Inside Cornell: Analyzing the words of psychopaths

this study actually starts as a story almost a decade ago in Halifax Nova Scotia where Mike Woodworth who will be diving in soon and I were PhD students in psychology he was on a clinical track which means he's somebody that works with people in particular he's friends at clinical psychologists so he works with people both that in an everyday clinic but also in prisons and I was an experimental psychologist I study how people use language and particularly how people use language in online contexts on the Internet so I study for example deception and how deception gets changed by digital communication environments and we were talking one day about what the two of us were doing he was interviewing psychopathic and non psychopathic homicidal killers in a maximum-security prison in New Brunswick and it was this really amazing project very few people had ever been able to get access to these people and actually interview them and I was really excited because he was generating all this language that were psychopaths telling the story describing the day of the murder and non psychopathic murderers describing the day of their labor and to both of us that seemed like a really great place for us to collaborate because Mike was getting this these transcripts this text produced by these very you know unique populations and I was just then exploring how to do automated language analyses and so we wanted to put those two two things together but it takes a long time to do something new like this it's very unusual and novel so that's why it's taken us so long to get done but since the last maybe two years it's sort of exploding the things we've been able to do so let me start a little bit by describing some of the things about psychopaths that I just think that they might talk differently especially when they're talking about a murder they don't describe a little bit about how I do language analyses and we'll go over some of the results and then at that point we can open up for questions and Mike will be on Mike is one of the people that he studies Psychopaths quite deeply and so if you have a lot more of the more subtle questions around psychopaths we can hold on and ask him because that's that's his primary focus so there's a couple things about Psychopaths that are really interesting one that you may all know about is the sort of emotional Berenice that they have so they don't experience emotions in the same way that most people do so they lack a conscience for example they have a difficult time understanding other people's emotions though some of them can learn to use those two how to use emotions to manipulate others and so one very simple thing there was to look at the emotional angle of somebody trying to describe a murder a highly emotionally salient event well there's a couple things one is something that is called psychological distancing it's also called temporal construe a basic idea is that we put negative events in our lives further in the past so for example when people describe 9/11 right after 9/11 happened some people found that they were using more past tense verbs for example than they would when describing other things that happened equally long ago safe three weeks ago was when 9/11 happened in three weeks ago was when some other event happened they would use more past tense less present tense and so what we do in our minds gets reflected in language this is one example so if I had a horrible event I can actually psychologically distance myself from it the way this happens is same for all the things they want to talk about some psychological dynamic happens presumably in the mind somewhere you're experiencing some psychological dynamic and then that is reflected in the words that we end up using for a long time we've believed that we control very carefully our words and that may be true for some words like nouns and verbs but the vast majority of the words we use on an everyday basis we pay zero attention to both its listeners and speakers these are called function words they make up about half of all the words that we use they're the twos and ahhs and those and ons all the little words that go between the big words basic and the beautiful thing about them is they're unconsciously produced same with when we think about words using tents so we don't think about what what is the past tense verb I need to use here it comes out automatically if you think about it if you have an English as a second language person friend what are the mistakes they tend up making they screw up he/she they screw up they get their tenses wrong because we in English there comes unconsciously to us automatically we can use that as a way to see in to the psychological dynamic that's happening without the person necessarily being aware of what's actually going on so they're speaking in a very spontaneous natural way and we're able to look at some of the features of the language like tense for example to get it done another way emotionally that we should see some differences there it's very more more direct is they should use less intense emotional words when describing the murder and they should be less pleasant so they tend to have a sort of a darker world perspective if you will so we looked at also the emotional tone the last that's a related to the emotions is something called disfluencies I just did one right there you probably didn't hear it because we when we're speaking don't process them I said that's a disfluency um repetitions the the turns out when you look at videotape and you go back to conversations they're not nearly as smooth as we believe them to be they're very very messy but we don't hear it we hear just beautiful language being spoken all the time with the exception for example of professional speakers like radio announcers so we believe that when describing a really emotional event that they should have difficulty sort of conceptualizing because it's a very emotional thing that they would produce more disfluencies or of these arms and claws okay one of the other areas that we knew a lot about psychopaths because of the work of Michael Woodworth and his adviser Steve Porter who's also an author on this paper both of them are you see British Columbia Okanagan is earlier they had shown that Psychopaths view the world in a more instrumental manner okay so when they commit a crime it's usually to accomplish something whereas about half of the murders that a regular murderer will do but half of them are what are called reactive that is you find the guy in bed with your wife and you see red at you you murder somebody you're reacting to a situation much rare almost all of the psychopathic murders that that Mike and Steve looked at were instrumental much higher proportion well we should see that in their descriptions of the murders as well we can look at things that are related to causality so words like because since so these are the words that begin subjunctive clauses and we can just look at the language to see how many of those causal related words were in the psychopathic speech compare announcer psychopathic speech all right the last one is sort of the most astonishing findings I think from the work so Psychopaths have been categorized as developmentally challenged in terms of the things that they look for in life that they have needs for there's a very old psychological sort of system for this called maslov's hierarchy of needs some of you may remember it from your own settings it's not very well used in developmental psychology anymore it's just been shown to be very difficult to operationalize but the basic idea is sort of still accept it and that's the idea that we have these lower-level needs which are about what are we going to eat that day what are we going to use hey come on in Eric is one of my former students and now it's CNN so we okay so back to Maslow's hierarchy we have these needs that are weakened called basic which related things that we eat and drink they're related to shelter money which is something that about about how we get food drink shelter these are our basic needs and then there are higher-level needs which are more soci emotional they're related to family self esteem development and ultimately in self-actualization and the literature suggests that Psychopaths are much more focused on this lower level they are really unconcerned with self-actualization one reason being is because they sort of have this grandiose idea of who they are they're highly highly narcissistic so the need for self-actualization isn't really there for them instead we can partly related to this instrumental sort of approach to the world they are very interested in material things so that's what their need focus that so in this we looked at the kinds of things that they talked about so we can actually classify transcripts according to how often they talk about lower-level things food drink shelter money and how often they're related to love family religion evil God okay so those kind of things so those are the three sort of general things we looked at so emotionally related language we looked at this instrumental kind of language and we looked at where they focus their attention whether telling these stories and so might interviewed at Mike and his colleagues interviewed 18 Psychopaths clinically identified Psychopaths using something called psychopathy checklist revised and that we're in a maximum-security prison that had committed murder and they also interviewed 38 murders in the same prison that had that were not identified as Psychopaths okay and Mike gave me those transcripts and we looked over those transcripts we used a couple of tools to analyze them automatically so it wasn't like I was going in and hand coding things we use a tool one of them was called W matrix which allows you to identify each of those kinds of things except a motion really carefully and another one was an emotion analysis tool called Dow dictionary of 1/2 second language and then what do we have at the end of that we have a pot of language over here that is psychopathic talking about the murders and a pot of language over here that is not psychopathic talking about the murders and the psychopaths in the non Psychopaths were controlled for a number of things like how old they were how far back in time the murder happened how long they'd been in jail for those sort of things and what we found were for each of those predictions were supported so the first the instrumental one for example we found that Psychopaths talked a lot more causally using because so these subjunctive coordinating clauses than the non Psychopaths suggesting that they when they described the murder they were describing it because they were trying to accomplish something the murder was a means to an end compared to the non Psychopaths who more often were reacting to an event like finding their their spouse in bed with somebody else for the emotional one we found that even though the murderers statistically we could control for the same length of time and fast they used more past tense to describe the murders and last present tense suggesting that in their mind that they were construing them as taking place farther away from where they were in time we also saw a less intense emotional language as you would expect from these emotionally barren individuals and we found more disfluencies they found it more difficult to describe the murders and this is consistent with other work that suggests that even though Psychopaths are very glib and very charming they have very their speech is less cohesive than most okay and lastly sort of way I again think is the more fascinating stuff and was what they talked about and so Psychopaths talked a lot about what they ate that day which is one of the reasons that we named the paper hungry like the wolf because it was one of the biggest effects was when we asked them to describe their murder they talked a lot about what they ate that day what they drank that day was also more frequent in the psychopathic language than on Psychopaths they talked about money more often which fits both with that instrumental thing and with the lower level needs where they were focused whereas the non psychopathic murderers talked a lot more about spirituality religion and family and this again reflects sort of what most non psychopathic people would think about and focus on when they just committed murder and this is one really important thing to point out and these all these findings occurred despite being incarcerated for on average ten years so even though they'd been to training and they've been sort of in a lot of counseling to get over this idea that they weren't responsible for the murder they still saw it as this instrumental thing that they were doing they still saw it as less emotional they still focused on these peripheral events like eating and drinking despite having been in jail for ten years on average so the effect holds up for a very long time so that's the story that began in Halifax almost a decade ago now and ends with this paper which looked at at Psychopaths and on second class we're now moving into looking at stories that don't involve murder so we have these people described a positive and negative event in their life and we've now analyzed that we can talk a little bit about that but it's not not published yet it's under review and we're just now conducting studies looking at can we use social media that people produce you use that to predict psychopathic tendencies so we're going to move out of the the prison space because that's a pretty specialized population and out into the social media world it's gonna be much more difficult I mean these Psychopaths that we're in jail were pretty serious bad dudes and whether we'll be able to find it in the psychopathic tendencies that exist in people in the general population as we talked earlier there's estimates from 0.5% of the population to about two on average 1% well they will be able to find a strong enough signal in social media to connect to psychopathic self-reported levels of psychotic so that's the that's the story so I thought I'd maybe open it up for questions and clarifications anything else right so there's been a number of different ways that that's been defined and what I'll do is I'll leave it to Mike to distinguish between sociopaths and Psychopaths in for my purposes as the person that does the language analyses they were essentially equivalent so we've focused on the psychopathy construct because it's it's well defined right we're using hair zakappa the-- checklist which is you know been validated many many times and it's considered the sort of the gold standard if you will so in my view I don't distinguish between the two but Mike can you talk about the that's one we'll hold on for Mike yeah he'll be the one to distinguish between those two yeah yes how are you studying the social media and what's the sort of methodology there right so what we're doing is something we've developed over the last four years in the lab we're taking advantage of the fact that everything we do digitally now leaves a record so everything that I do including looking at deception which Erika actually has written a paper with me on we now can use what people wrote so any text messaging if I were to get you guys to pull out your your cell phones there'd be really nice digital records of real message that you've sent in the real world going back several days at least so we get people to pull up their phones and look at text messages we can get them identify how many lines it took place and those messages really lovely what we're doing here is we get people to pull up their last twenty text messages their last ten emails and then to give us any social media that they have like Twitter they have a blog even the last Facebook posts and we take all of those and we then ask them to fill out something called the SRP the self report psychopathy scale and what we'll be doing is correlating the kinds of language things I'm talking about here with scores on the self-reported psych faculty test and we'll be working with Cornell students to start we already have some dating in from University of British Columbia students it was just them typing a positive and negative story it wasn't from actual real produced social media but even there we're already starting to see some similar patterns that are emerging they do they do they do but it luckily for us that notion of the unconscious still works when when writing in fact many of us type almost as much as we speak now sadly I've just been doing some analysis on my own email I email about seven times I produce seven times more words in my emails than I do in my academic writing which just astonishes and stats saddens me to no end but the same patterns the same unconscious patterns will take place in text as they do in speech except for disfluencies so we don't see the same kinds of disfluencies the eyes and the arms though we may be able to look at the number of times people backspace for example as an instance of disfluency try and work with you know criminologists outside of psychopaths so you're gonna try and emphasize use this as sort of a new I guess lie detector death to sort of yeah yeah right you can definitely see potential applications if there are solid findings in there I can see it as one other tool that various types of professionals could use so if you're a clinician you could imagine using that to do research on your client to help them if you're an investigator you can imagine it being useful at different stages of the investigation if you're looking for a suspect than looking at any social media they've produced I'm thinking of the Long Island serial killer here using Craigslist he left a very nice trail of digital messages if you're if you've got a person that you're then interrogating my understanding for Mike and Steve is that you interrogate an interview psychopaths differently than you do non Psychopaths so knowing before they've received the cyclop at the checklist whether they have psychopathic tendencies could be useful there as well John yes okay so we'll dial him in does that answer your question to see more of how you guys plan on if you are gonna use this in the criminology field and and it looked clues would you it would be more of a training that you would do for investigators right how do you work to approach the FBI in their bring a real analyze are you right we've and Mike can speak to this because he was the first off on this we've just finished several articles for the FBI's main journal which you might know the name of I'm free I think it's called the FBI bulletin we have one article in it that describes this work and then we'll also wrote a joint piece with some former FBI investigators Marino Sullivan was the main person there yeah so and Mike will know more again about the that side of it though I do think that some of these tools will be used by it's a really really interesting question and you know we obviously will have to be cautious with how these sort of things are used and this is the same from my deception research too we for example have been talking a lot about our algorithms for detecting fake hotel reviews and it's the same thing where it can only be one piece of the evidence that you're using right so this is not sort of a stamp of like obviously this person is a liar or this person is a psychopath but when I work with law agencies or more particularly intelligence agencies I sort of think of it as a the first set of triage so if you're receiving thousands of messages a day and you have to analyze them for which one needs to be attended to more carefully then some software that can do first-pass type things on them and highlight or mark them that becomes really useful I mean a lot of times eight analysts tell me they feel like they're drinking from a firehose and so we need to as we produce a more social media we need tools to be able to analyze but the changes the way that drugs are being administered things for kids that's a very big question let me just downlink it is second twenty clone a professional group Donna speaking hi done is Jeff calling for Mike what mama clean Thanks he finished his last session at 1:00 he has to clear his comments all right good Tunes yep yes sure so disfluencies again these are a broad category of terms that relate to speech that literally is not fluent so whenever I have to do repetition of a word so for example um thank you Mike how's it going good good very good we have six reporters in the room and a videographer and our guy that organized all John Carr Barry and I just finished going over the study and they've started to ask some questions we held off the psychopathy related ones okay for you saying maybe hello everybody would you like to ask us a copy the sociopath do you differentiate between psychology and associate with Wien Psychopaths and sociopaths in terms of their language and also terms I would think of how far they go the psychopaths might end up murdering whereas the sociopaths might not murder but would create trouble in other ways well the main differentiation between Psychopaths and sociopaths or what we would call from a clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder would be that sociopaths and people with APD they show all the behavioral characteristics a lot of really negative antisocial characteristics but they don't often have that accompanying emotional issues and some of the interpersonal issues that Psychopaths do so we may see that there's some differences in their language between the two groups and it's an interesting question we haven't compared against a group that had say antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy we may see that some of these things we found with psycho psychopaths are unique to them considering the different types of deficits that they have you talked a little bit before about you mentioned the Craigslist killer on them can you sort of speak a little bit house some research like this might be used when investigating a case like that like what how would it have a practical application sure hey Mike I'm not sure if you're familiar with that case or not yeah would you like to speak to you want me to give it the first pass you go ahead okay but just come from therapy so right I think in your minitor to change brain brain says yeah yeah so in that case there were a number of Craigslist posts which was how he lured his victims and the way something like this could be used is as I mentioned before anything you do digitally leaves a trace and it's a really nice tracing that it's searchable and copyable which is what we need once we have that we could then use that to run the message against the database of psychopathic and non psychopathic messages we have and try to classify whether that message looks like it was written more by a psychopath or more by a non psychopath it's going to be difficult at this stage we're not anywhere close to that at this point because right now we have the murder language and we have the positive and negative story language to compare against so what we would need to do there is we need to develop our database so it encompasses things like online dating so we have mark Twitchell who was a murder in Edmonton that lured people using an online dating site saying he was a woman bringing them there so we'll be able to build up these databases and then we can have if say an investigative body wants help we can then compare it to the most relevant kinds of messages that we have for both psychopaths and non cigarettes and as I said and Mike can speak more to this once an investigator knows whether somebody is more likely to be a psychopathic or not it changes both the way they conduct the investigation and if they have the suspect how they go about interviewing the person as well yeah I think that one of the most key things that's come out of this research is that previous to this research literally nothing else has looked at the language of these individuals in it in a way that can get at what they're saying beyond their conscious control psychopaths have such an uncanny ability to micromanage their presentation I mean literally it's sort of like almost a chameleon like level there's this vividness of how they present themselves to others and it's very tough to assess them in a face-to-face context or when you're not able to sit back and consider their language I mean conning and manipulation is one of the key characteristics of these individuals so having an ability to look at their language and analyze it in ways that they aren't able to micromanage at least not unless they're uncannily sophisticated is is a really important tool for not only how to detect what some of their underlying motivations might be but also as another strategy of how to interrogate them we may even see a future where it's determined it's better to interrogate Psychopaths not with a live human interrogator did you ever think about the aspect of this because this is a concern for the FBI because you can monitor and troll these social media sites and you don't need any sort of court protection which is not the same you know if you're gonna top a liar so what are you guys doing to protect yourselves because this could become an issue and do you think that you you should that you need to write some I don't know if you could hear that question about in terms of monitoring people or online yeah and the concern about civil liberties that this kind of tool could be used without any kind of warrants because you'd be analyzing social media so this is the our first paper in this space but you're right it is something that we've started to think about we haven't done anything specifically to protect ourselves because we've published everything that we've done so all the data everything that we have is is published could agencies or other entities use this information to do social media monitoring yes and I think that companies marketing and branding companies for example are already doing this not necessarily with psychopathy but they're tracking for example who is the thought influencer in this space so they have these indexes for people that get followed the most right right so in this case it's rather than a consumer space it's in a legal and investigative space and so yeah I think it is important I think though it's at this stage at most sort of like the polygraph right which cannot be admitted into court so that's I think where this kind of science are just sort of a bleeding edge is that Mike did you have any other thoughts on that not on that aspect of it just because the research right now is actually only we've only been concerned ironically with the liberties in terms of the offender's that we interviewed at the Psychopaths and the non Psychopaths in the prison to make sure that their confidentiality and anonymity was ensured by the way that we published the data right yes Mike getting access in the prison as I mentioned earlier it was a huge amount of work because it's a very protected a to do a lot of things to make sure is anonymous like you want to talk about how psychopaths are identified maybe the PCL are sure the main tool that is commonly used around the world is called the psychopathy checklist it's been revised a couple times but the newest version is from 2003 and it was published by a man dr. Robert hare who many would consider to still be the world's leading expert on psychopathy and there are 20 items that are used to assess an individual on psychopathy and obviously the more of those items that the person seems to have at least some qualities of that trait the higher they can score it's from zero to 40 anyone scoring above 30 would be considered to be a a psychopath as you get farther away from 30 and closer to 40 you're getting individuals that are highly psychopathic it's very difficult to score that highly on the tool as well I should mention when we're talking about these individuals that we assess those individuals that were psychopathic they would encompass sort of all of the main qualities that you could potentially see across 20 different areas of functioning it's based on a extensive file review of course considering how deceptive and pathological lying and conning and manipulation you have to be very careful in terms of an extensive file review as well as an extensive interview which can last for hours and hours when you get into the prisons and interview these guys they are such Wiley interview individuals that you have to be very very diligent in your work when when interviewing them yeah yeah I find the aspect of manipulation very interesting because I just don't have nothing else to do I do bunches of surveys on the web and I was fascinated to find out how much I can manipulate them to the extent it oh now I'm getting a terribly expensive financial magazine delivered free at my door every Saturday because I'm a little lie I told and when you're working with computers whether it's social networking or what there's lots of room for manipulation face to face you've got body language which is a whole other issue but how can you adjust for manipulation right I mean that's a really good question we when it comes to say deception online we found that people don't necessarily lie more online than often we have that feeling that they should because there's no nonverbal cues but in and it's because we've been interacting with a body for 60,000 years ever since we started using language and when that body goes away we get very suspicious and this is natural but we don't actually find that in fact Erica's honors thesis was to get to people to talk to get to know each other either in chat or face-to-face as one example and we had to look really hard to find differences in line overall line rates didn't change people that were lying about face to face lied about things are outside the conversation whereas people that were lying in computer media communication they could lie about themselves more so there was this that was the only change but we see for example LinkedIn we get more honest resumes produced on LinkedIn when we do an experiment than we do traditional paper printed resumes yes Mike and I've also done a study that shows that okay so maybe there's not that much more lying online especially people you know but that if you are highly motivated to lie you're actually going to be more successful and so we did that study that's that came out in 2010 didn't it my Yap right that we found there that when we motivated one kind of liar and the other liar wasn't motivated that they actually succeeded more than any other kinds of liars and people are very bad at detecting deception there's a lot of consensus on that we perform you know typically around chance but these guys that were highly motivated their partners perform significantly below chance so there is something special at the online space yeah and just to follow up and the part Jeff didn't mention is that in face-to-face you actually see what we call a motivational impairment effect where people do do worse as they become more motivated to lie the good news is they do do worse they're not as effective at lying we see the flip side so that was a question was a really good one in that and in a computer mediated domain we actually see motivated individuals doing better and so dr. Hancock and I actually coined it we called it a motivational enhancement effect but you only see it in computer mediated spaces so when people are online that motivation actually gives them a better chance of telling a lie which is the exact opposite of what people have found and study after study in face-to-face so when you're interviewing Psychopaths for instance do you check out the direction of the eyes what they do with their hands and basic facial expressions as well as all of these scientific aspects well you know what they move so fast it's tough they're shifty characters you can watch a video of Paul Bernardo who's sort of one of the more infamous Canadian serial killers you can go on YouTube and watch him being interrogated a couple of years ago for another murder they suspect he committed and it's a very apt example of these guys he basically overtakes the interviewer and actually two interviewers two interrogators and the amount of body movement and distraction and manipulation it's it's unbelievable we are hoping to start looking at some of that nonverbal behavior as well but it is speculated that the amount of illustrators and body movement that they are doing is one of the ways that they're distracting the listener from the underlying message because they are so good at conning them indefinitely manipulating people face to face it's unbelievable you can spend two or three hours with a psychopath and come out of there feeling like you've been hypnotized and literally alright and you know it's definitely time for a glass of wine and a cold shower and we're not quite sure what it is because there's weird as we've talked about today and Jeff was talking about I'm sure before their language is actually quite distinct and in some ways you don't think it would lend itself to being so conning and manipulative so your question is great and that people are now speculating paper came out by heart and colleagues a couple years ago that maybe it's some of the nonverbal stuff that's going on that's really duping individuals whereas the language can actually provide us the window for instance and we're find that with deception as well that there's been this focus on the nonverbal so much that now we're seeing that language is the place where we see more action with deceptive non-deceptive messages all that my cancers out I think I know what let's say but mike is there what kind of approaches are there for when psychopaths are identified in prison yeah the the the latest word on that is that for a period of time people were very hopeful we could employ a treatment strategy then it went to being absolutely no hope of treating these guys and right now I'd say that probably 20% of experts in the field feel that you could maybe at least manage them in some way standard methods of treatment just standard cog behave cognitive behavioral treatment things that would try and tap into their empathy all of those type of treatments have been showing not only to be largely ineffective they've actually shown to be detrimental in some studies where the psychopaths learned some of those traits and actually use them to be more effective criminals so right now there's a debate about how we can tap into treating these guys for example sex offenders that you used to not treat denying sex offenders if they totally denied their offenses it's very difficult to get them into a treatment group a few years ago they started running groups specifically for these guys saying okay let's just say you didn't do it but but if you did at least you put yourself in a position where people think you did what kind of things can we work on some people suggested you try similar strategy with Psychopaths saying okay you're not a psychopath and and but we want to work on some things that are gonna make your life easier to live and easier to function in terms of having your needs met where you don't end up in prison or you don't end up having to harm other people some people don't believe in that even they feel that it's largely impossible to treat them but others are working on that some have said maybe even just minimizing the amount of damage they do rather than thinking of it as treating them where they won't do damage just the extent and breadth of damage may be can be tained contained a bit by treatment is there an app out there to tell me not to go on by next what is there in the future are we looking at an app that says that it can quickly tell me don't go on the next batch comedy think of practical application law enforcement is phenomenal but you know some of these things that as you mentioned our folks who used Craigslist or online things to us yeah so obviously everything a boy is there going to be a plugin for that comment give me an index on the sides you don't want to be alone right well Mike and I actually have a good friend that recently sold an online dating company in the UK and so we got some insight into these questions they are constantly having to look for bad guys they have a small team of people and this would be the case for any company match would be a lot more much larger those people are trained to identify the people that are really problematic so when people report how this guy was you know violent or whatever then they will go on and do something to his files I mean for instance called ghosting where the person still thinks that they're on the site but no one else can see them and so they think they're just you know unattractive we've done we've looked at deception language patterns and online dating profiles and we can see language aspects there our friend was really excited about this technology the fact that we could detect these things that he thought there was something there again that analysts drinking from a firehose aspect where there's now millions of these online dating profiles over 25 million Americans are using online dating so to try and analyze all of those you need some algorithmic power did you have a question I can think of so many ways that could be used and misused because if you're stepping down from the experimental academic level into use everyday use a lot of these things become distorted simplified to an extent where they're meaningless for instance something like this could be used to screen employees by people who really don't understand the principles etcetera so I mean aside from the civil liberties of fact I can see how it could get down to lower levels where it's misused absolutely Michel Joanna speaking at all well certainly in terms of civil liberties are just in terms of individuals right there's no question at least the from the part of claiming that you can assess psychopathy and claiming you may have additional tools to do that yes I mean if you're diagnosed as a psychopath especially in the United States studies have shown that independent of any other factor same crime same everything you are far more likely to get the death penalty far more likely to get more serious offenses but the term at this point really takes on a negative characteristic for people although that's like starting to slightly change in terms of people suggesting maybe individuals with psychopathy have a reduced culpability but I think the positive thing is here there's such applied value from a law enforcement perspective at this point in terms of both interrogation and prevention and even a little bit some could argue from a treatment perspective like somebody asked earlier where if we see changes in their self-report that again they're unable to control because we're using automated programs where they're not able to micromanage for all of that if we can see some changes in a positive direction from their language maybe this is indicative at least at a small level that there's been some sort of cognitive shift or change that would make them slightly less slightly less dangerous all the major media companies report to you to law enforcement I mean it's gonna be a big nut to crack because then you're gonna have to you law enforcement is not gonna be able to have a team it's Mon on Facebook all time it's kind of have to be an internal team from Facebook and if they see something to notify law enforcement yeah is that the relationships you're thinking about setting up or um no III wouldn't have any sort of predictions about how that's going to work but that that idea of how law enforcement and the social media companies are going to interact is is currently being worked out I mean we don't know how to do this yet there's a there's a huge privacy area here but at the same time Facebook doesn't want to be known as the place where you know predators hang on that's right and so you know New York has particularly tough laws in that space and it was initially aimed at Facebook and MySpace for allowing underage people to get on for allowing known sex offenders to get on so it's an area I know much less about and maybe Michael speak more to it the legal side of it but this isn't it is a huge space of turmoil right now I would say and I think all the notions around the policy aspects around how this is used in court all of these things how this implemented at the company level are all up for grabs on your criteria work equally well when you have people say you're psychopaths or you're not psychopaths and Ron whatever's when you have people of different educational levels different intelligence levels different region a letís etcetera etc etc all of which affect their language do we do your your Quran where there's sort of allow for these things and compensate for them well let Mike answer the question about where all of these guys came from they're all Canadian and most of them were Maritimes I think right Mike uh yeah part of the maritime so right that's right so no we did not control for where they came from or anything like that and those will have some impact thankfully the level that we're looking at most of the types of language looking like these disfluencies are very very very common in language and so I think they would work across these things the that isn't to say that there won't be issues here so we have data from Mike's University University of British Columbia students there that told these positive stories we're now collecting that from Cornell so we'll get a really nice set of different types of people East Coast West Coast Canadian us so we'll see if that if it works there but the answer your question is no it's weird looking just generally absolutely same class that's right but Mike you could talk about how they came from different backgrounds right different injures and enemy we do control like we have control for some stuff where we could see if there was any differences in the in the corpus of the overall language say based on their IQ or something we just need to have access to that information and that's the great thing with the psychopathy research if you can get access to these guys they usually have really detailed background files the majority of guys in this study were individuals we interviewed back east at a couple of medium and maximum security prisons and they were all primarily Caucasian all male and we also considered things like how long they've been in jail for how long it had been since their murder we did consider things like that but you're right there are other sort of little idiosyncratic aspects of maybe the the way they spoke from where they grow up grew up that could impact but we just sort of hope that it all averages out in the mix and and for the most part it was a fairly fairly equal sample in this case it will be interesting to compare across though with our student sample and other samples all these guys were in there though for at least one murder and was all maximum or mediums medium security prison-- yet fantastic question right now there's a lot of speculation that female psychopathy may actually more truly encompass the core aspects of the disorder than even males and in terms of some of the real interpersonal and emotional aspects of it and so how what you'd expect to see I think if you were to do this with a large sample of female Psychopaths you may actually see stronger results for some of the things that we found in terms of how they would be conveying these incidents or let's say other incidents it's it's on there's so little research done overall on female Psychopaths just purely based on logistics and that there's just less of them that it's tough to say but that that would truly be a fascinating study I don't actually personally believe that but some have suggested that some of the core characteristics of psychopathy in terms of the emotional angle and the way that they might go about manipulating people outside of using real overt antisocial behavioural means it kind of gets back to that stereotypical idea that women and in some ways they're more like to use covert types of ways to kind of control things whereas men might just with bravado and anti-social behavior use more more overt styles what you find is with some studies females do score they definitely do score differently on the pcl are and they often do show less of those more stereotypical kind of criminal or antisocial type behaviors and they do show more of what often people think are the core characteristics of psychopathy around the emotional deficits and they're a bit ability to be very callous and very cunning and manipulative they do it in more subtle ways ways that really make a great psychopath and I mean that in a negative sense but if you're a really prototypical psychopath most people hang their hat on the fact that it comes down to the emotional deficits at some of the interpersonal stuff and some women Psychopaths really seem to to delineate this best so how that would play out in their language that's great I had never really thought of that in terms of study but that would be fascinating to compare a bunch of males and females and I think we can maybe kind of do that from our student sample actually admit maybe actually dr. Hancock has even briefly looked at that I'm not sure you know we didn't break it down by gender yet so when I get back I'll do that tonight hey well I have to give you credit for that that would be it would actually be really interesting to see if there's certain aspects that we can start to look at differences in male and female psychopathy but do that from the perspective of their language how many students are taking part in that social media we've just begun collecting the data what's what's your hope for the 200 and the UBC students we have about 200 180 I think that yeah yeah closing in on 200 yeah great well thank you guys so much it's 1:30 so I just want to say thanks for all the questions you

Channel: Cornell University

Views: 589,176

Rating: 4.7400775 out of 5

Keywords: communication, psychology, computer science

Id: 6vF5PtdiiCo

Length: 53min 37sec (3217 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2012

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Using computerized text analysis, Cornell professor of communication Jeff Hancock and colleagues at the University of British Columbia found that psychopathic criminals tend to make identifiable word choices when talking about their crimes. Hancock and UBC professor of psychology Michael Woodworth discussed the implications of their study at the October 17, 2011 Inside Cornell session at Cornell's ILR Conference Center in Midtown Manhattan.