Abstract
Antisocial and psychopathic personality traits constitute a severe and treatment resistant form of externalizing psychopathology. While deficits in social information processing have been extensively investigated in these individuals, less is known about their capacity for altruism and cooperation. In particular, no studies to date have investigated whether established social-contextual determinants of cooperation, e.g., group affiliation and number of expected interactions, can motivate cooperative behaviour in antisocial individuals. The present study compared cooperative behaviour of incarcerated violent offenders (N = 52) and controls (N = 46) by using an established social interaction paradigm (Give Some Dilemma) where two players divide monetary units between themselves and the counterpart. Group affiliation (in- vs. out-group) and number of expected interactions (single-trial vs. repeated-trial interactions) were manipulated. Violent offenders as compared to controls shared less monetary units with their counterparts, indicating an overall reduced cooperation. Both groups showed increased cooperation rates towards in-group members and in repeated interactions. Higher psychopathic traits were associated with lower cooperation in single-trial interactions in the violent offender group. Although cooperation was comparably reduced in violent offenders, behaviour in both groups was determined by the number of expected interactions as well as group affiliation, thus providing evidence for equivalent social-contextual determinants.
Highlights
Antisocial and psychopathic personality tendencies, such as irritability, aggressiveness, ruthlessness and failure to adhere to social rules and norms, as well as a fundamental lack of care for others, constitute severe and treatment resistant forms of externalizing psychopathology
The groups did not differ in terms of years of education and intelligence (Wiener Matrizen Test 2, WMT)[34,35], but violent offenders were slightly older than control participants
The present study aimed to investigate for the first time cooperative behaviour and its’ social-contextual determinants in a population of incarcerated violent offenders using the GSD
Summary
Antisocial and psychopathic personality tendencies, such as irritability, aggressiveness, ruthlessness and failure to adhere to social rules and norms, as well as a fundamental lack of care for others, constitute severe and treatment resistant forms of externalizing psychopathology. There is a large body of research on different aspects of prosocial behaviour in healthy individuals using some variation of these economic games These methods have gained growing attention in clinical psychology where a considerable proportion of disorders are characterized by interactional impairments that are usually difficult to quantify[14,15]. This line of research provides increasing evidence that antisociality and psychopathic traits in particular may be associated with specific deficits in prosocial behaviour. Similar studies in clinical or incarcerated samples are pending
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