Abstract
Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this finding, Lykken (1995) ventured that a fearless temperament underlies both psychopathic traits and heroic behavior, and that heroic individuals’ early exposure to effective socializing forces such as warm parenting or healthy self-esteem often fosters a characteristic adaption that tends to beget “successful” behaviors, thereby differentiating heroes from convicts. In this study, we investigate relations between psychopathy, principally its fearless dominance dimension, pride, and prosocial and antisocial behavior in a community sample (N = 339). Fearless dominance and self-centered impulsivity components of psychopathy yielded differential relations with authentic and hubristic pride (Tracy and Robins, 2004), such that fearless dominance was significantly positively correlated with both facets of pride while self-centered Impulsivity was significantly negatively correlated with authentic pride and significantly positively correlated with hubristic pride. Further, authentic pride moderated (potentiated) the relation between fearless dominance and transformational leadership, one of the two outcome measures for prosocial behavior employed in our investigation. Authentic pride did not moderate the relations between fearless dominance and either our other measure of prosocial behavior (heroism) or antisocial behavior, nor did positive parenting moderate the relations between psychopathy components and social behavior. Unexpectedly, hubristic pride significantly moderated the relation between impulsive-antisocial features and antisocial behavior in a protective manner.
Highlights
Cleckley’s (1941, 1976) Mask of Sanity famously described the heart of psychopathic personality as an enigmatic constellation of traits which entail both the outward appearance of healthy functioning, even charm—including social influence and stress immunity—and, paradoxically, brazen maladaptive or antisocial behavior
Pride AHPS Authentic Pride, Rosenberg SelfEsteem Scale (RSES) total scores, and Dispositional Positive Emotions Scale (DPES) total scores were positively correlated with Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R) Fearless Dominance and negatively correlated with PPI-R Self-centered Impulsivity
Of the Guilt and Shame Proneness Scale (GASP) subscales that describe shame, PPI-R Fearless Dominance was negatively correlated with both GASP Shame-NSE and GASP Shame-Withdraw; PPI-R Coldheartedness was strongly negatively correlated with GASP Shame-NSE and was not significantly correlated with GASP Shame-Withdraw (Steiger’s Z = −8.00, p < 0.001); PPI-R Self-centered Impulsivity was negatively correlated with GASP Shame-NSE and positively correlated with GASP Shame-Withdraw (Steiger’s Z = −9.35, p < 0.001)
Summary
Cleckley’s (1941, 1976) Mask of Sanity famously described the heart of psychopathic personality as an enigmatic constellation of traits which entail both the outward appearance of healthy functioning, even charm—including social influence and stress immunity—and, paradoxically, brazen maladaptive or antisocial behavior. Along with the writings of Cleckley and other prominent authors (e.g., Lykken, 1995; Patrick, 2006; Fowles and Dindo, 2009), is consistent with the possibility that psychopathy often comprises features that are largely adaptive, at least in the short term, such as fearlessness, venturesomeness, social dominance, and immunity to anxiety Such traits may be tied to successful interpersonal behaviors and bear important implications for prosocial functioning (e.g., heroism or organizational leadership) (Lilienfeld et al, 2015). Per this dual conceptualization, is related to both adaptive (through authentic pride) and maladaptive (through hubristic pride) social and behavioral outcomes (Carver et al, 2010; Liu et al, 2016) In this investigation, we integrate Lykken’s low fear model with the authentic/hubristic model of pride, positing that it is not merely the presence of pride per se that protects against antisociality and fosters prosociality in psychopathic individuals. Our correlational analyses were exploratory, with one notable exception; we predicted that positive parenting would be related to authentic, but not hubristic, pride
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