While movies have long conditioned us to believe that psychopaths listen to classical music as they prepare their instruments of torture or throw brains on the grill, it turns out that their tastes are much more modern.

A recent survey found that people with the “highest psychopath scores” were huge fans of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” and mid-90s Blackstreet jam “No Diggity.” (Though maybe they just like to run!) In contrast, fans of Sia’s “Titanium” and The Knack’s “My Sharona” were amongst the least psychopathic.

Why is this important? Researchers believe that analyzing the playlists of certain individuals could be used to recognize potential psychopaths without them knowing it, though that seems like a pretty terrifying slippery slope into Minority Report territory.

“You don’t want to have these people in positions where they can cause a lot of harm,” said lead researcher Pascal Wallisch. “We need a tool to identify them without their cooperation or consent.” As noted in The Guardian, scientists previously identified gene variants which are more common in psychopaths, but that certainly isn’t definitive enough. Ditto for brain scans.

The Rock's New Beard:

Wallisch had originally recruited volunteers to study their taste in music. Upon learning that many of those same volunteers had gone through psychological testing, however, he combined the results to find the song preferences of psychopaths and non-psychopaths alike. He also added that while the aforementioned songs were among those enjoyed by participants who scored higher on measures of psychopathy, there were tracks with even greater predictive power. Of course he wouldn’t name them for fear of compromising future research. (Dystopian YA authors take note! This is what the future looks like!)

Wallisch’s future study will seek to learn whether this connection between music and psychopathy is real or not. And he seems to have acknowledged that having this kind of information could pose a major ethical problem down the road (not to mention other confounding factors — popular music is popular for a reason, after all; everyone listens to it).

“The beauty of this idea is you can use it as a screening test without consent, cooperation or maybe even the knowledge of the people involved,” he said. “The ethics of this are very hairy, but so is having a psychopath as a boss, and so is having a psychopath in any position of power.” (Yes, he did repeat that consent and cooperation part twice; we noticed it, too)

Right now, the research team stresses that their findings are preliminary and unpublished.

On a similar note, Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton (who wrote The Wisdom of Psychopaths) has been gathering data for a large-scale psychopath study, some of which includes exploring tastes in music. Thus far he’s gotten over 3 million people to fill out his online test, and the early results suggest that psychopaths would rather listen to rap than classical music or jazz, according to The Guardian . And while it’s worth pointing out,"okay, so do a lot of people," maybe it’s time to update those movie tropes. You know, just in case.

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