Answer This Riddle Correctly, And You Might Be A Psychopath

There's a strange riddle involving a funeral that some believe could indicate psychopathic tendencies based on how you answer it.

As Healthline explains, though “psychopathy” isn’t an official medical diagnosis, people often use “psychopath” to describe certain traits linked with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).

This can include characteristics like a lack of empathy or remorse and an inclination toward manipulative behavior.

"A personality disorder is a lifelong mental health condition that affects how you behave and feel about others and yourself, often causing a high degree of distress or impairment," the site clarifies.

"It may affect aspects of your life, like the way you think, how you feel, how you interact with others, and your ability to control your impulses."

Diagnosing psychopathy is a complex process, but some researchers studying personality disorders have proposed methods for identifying traits associated with psychopathic behavior.

In fact, a 2011 study published in the journal Cognition examined how people reacted to certain intense and morally difficult scenarios.

Can you solve this riddle? Getty Stock Image

In this research, scientists from Columbia Business School and Cornell University presented a group of participants with a mix of moral dilemmas and personality tests.

One particularly unsettling scenario involved a funeral scene.

According to Business Insider, the riddle was: "While at her own mother's funeral, a woman meets a guy she doesn't know. She thinks this guy is amazing - her dream man - and is pretty sure he could be the love of her life. However, she never asked for his name or number and afterwards could not find anyone who knows who he was. A few days later the girl kills her own sister - but why?"

One of the riddles is about a funeral Getty Stock Image

Did you figure out an answer? Technically, there’s no “right” or “wrong” answer, but if you guessed that the woman might have killed her sister to see the man again at her funeral, then you may have been “thinking like a psychopath.”

The second scenario is just as unsettling: "A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people. Would you push the man?"

If you opted to push the man in order to save five people, even though it involves harming another, it aligns with responses commonly linked to psychopathic thought patterns.

Another scenario asks you to imagine standing on a footbridge Getty Stock Image

It’s crucial to remember that these scenarios are not meant to diagnose psychopathy, and even the researchers emphasize this point themselves.

"Although the study does not resolve the ethical debate, it points to a flaw in the widely-adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas to identify optimal moral judgment," said Daniel Bartels, a co-author of the study at Columbia Business School.

He went on to add: "These methods fail to distinguish between people who endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (like those captured by our measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse them out of genuine concern for the welfare of others."