You may be shocked to learn that, according to a recent study by Southern Methodist University, our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., has the country’s highest concentration of psychopathic individuals.
Okay, you won’t be surprised at all.
Researcher Ryan Murphy at Southern Methodist released his study last week, cataloging the varied levels of psychopathy in the American states. Murphy discovered that Connecticut, long the home of many of Wall Street and industry’s most hardened businessmen (and women), was the state home to the most psychopathic people, with California, New Jersey, and New York not far behind.
But Washington, D.C. has so many psychopaths per capita that it easily eclipsed any and all states.
Murphy judged the states by their concentrations of people who exhibited “dis-inhibition, boldness, and meanness,” characteristics he says are now associated with evidence of psychopathy.
“Boldness corresponds to low neuroticism and high extraversion, meanness corresponds to low agreeableness, and disinhibition corresponds to low conscientiousness,” Murphy explained. Those characteristics, in turn, gave Murphy the ability to assign a “psychopathy score” to various cities and states.
The findings might be shocking to political animals, but probably to few others.
“The presence of psychopaths in District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture found in Murphy [2016] that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere,” the study concluded. “The District of Columbia is measured to be far more psychopathic than any individual state in the country, a fact that can be readily explained either by its very high population density or by the type of person who may be drawn a literal seat of power (as in Murphy 2016),”
Hence their choice of address.
The study has yet to be peer reviewed, and has not appeared in a journal, but it’s hard to argue with its outcome.