Fairness norm violations in anti-social psychopathic offenders in a repeated trust game

Lisa A Rosenberger,Daniela M Pfabigan,Christoph Eisenegger,Benjamin Lehner,Katinka Keckeis,Claus Lamm,Eva-Maria Seidel

doi:10.1038/s41398-019-0606-3

Lisa A Rosenberger, Daniela M Pfabigan + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-019-0606-3

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Abstract

Psychopathic offenders have a high propensity to violate social norms, as indicated for instance by their widespread lying and cheating behaviour. The reasons for their norm violations are not well understood, though, as they are able to recognise norms in a given situation and also punish norm violators. In this study, we investigated whether psychopathic offenders would violate fairness norms during a repeated trust game because of increased profit-maximising concerns. We measured back-transfer decisions in the repeated trust game, and affective arousal by means of skin conductance responses (SCR) in violent offenders with varying degrees of psychopathy, and non-offenders with low-trait psychopathy. Psychopathy in offenders was measured with the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). In the task, a participant and an interaction partner entrusted each other money for multiple rounds with the goal to earn as much money as possible. Fairness norm violations were positively associated with Factor 2 scores (the lifestyle/anti-social psychopathy subscale) of the PCL-R, but this was not accompanied by clear profit-maximising behaviour. In addition, anticipatory arousal to self-advantageous decisions was higher in all offenders, independent of their degree of psychopathy, compared with non-offenders. The results of our study widen our understanding of social decision-making in psychopathy. They also suggest treatment possibilities in offenders scoring high on Factor 2, targeting empathic concern and related prosocial intentions to overcome norm-violating behaviour.

Highlights

Adhering to social norms is an integral part of successful functioning in everyday life
Affective arousal was assessed by means of skin conductance responses (SCR), and fairness norm violations were assessed in a behavioural economics approach, using a repeated trust game
Even though economic decision-making paradigms lend themselves perfectly to test hyperresponsive arousal to rewards, we are not aware of any decision-making study that included arousal measures in psychopathic offenders. We addressed this in our study and hypothesised that psychopathic offenders’ aberrant reward processing would manifest itself both on a behavioural level, i.e., in terms of their decisions during the repeated trust game, and on the affective arousal level, as measured by SCR

Summary

Introduction

Adhering to social norms is an integral part of successful functioning in everyday life. Psychopathic individuals have a reputation of violating social norms by lying, cheating and deceiving on a regular basis[3] They are highly reward sensitive[4,5,6], which is why they might favour their own over group profits, and neglect social norms. Affective arousal was assessed by means of skin conductance responses (SCR), and fairness norm violations were assessed in a behavioural economics approach, using a repeated trust game This approach is unique, as most previous decision-making research on psychopathy had used single-shot games, whose limitations could be overcome by the repeated nature of our task design. This enabled us to disentangle behaviour driven by profit-maximising self-interest from groupbenefiting norm adherence

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