The Factor Test
How much of you is Factor 2?
Factor 2 is the half of Hare's structure that shows. The need for stimulation, the years financed by other people, the absence of a five-year answer, impulsivity, irresponsibility, a temper with a body count of jobs, trouble that started before anyone was old enough to be charged for it. It is the side more associated with instability and with criminality, and it is the side that gets a person caught, because it is the part that leaves a record. The test below is twenty items, ten written toward each factor, so your Factor 2 score arrives next to your Factor 1 score rather than on its own. A number for one factor with nothing beside it says almost nothing, which is why no page here offers one.
The eight facets Factor 2 is written toward
These are the lifestyle and antisocial facets of Hare's checklist. The items in the take are written toward them, one facet at a time, in the first person.
Need for stimulation
Boredom is not an idle state. It makes decisions, and the decisions arrive before the reasons do.
Parasitic lifestyle
More than one stretch financed by somebody else, framed at the time as temporary and by them as a pattern.
No realistic long-term goals
The five-year question has no honest answer, and the versions given out loud were built for the person asking.
Impulsivity
Action first, discovery second. The consequence lands about three days late and is a surprise every time.
Irresponsibility
Obligations that were real to everyone else and negotiable to you. Rent, shifts, the thing you said you would do.
Poor behavioural controls
A temper that arrives fully formed and leaves a bill. The apology, where there is one, comes after the cost is known.
Early behavioural problems
It started young. This facet is why the diagnosis that sits nearest asks about the years before fifteen.
Criminal versatility
Rule-breaking that is not specialised. Not one habit, a general looseness about which rules apply.
The other ten items read Factor 1: charm with a purpose, grandiosity, lying that costs nothing, manipulation, absent remorse, shallow feeling, callousness, and blame that never lands on the self. You are scored on both, because the pair is the finding and neither number is.
Why the two are scored together
Factor 2 alone
The hot shell without the cold core
The interior still works. Guilt lands late, but it lands. This is the more common of the two and the one that produces most of what the public means by the word psychopath, because it is the half that ends up in a report. It is also the half that responds to structure and to the right kind of therapy, which almost nobody with this result realises is the good news.
Both high
The configuration the checklist was built to find
The plan and the impulse in the same person. In the research this carries the worst outcomes of the four possible results, and not because the interior is darker than the cold profile's: the shell keeps handing the interior consequences it would otherwise have swerved.
Factor 1 alone
The cold core without the shell
Composed, employed, unread for decades, because nothing visibly breaks. If you arrived here certain you were the Factor 2 one, this is the result worth being prepared for.
What this is, and what it is not
This is a self-report reading aid written toward the facets of the PCL-R. It is not the PCL-R. The PCL-R is scored by a trained clinician from an interview and a file, it cannot be taken online, and nothing here pretends otherwise.
There are no published norms for a twenty-item bank written for this site, so the bands are thirds of the scale and the result says so rather than inventing a percentile. If you want a number against a real sample, the Sociopath Test runs the LSRP against Levenson's 1995 sample of 487 US undergraduates and reports where you sit in it.
Nothing on this page or its result is a diagnosis. Factor 1 and Factor 2 are statistics from Hare's checklist, not categories in the DSM or in ICD-11, and a high score on either describes a set of answers rather than a person.
Where to go next
Each of these is a different instrument on the same question, and every one of them is free.
Frequently asked questions
What is Factor 2 psychopathy?
Factor 2 is the lifestyle and antisocial half of the two-factor structure Hare's PCL-R produces. It covers the need for stimulation, a parasitic lifestyle, the absence of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, poor behavioural controls, early behavioural problems and criminal versatility. Factor 1, the other half, is the interpersonal and affective core: charm, grandiosity, lying, manipulation, no remorse, shallow feeling and callousness. Factor 2 is the half that leaves a record, which is why it is the half most people have heard described.
What are the Factor 2 psychopathy traits?
Eight facets, taken from the checklist itself: needing stimulation and being bored without it, living off other people, having no realistic long-term goals, acting without planning ahead, failing to meet obligations, losing control of behaviour, showing behavioural problems early in life, and breaking rules of several different kinds rather than specialising in one. The items in the test on this page are written toward those eight, one at a time.
Is Factor 2 psychopathy the same as sociopathy?
They point at overlapping territory and they are not the same kind of claim. Factor 2 is one half of a statistical structure inside a clinician-rated checklist. Sociopathy is not a diagnosis in the DSM or in ICD-11 at all; it is a popular word, and what it usually describes, impulsivity and poor control and trouble that starts early, is much closer to Factor 2 than to Factor 1. The nearest formal terms are Antisocial Personality Disorder, whose criteria overlap Factor 2 heavily, and secondary psychopathy, which is the research name for the same side. So the words get used for each other reasonably often, and none of the three is something a quiz can hand you.
Is secondary psychopathy the same as Factor 2?
Close enough that the terms get used interchangeably in most papers. Primary and secondary are the older pair, from Karpman, and they are what the LSRP scores. Factor 1 and Factor 2 are Hare's, from the PCL-R. Primary maps onto the cold Factor 1 core and secondary onto the hot Factor 2 shell. The words differ by author, the split does not.
Can you score high on both factors?
Yes, and that is the configuration the checklist was built to find. In the research it carries the worst outcomes of the four possible results, because the impulsive half keeps producing consequences the calculating half would have avoided. The test on this page reports both scores separately for exactly that reason: a single psychopathy number cannot tell those profiles apart, and they look nothing alike from the outside.
Is there a Factor 2 psychopathy test, and can it score me?
This is one, with its limit stated plainly. Twenty self-report items, ten written toward each factor, giving you a band on Factor 2 and a band on Factor 1 and telling you which leads. What no online test can do is score the PCL-R, which needs a trained clinician, an interview and a file, so any page claiming to give you a real Factor 2 score is claiming access it does not have.
What is the PCL-R, and can I take it online?
The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised is a twenty-item instrument a trained clinician scores from an interview plus collateral records, each item rated 0, 1 or 2, which is where the maximum of 40 comes from. It is used in research and in forensic settings. You cannot take it online, because the rater and the file are the instrument. Everything free on the internet, this page included, is a self-report standing next to it.
Who wrote this?
Kanika Batra, diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder and clinically assessed as Factor 1 psychopathy by her psychiatrist. That is a clinician's assessment, not a self-description and not the output of a quiz. The Factor 2 material on this page is therefore written from outside it, from the side she was not assessed as.
Nothing on this page or its results is a diagnosis. A band is a reading aid; only a clinician can diagnose, and only with a proper assessment. Every figure on a result describes people who took this quiz. Aggregates live on the Dark Mirror Index, and the long read is the Factor 1 vs Factor 2 guide.