Do politicians have to take psych evaluation tests?

LOL…great Q.!
I haven’t a clue, but I will be interested to find out.
Makes sense to me, but then again, sociopaths are smooth operators and could probably fool the best psych. professional, hell, look how god they are at lying to the population and each other.
Sociopaths are intelligent, clever, amazingly skilled at deceptive charm, lying and always have an angle, uh….sociopath = politician. haha

@Coloma I’m sure there are ways they can pick out a sociopath. A profiler should be able to tell. Heck, I’m no profiler and yet I can tell when I see one running for office. Though most are egocentric and erratic like Sarah Palin.

@Pandora Sometimes perhaps, but…they are infamous for beating polygraphs and charming their way out of situations. I’d say 50/50 odds, at best.

They certainly should have to, but to the best of my knowledge, they don’t.

@Coloma I’ll take those odds over not having them tested.

They don’t. A psych evaluation won’t help either since surveys and questionnaires are not an objective science and personality, thinking, and emotions cannot be directly measured. The psychologist will end up concluding from a subjective answer.

However, there are certain branches of psychology that might remedy that such as Behavioral neuroscience, Neuropsychology, Physiological psychology, Cognitive neuroscience but I would imagine to do this regularly would take a lot of time and the costs would be enormous.

Those Fmri machines are really good.

@exnick Think of the cost of putting some cracker nut in the presidents chair. I thought there was a test where they compared sociopaths brain patterns or something like that? One test. Your brain looks normal you get to run. It doesn’t then you don’t.

Yeah, they examined the brains of serial killers. They did find differences that might be the cause of the behavior, but I don’t think its conclusive though. Btw, brain sizes are not important at all. It’s the “processor” of the brain that’s important. People use to make misogynistic arguments that women have smaller brains than men and that makes men more intelligent, but neuroscience has shown that although a woman’s brain is smaller than a mans, it actually has the same and possibly even more processing power than a man’s. However, men and women do think differently.

Schizophrenia, for example, can be observed clearly on the brain when under an mri machine.

They should, but being psychopathic, they’d surely find ways to beat the tests.

@Pandora They could easily afford these test if they just use 1/10th of what they spend on media coverage. I’m sure they have that all available in Bethesda. Since it is a military hospital, it won’t cost them that much.

@Pandora Ah, but you’re asking them to a) take money from the war chest and b) risk them losing the campaign. A double-lose.

There are those who think that mental illness or sociopathy is a requirement, or perhaps even part of the definition, of politician.
The late Douglas Adams was of the opinion that running things was too important to leave to politicians, so they mostly get elected to keep people from realizing that they don’t do anything. So it was with Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Nah, I don’t think it should be a requirement. I mean we have let the clowns run the circus for some time and all we are left with is a bunch of crying children, lots of elephant and donkey shit, and stale old popcorn. We aren’t too far from them releasing the lions on the crowd.

What you need is a candidate who undergoes and successfully passing an evaluation as a campaign publicity stunt, and for that to catch on.

@Nullo GA! LMAO That would work.