Like many people, I've done some bad things in my life — chewed with my mouth open, kissed the wrong girls, signed friends and neighbors up for subscriptions to Juggs and Barely Legal. And then, one morning, not so very long ago, I woke up and decided to see just how rotten a person I'd become.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote a book about this once; the hero of that novel, one Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, saw how rotten he was by butchering an old hag with a hatchet. But we live in more civilized times, and pay others to test for the depravities we can preempt and thereby prevent. So, if you happen to spend most of your time on Wall Street — or behind bars — there's a good chance you've already experienced such a thing: the MMPI, or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, which was introduced in 1942, revised in 1989, and used throughout the years to evaluate criminals and mental patients, screen clergy members and law-enforcement officials, and identify yes-men in gray flannel suits to corporate employers. I took the test — which consists of a No.2 pencil, an hour in a quiet room, and 567 true-or-false questions — in a psychologist's office on the Upper West Side, and waited 20 minutes for the results.
They weren't pretty. The good news was that I'd scored off the charts for honesty. I imagine that if you were appealing your death sentence, or applying for a job at Bear Stearns, you'd think twice before responding- — though a lack of response is also factored into the test results — to statements like "I hate my whole family," or "It does not bother me personally to see animals suffer." But I had no interest in gray flannel. Despite a thoroughly average, suburban upbringing — right down to the wood-paneled basement and two-car garage — I'd decided at the age of 17 to live by my wits and avoid the office entirely. I wasn't applying for anything in particular. I had no reasons to lie. But, like many writers, not only was I morbidly curious about my psychological disposition, I'd spent so long in the wilderness that I'd come to think of myself as totally unsuited for any other line of work. Here was a chance to see if my suspicions were justified. (If nothing else, I'd have something to tell my parents the next time they started in about law school.)
In any case, the cunning folks who designed the MMPI equipped it with L, F, and K scales, which test for lying, faking, and defensiveness, and adjust for just such evasions: Believe me when I tell you that, if I'm a psychopath, I've turned out to be an especially honest psychopath.
The bad news was, I've turned out to be a bit of a psychopath.
