Tracking psychopath's language patterns online

The following is going to sound absurd to some of you, and very promising to others. Cornell professor Jeff Hancock University of Critish Columbia professors Michael T. Woodworth and Stephen Porter have come up with a text analysis system that they believe may be able to pick out sociopaths in something as short as a 140 character "tweet." As reported by the NY Daily news:

A New York professor who studied the tell-tale speech patterns of psycho killers is broadening his research to see if tweets, texts and emails reveal similar tendencies.

That could help detectives identify murder suspects through their social media and online postings - and develop strategies for grilling them in the interrogation room.

"I do think some of these tools will be used by law enforcement," Cornell's Jeffrey Hancock said at a briefing Monday about his research.

The core of the study involves interviews with 56 convicted killers in a maximum security Canadian prison - including 18 who were certified psychopaths.

Hancock and co-author Michael Woodworth of the University of British Columbia used linguistics analysis to parse the transcripts. They noticed several trends. The psychopaths used the past tense more often than the others, suggesting a higher degree of detachment from the crime - a hallmark of the disorder. They also peppered their speech with verbal stumbles like "uh" and "um," showing it was difficult for them to talk about an emotional event. The researchers knew that psychopaths often view their killings as a means to an end - not an emotional reaction - and that was borne out in their language. They used cause-and-effect words like "so" and "because" more often than non-psychopaths - and focused on material needs instead of social needs like love and family. "Psychopaths talked a lot about what they ate that day [of the murder]," Hancock said. "They talked about money more often."

As a followup, the profs are now having student volunteers submit their online communications and fill out a survey that measures their psychopathic tendencies. They hope the exercise will determine if the language patterns used in social media can show whether a person is a psychopath. That could be a valuable tool for investigators because much of language is unconscious - and less likely to be manipulated by psychopaths, who can be incredibly cunning. "You can spend two or three hours with a psychopath and come out of there feeling like you've been hypnotized," he said. "It's definitely time for a glass of wine and a shower."

Or from the Daily News:

Psychopaths also used more subordinating conjunctions like ‘because’ which is explained by their interest in cause and effect.

The report says: ‘This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)’.

Uh, that reminds me of last night when I spent so much money on dinner because I was starving and I was wearing coveralls, since I was worried about the blood.

18 certified psychopaths? Even if you took large language samples from each of these prisoners (emphasis on prisoner), I imagine that it would be very difficult to show that these similarities were actually correlated to the isolated variable "psychopath." Law of large numbers, anyone? Also, the language was taken from having people describe their crimes. Luckily I don't ever talk about mine on Twitter so I should be fine...