Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Blog #2 Ronson chapters 4 and 5

In "The Psychopath Test", Jon attends a seminar headed by Bob Hare to learn about the different items used to identify a psychopath, and Jon starts to worry himself if he possesses any of the traits.. Bob met with Jon at a bar and told him about his path to making the Psychopath test. He worked at a psychiatric prison, and was tricked so much by psychopaths, that he devised a test to pick them out of a crowd. Now he is teaching a seminar on it. Most of the attendees of the seminar arrived with skepticism. Hare then got into stories of psychopaths, and actual accounts of his test being used. The people attending the seminar became less skeptical as time went on, because they could see the use of the Psychopath Test in actual documentaries. After the seminar, Jon became an advocate of the Psychopath Test, and started using it on people to see if he could pick them out as being a psychopath. He started to worry that he himself possessed some of the traits, but Hare reassured him, and told him that if he was worrying that much about it, he was not a psychopath.

Chapter 4 was very interesting. I liked how Ronson would put the item number and explanation of the Psychopath Test in whenever he believed someone held one of the psychopath traits. It makes me want to try and pick out psychopaths. While I was reading the chapter I kept thinking it was fiction, because I feel like it would be unjustifiable to just use a checklist to determine if someone was a psychopath, but towards the end I realized that most people would not fall under a majority of the items. In chapter 5, I enjoyed how Ronson put his skills to the test. I was even trying to put my own skills to the test to see if I thought Toto was a psychopath before Ronson did. I did think he was a psychopath, which it turns out he probably was.

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