining putting other people's lives in danger so he can be the hero.
@AndreeaCe
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
The bullshit he spreads because he is as well a psychopath
@ast-w8s
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
Let me make it harder what if you know that person personally would you still flick the switch just as easily?
@oneownersoul142
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
The correct answer is to chuck chunky over the rail after the train passes so there are no witnesses.
@other-terrestriallifeform1851
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
No guarantee that the obesity stricken fellow would stop that train,no way anyone could even imagine how this fatty could stop the train to begin with. Preposterous scenario.
@fackthegl4094
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
hello there, i wanted to say i have studied psychopathy to the core and i have been able to make out a lot of them and i´d like to say, they know if they are or not
@jimuk1982
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
I’d just ask the train driver to politely stop.
@Peace_5200
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
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@Yumi-hw9sc
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
With this riddle i've never seen people talk about answering to do nothing at all. Why should I flip the switch or push the fat guy over? If i act in any way, i will be percieved as a murderer because i either touch the button or i push the fat guy which only builds up charges for me. If i do nothing then i have nothing to do with it; i didnt put the people on the traintracks. If he wants to, the fat guy can decide
@mikeauret8499
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
There is no ‘least worst’! Worst is absolute!
@Tony-u9o
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
Why does he have to be fat? That’s easy. Maybe…your child. Now that’s a dilemma.
@ellasm
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
I really don't think a psychopath would even see this video, they don feel "the need" to know who they are, the rest of us who maybe were damaged by then are here
@coatesjable
March 10, 2026 at 5:13 am
Anyone hear in 2024
Comments are closed.