There's been a ongoing debate on insight and sociopathy. I remember making a television appearance and being told recently that sociopaths lack insight, and so if a sociopath had insight he wouldn't actually be a sociopath. I've also heard that if sociopaths don't have empathy, they can't experience insight. And maybe it's true that sociopaths lack definition, particularly if we use Merriam Webster's first definition which is "understanding or awareness of one's mental or emotional condition; especially : recognition that one is mentally ill". Because many (most?) sociopaths are not self aware and few would classify themselves as mentally ill even though they may clinically qualify.
But if we think of insight as the ability to understand or at least predict particular traits of a person on a deep level, then sociopaths do it and approximately the same way as this data analytics tool presumes to do so. From an Engadget articles on how your Facebook likes can predict all sorts of other personal attributes:
[Researchers at Cambridge and Stanford] created a computer program that sifted through the Facebook likes of over 85,000 users to see if a person's preferences could rat out their true persona. The team used certain associations that seem fairly obvious; for instance, liking tattoos means you're more likely to drink alcohol. Others were more bizarre: apparently, people who like curly fries tend to be intelligent. Who knew?
The researchers made the subjects take a MyPersonality survey to create a baseline, then asked friends and relatives to judge them with a similar survey. The results were surprising -- the computer model could judge someone better than a friend or roommate by analyzing just 70 likes, and do better than a parent or sibling with 150 likes. The average number of likes per user in the study was 227, enough for the computer to evaluate someone better than almost anyone, with one exception: their spouses.
You can try the program here, but you need to be a very active Facebook user for it to have enough data to crunch. But you can imagine that if a computer is able to learn so much about you based on your Facebook likes, and if Sherlock Holmes is able to learn so much about you based on the mustard stains on your shirt, it should be very possible for a sociopath to have similar levels of insight about you and based on approximately the same techniques.
But if we think of insight as the ability to understand or at least predict particular traits of a person on a deep level, then sociopaths do it and approximately the same way as this data analytics tool presumes to do so. From an Engadget articles on how your Facebook likes can predict all sorts of other personal attributes:
[Researchers at Cambridge and Stanford] created a computer program that sifted through the Facebook likes of over 85,000 users to see if a person's preferences could rat out their true persona. The team used certain associations that seem fairly obvious; for instance, liking tattoos means you're more likely to drink alcohol. Others were more bizarre: apparently, people who like curly fries tend to be intelligent. Who knew?
The researchers made the subjects take a MyPersonality survey to create a baseline, then asked friends and relatives to judge them with a similar survey. The results were surprising -- the computer model could judge someone better than a friend or roommate by analyzing just 70 likes, and do better than a parent or sibling with 150 likes. The average number of likes per user in the study was 227, enough for the computer to evaluate someone better than almost anyone, with one exception: their spouses.
You can try the program here, but you need to be a very active Facebook user for it to have enough data to crunch. But you can imagine that if a computer is able to learn so much about you based on your Facebook likes, and if Sherlock Holmes is able to learn so much about you based on the mustard stains on your shirt, it should be very possible for a sociopath to have similar levels of insight about you and based on approximately the same techniques.