8 Ways To Tell If You're A Psychopath

6. Is It In Your Gender?

We tend to find that males psychopaths vastly outnumber female psychopaths, possibly by as much as 20:1, but that could be that we're just not as good at spotting them.

For a start, most of our figures on psychopathy come from prison inmates. Prisoners, by their very nature, are the ones that got caught and some think that the lack of female psychopaths on the records could be that they get away with the "typical" psychopath crimes because we don't expect women to commit them. It could also be for this reason that women who exhibit psychopathic tendencies are often given diagnoses of histrionic or borderline personality disorders.

There is always the possibility that there really are fewer female psychopaths, or at least violent ones that are likely to get caught, and this could be down to genetics.

The aggression gene that has been linked to violent psychopathy, MAOA, is passed down in the X chromosome. Females receive two X chromosomes, and so the effect of the gene could be diluted out, but males only receive on X chromosome, and therefore MAOA is more likely to be expressed.