The LSRP, 26 items
Am I a psychopath?
The honest first answer is that nobody can hand you that word from a web page, and the pages implying otherwise are the ones to leave. What can be done is this. The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale is the research questionnaire the term is most often measured with outside a clinic: twenty-six items, scored on two scales at once and read against the sample it was published on. Primary is the cold end, callousness and manipulation and the absence of remorse. Secondary is the hot end, impulsivity and reactivity and the trouble that follows. You get both numbers, both bands, and the sentence that says what having them does and does not mean.
The two scales, and what each one reads
Primary
16 items, the cold end
Callousness, manipulation, a self-estimate that needs nobody's agreement, and remorse that does not arrive. This scale tracks the interpersonal-affective core, the side Hare's checklist calls Factor 1. It is the more stable of the two and the one that does not respond to work.
Secondary
10 items, the hot end
Impulsivity, frustration that spills, plans abandoned, trouble that repeats. This tracks the lifestyle-antisocial side, Hare's Factor 2. It is the scale that produces the visible damage, and the one that does respond to structure.
The pair, not the sum
Why there is no single score
A high primary with a low secondary and a high secondary with a low primary are different people who would share a total. The result reports them separately, with a band on each, and says which one leads.
The scale is published: Levenson, Kiehl and Fitzpatrick, 1995, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Its norms come from 487 US university undergraduates, mixed sex, and the result page prints that sample and its figures rather than waving at published norms and moving on.
What a score here can and cannot be
The LSRP is a research instrument, not a diagnostic one. A high band means your answers landed where the high-scoring end of a student sample landed. It is not a diagnosis, and nobody becomes a category by answering twenty-six questions about themselves.
Psychopathy is not a DSM diagnosis in its own right. The DSM's diagnosis is Antisocial Personality Disorder. DSM-5 does carry a "with psychopathic features" specifier for antisocial personality disorder, but in Section III, the alternative model, and not in the criteria set most clinicians diagnose from. The PCL-R, the instrument the word is anchored to in research, is scored by a clinician from an interview and a file and cannot be taken online.
The scale has known limits and the result page states them. The secondary scale is the less reliable half, its internal consistency sits around .63 to .69, and the field's best-fitting structure for the LSRP is three factors rather than the two scored here (Sellbom 2011; Lagera and Sellbom 2023). The norms are pooled across sex, which places a woman roughly half a standard deviation high on primary, so the sex means are printed beside the band.
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
Can a test tell me whether I am a psychopath?
No, and the ones that say otherwise are selling the certainty rather than the reading. What a self-report can do is place your answers against a sample: high, average or low on each of two scales, with the sample named. Whether the word applies to a person is a clinician's call, made from an interview and a history, with an instrument no website has access to.
What does the LSRP measure?
The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale measures two constructs at once. Primary psychopathy, sixteen items, is the callous and manipulative end with absent remorse. Secondary psychopathy, ten items, is the impulsive and reactive end with poor frustration tolerance. It was built in 1995 to study the constructs in people who were not in prison, which is what makes it the appropriate self-report here and also what limits it: it was normed on students rather than on a general adult sample.
Is a psychopathy test the same as the PCL-R?
No. The PCL-R is twenty items rated 0, 1 or 2 by a trained clinician from an interview plus collateral records, giving a maximum of 40, which is where the phrase forty-question psychopath test comes from. Everything free on the internet is a self-report questionnaire that borrows the construct. The difference is not length, it is who does the rating and what they are allowed to read.
What is a high score on a psychopathy test?
On this one it means your total on a scale sat a standard deviation or more above the mean of the sample it is read against, which is 487 US undergraduates from 1995. That is a statement about where your answers fell in one sample, from one decade, in one country. It is not a threshold, the LSRP has no cutoff, and no band on this site is a diagnosis.
What is the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath?
Mostly the speaker. Neither word is a diagnosis: the DSM has Antisocial Personality Disorder and ICD-11 has a dissociality trait qualifier, and neither manual uses either term as a category. In ordinary use, psychopathy points at the cold interpersonal core plus the behaviour, and sociopathy at the behaviour and the volatility without that core, which is close to the primary and secondary split this test scores. Anyone telling you the line between them is diagnostic is describing a convention, not a finding.
How common is psychopathy?
A 2021 meta-analysis of 15 studies covering 11,497 adults put the general estimate at 4.5 percent, with a confidence interval running from 1.6 to 7.9 (Sanz-Garcia et al., Frontiers in Psychology). Split by method, studies using the clinician-rated PCL-R came out at 1.2 percent and self-report studies at 5.4 percent, which is most of the disagreement you will see quoted elsewhere. Where the sample was drawn matters more than the instrument: community 1.9 percent, students 8.1 percent, organizational samples 12.9 percent.
Is psychopathy treatable?
The two halves behave differently, which is the useful part of scoring them apart. The impulsive, reactive side responds to structure and to therapy aimed at the gap between impulse and action. The cold interpersonal core is stable and does not respond to work in the way the word treatment implies; what changes there is what someone knows about their own pattern. If a score here has left you looking for someone to talk to, that is a reason to see a clinician, not to retake the test.
Who wrote this?
Kanika Batra, diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder and clinically assessed as Factor 1 psychopathy by her psychiatrist. Every result page on this site is written from that position rather than about it, which is the one thing the rest of this search result cannot offer.
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 ASPD and sociopathy guide.