The U.S. State With the Most Psychopaths Is …

Quaint, quiet Connecticut—home of the Frisbee and the first speed-limit law—is also apparently home to the most Norman Bates types. A recent study spotted by Quartz ranked each U.S. state by the number of psychopaths who are estimated to be living there, and the results may surprise you.

Following Connecticut, the top five states by psychopathy are California, New Jersey, New York, and Wyoming (New York and Wyoming tied). The least psychopathic state, on the other hand, is wild and wonderful West Virginia.

Psychopathy on its own is not a clinical diagnosis. Rather, it's a subset of antisocial personality disorder, whose symptoms include egocentrism, manipulativeness, impulsivity, lack of remorse, and an inability to form intimate relationships, just to name a few.

The study, posted on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), partly drew data from previous research on the “big five” personality traits—Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience—and their prevalence in each state [PDF]. Ryan Murphy, the study's author, said there's a correlation between these personality traits and some of the traits associated with psychopathy—namely boldness, meanness, and disinhibition.

“Boldness corresponds to low neuroticism and high extraversion, meanness corresponds to low agreeableness, and disinhibition corresponds to low conscientiousness,” Murphy told Quartz. In the earlier study of personality scores by state, Connecticut showed high levels of extraversion and comparatively low levels of conscientiousness.

The District of Columbia was also taken into consideration and showed higher levels of psychopathy than any state in the country. However, Murphy said this isn’t a fair representation because D.C. is an urban area and cannot be accurately compared to a larger, more geographically diverse region.

Although D.C. was excluded from the final ranking, Murphy said there might be something to the popular belief that politicians are more likely to be psychopaths: “The presence of psychopaths in [the] District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture found in [my research] that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere.”

It must be noted, though, that these findings have only recently been pre-published and are not yet peer-reviewed.

Here’s how the 48 contiguous states (excluding Hawaii and Alaska) ranked for psychopathy:

1. Connecticut
2. California
3. New Jersey
4. & 5. New York / Wyoming (tied)
6. Maine
7. Wisconsin
8. Nevada
9. Illinois
10. Virginia
11. Maryland
12. South Dakota
13. Delaware
14. Massachusetts
15. Arizona
16. Florida
17. Iowa
18. Colorado
19. Texas
20. Ohio
21. Utah
22. Arkansas
23. Idaho
24. North Dakota
25. Michigan
26. Alabama
27. Pennsylvania
28. Rhode Island
29. Louisiana
30. Kansas
31. Georgia
32. Minnesota
33. Missouri
34. Washington
35. Kentucky
36. Nebraska
37. South Carolina
38. New Hampshire
39. Oregon
40. Indiana
41. Mississippi
42. Montana
43. Oklahoma
44. New Mexico
45. North Carolina
46. Tennessee
47. Vermont
48. West Virginia

[h/t Quartz]