Abstract
Psychopathy is a multifaceted personality construct entailing interpersonal-affective disturbances, antisocial traits, and a tendency to lead an erratic lifestyle. Elevated levels of psychopathic traits have been linked to having an altered experience of pain, reduced responsivity to distress in others, and making poor moral choices that bring harm to others. In the context of moral decision-making, it is possible that the capacity to estimate the distress felt by others is linked to a limitation in the first-hand experience of distress, as the presence of psychopathic traits increases. We employed a model-based approach in a non-offender sample (n = 174) to investigate whether pain-related distress mediated the links between facets of psychopathy and estimates of the pain distress potentially experienced by others. Participants judged the permissibility of moral dilemmas and rated how much pain distress they would experience while making such judgements, as well as how much pain distress they believed the “victims” would feel as a result of the moral choice made by the participant. We found that ratings of own pain distress predicted beliefs about the distress others may experience, and elevated scores on the lifestyle facet of psychopathy uniquely predicted lower estimates of own pain distress. Furthermore, own pain distress mediated the relationship between the lifestyle facet and beliefs about others’ distress. Finally, exploratory zero-order correlation analyses revealed that ratings of own pain distress decreased as the scores on multiple psychopathic traits increased. Only the lifestyle facet correlated in the negative direction with beliefs about others’ distress. Taken together, our findings suggest that beliefs about how much pain distress others may experience is indeed mediated by own pain distress, and that the tendency to lead an erratic lifestyle is linked to alterations in this mechanism.
Highlights
Psychopathy is a personality construct typified by disrupted interpersonal and affective functioning, combined with a tendency to have an erratic lifestyle and to engage in disruptive and antisocial behavior (Hare, 2003)
The main goal of the present study was to examine if own pain distress mediated the relationships between psychopathic traits and estimates of the level of pain distress that others may experience, in the context of moral decision-making
Lending support to the self-to-other principle, stronger own pain distress predicted higher estimates of the amount of pain distress experienced by others when making moral choices
Summary
Psychopathy is a personality construct typified by disrupted interpersonal and affective functioning (e.g., lack of guilt, reduced empathy, manipulativeness), combined with a tendency to have an erratic lifestyle and to engage in disruptive and antisocial behavior (Hare, 2003). One advantage of the dimensional approach to psychopathy is that it makes it possible to measure the corresponding traits in the general community as well, which can help identify the impaired mechanisms that are associated with particular psychopathic traits. Research in both offender and community samples has consistently pointed out that individuals with elevated levels of psychopathic traits often inflict harm on others, in part due to lack of moral constraints (Blair, 1995, 2007). It has been proposed that a diminished responsivity to others’ distress plays a key role in understanding poor moral decisionmaking in psychopathy (Blair, 1995, 2013). Our own range of affective experience functions as an “internal ruler”, and the boundaries of the internal ruler determine the extent to which we can estimate the intensity of what others may feel (Hoppenbrouwers et al, 2016)
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