The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
Published 2011 · 286 pages · 72,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, Psychology, Nonfiction
How hard is The Psychopath Test to read?
The Psychopath Test scores 27 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Ronson writes in plain conversational English, with clinical terms like the Psychopathy Checklist explained as he meets them. It sits near Beach Read in accessibility, with a little more medical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Sentences are short, comic and direct, closer to journalism than to argument. Occasional long reported passages stay easy to follow.
- Abstraction: 36 out of 100
- Ideas about diagnosis and sanity arrive through concrete interviews with Tony, Dunlap and Constant. It resembles Atomic Habits in grounding concepts in examples.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Dozens of figures and episodes fill the book, but each is spread over an easy anecdote. It is richer than a memoir but lighter than Atomic Habits' ideas per page.
How The Psychopath Test is regarded
The Psychopath Test holds a literary regard score of 42 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.