An expert psychologist has said the way the results were gathered were “pretty much uninformative” and the connection between psychopathy and buying crypto was “very weak”.
A study claiming that psychopaths and others with ‘Dark Tetrad’ personality traits are drawn to crypto has been criticized as "meaningless" for showing very weak correlativity by a psychology expert from The University of Otago.Researchers with backgrounds predominately in marketing and advertising from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) surveyed 566 people on their attitudes toward crypto and correlated the results with four specific personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.The findings were first shared by The US Sun, and were widely syndicated by the mainstream media, with the New York Post headline screaming “Bitcoin fans are psychopaths who don't care about anyone,” and Salon asserting that “Impulsive psychopaths like crypto”.Bitcoin fans are psychopaths who don't care about anyone, study shows https://t.co/9WZQkzoIPX pic.twitter.com/YTGcULRCef— New York Post (@nypost) April 12, 2022
But speaking to Cointelegraph, Professor Martin Sellbom from The University of Otago’s Psychology Department — an international expert on personality disorders and personality assessment — criticized the results of the study as essentially meaningless.“The effects they report, for example, the strength of relationships between these so-called ‘dark tetrad’ traits and attitude and intention to buy cryptocurrency are very weak, pretty much meaningless, in my opinion."The widely used Short Dark Triad (SD-3) personality test which rates the traits of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism out of a maximum score of 5 was used to assess participants’ personalities.The results of the study show that participant's scores for psychopathy and narcissism were below the average levels as determined by psychometric assessment group OpenPsychometrics.
