LINCOLN, NE—A researcher at the University of Nebraska has come across a unique finding in a personality pattern. Psychologist Patricia Ludlow, 41, studies what she terms "dark personalities," such as narcissists, con artists, and psychopaths.
Dr. Ludlow recently completed a 2-year study of personalities to see if she could more clearly come to understand shared behaviors and characteristics of these dark personalities. "There is some disagreement in the field," she explained, "about how best to measure psychopathy. Some argue that it should be based more on behavior rather than just personality, so I set out to see if we could clearly diagnose a psychopath through behavior."
The clinical psychologist and her team of researchers monitored and questioned hundreds of participants' behaviors and found one that consistently predicted the disregard for others' rights, lack of empathy, and delusions of self-importance that are associated with psychopaths. "Literally every single participant who had ever left a shopping cart in a parking space was a flaming psycho," Ludlow recalled. "This pattern was consistent across all age groups, races, socioeconomic statuses, and all other variables we looked at. If you have ever left a shopping cart in a parking space, you too are an absolute psycho."
The team's report describes the rates of psychopathy with the shopping-cart-leaving behavior as "both indicative of the other," meaning that if a person was a psychopath, they were certain to have left a shopping cart in a parking space, and if they had left a shopping cart in a parking space, they were certainly a psychopath. "This was the really interesting part, because usually you will find some exceptions to the pattern—you know, somebody who was a perfectly reasonable human otherwise, but who also happened to leave a shopping cart in a parking space once or twice. Or at least, a psychopath who had not ever actually left a shopping cart in a parking space. We found not a single instance of that ever occurring."
Now that this litmus test for psychopathy appears clear, it is not necessarily surprising, said Clinical Psychologist Gary Conway, 39, who was not involved in the research. "Yes, it actually makes intuitive sense. I mean, of all of the senselessly chaotic and selfish things to do, leaving a cart in an otherwise perfectly usable parking space—especially when there are plenty of cart collection sites close by—is really nothing short of monstrous. If there is some worse way to give a middle finger to the rest of the people who would also like to find a place to park, and to the employees who must retrieve the carts, then I don't know what it is."