Another Look at the Self-Control vs. Psychopathy Debate: a Study Assessing Sexual Aggression, Aggression, and Substance Abuse

Abstract

Self-control and psychopathy are general theories of antisociality that have considerable empirical support, are conceptually similar, and have occasionally been studied together. A recent head-to-head test of the theories and found that self-control generally outperformed psychopathy among assorted criminal outcomes among institutionalized delinquents. Using data from university students (N = 1611) and different measures of self-control (Grasmick et al. scale) and psychopathy (Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale), the current study revisited this work and found that self-control had robust associations with sexual aggression, general aggression, and substance abuse problems, and extreme scores on these outcomes variables. However, the effects of self-control were negated once psychopathy was specified, suggesting that psychopathy is more important for understanding assorted forms of deviance than self-control in the undergraduate population. Given the empirical heft of both theories, we encourage further study to determine which has greater predictive validity for understanding various forms of crime among different populations spanning student, community, forensic, and correctional samples. We also encourage the specification of both self-control and psychopathy as standard control variables.