I agree. Snakes are a poor choice of animal for a psychopathy test.
If I see a snake anywhere near my house, a friend/relative's house, or in a nearby park, then I will go out of my way to grab a shovel or something and kill it. I will not risk some child or someone I know getting bitten by one, and I'm not skilled enough to distinguish which ones are poisonous or potentially harmful to humans so they all go.
A better title would be "5% of people go out of their way to kill dangerous scary animals, 1% are psychopaths as usual."
And at least one person considers snakes and the time to kill them less valuable than the time it takes to identify dangerous snakes and not kill harmless or beneficial snakes.
Replace 'snake' with 'human' and '[venomous] or potentially harmful to me' with 'kittens' and 'rabid', you might realize that the ick factor of reptiles is more important to you than the actual danger.
Pardon the sensationalist headline of that article:
I was not aware of the other turtle and snake studies.
Note that with turtle this is the lower bound on percentage of evil; a perfectly amoral person that could e.g. kill for modest and unimportant sum of money or any other reason would still have no incentive to steer to drive over a turtle; and a significant percentage of people would simply fail to notice the turtle entirely.
This gives interesting prior for mental model of other people. Even at couple percent, psychopathy is much more common than notable intelligence or many other situations considered 'rare' or 'unlikely'. It appears to me that due to the politeness and the necessary good-until-proven-evil strategy, many people act as if they have an incredibly low prior for psychopathy, which permits easy exploitation by psychopaths. There may also be signaling reasons for pretending to have very low prior for psychopathy as one of the groups of people with high prior for psychopathy is psychopaths themselves; pretending easily becomes too natural, though.
Perhaps adjusting the priors could improve personal safety and robustness with regards to various forms of exploitation, whenever the priors are set incorrectly.