Election 2016 has so far provided rich pickings for armchair psychologists—and some professionals too. An academic at prestigious Oxford University has weighed in with his expert opinion and declared both Trump and Clinton are “full blown psychopaths.” Dr Kevin Dutton has been exploring the psychopathic traits of the candidates and comparing them to other historical figures – such as Adolf Hitler, Saddamm Hussein, and Jesus – using a standard psychometric tool, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory – Revised (PPI-R), reports the Daily Mail. While learning about these traits, Dutton also looked at which ones can be beneficial and which will lead to destruction. He explains that being a psychopath is not an all-or-nothing affair, but is on a spectrum along which each of us has our place. There also seems to be a range of positions that attract individuals on the high end of the psychopathic scale such as business, surgery, the law military and of course, politics. Previous to this recent study, Dutton contacted the official biographers of many historical leads and asked them to fill out an abbreviated version of the PPI-R in order to create a table showing which traits these figures had. The table shows each subject’s scores for [...]
