Psychopaths and Coffee

This month was my turn to host book club. So today the ladies came over and while we sipped coffee and nibbled on brunch, we discussed the Wisdom of Psychopaths and practiced pop psychology.

Author Kevin Dutton argues that we can learn from "functional psychopaths" who use their detached, charismatic personalities to become enormously successful members of society. Supposedly, the more "psychopathic" people are in certain professional fields like surgery and stock trading, the more likely they are to succeed. Not all psychopaths are ruthless mass murderers.

During the morning, we ran through the questions in the "Psychopath Survey" from the Website and hotly debated how to interpret each one. It was quite a lot of fun and led to a very lively and thought-provoking discussion, but I found the results disappointing. After I completed it, the assessment of "Who I am" merely rated me from "average" to "very high" on six personality traits, but didn't reveal if I have psychopathic tendencies.

Here's what it told me:
Neuroticism = average
Extraversion = very high
Opennes to Experience = high
Agreeableness = high
Conscientious = very high
Persuasiveness = very high

So....am I a psychopath? Probably not. Far too emotionally invested in other people. Fail. Well, this is one test I'm happy to fail, even if it means I'm less "successful."

And speaking of "fail" - what is with the weather?! The ladies brought me this lovely ceramic bunny, looking very Spring-like with the tulips still hanging on from Valentine's day.... but throughout the morning we had snow flurries. Psychopathic Spring is what we have!