Abstract
Recent research has documented a small but significant correlation between psychopathic capacities and utilitarian moral judgment, although the findings are generally inconsistent and unclear. We propose that one way to make sense of mixed findings is to consider variation in perspective‐taking capacities of psychopathic individuals. With this in mind, we had criminal offenders (n = 60), who varied in their psychopathy levels according to the Psychopathy Checklist‐Revised (PCL‐R), respond to common sacrificial moral dilemmas (e.g., trolley dilemmas) under different conditions. In a baseline condition, participants simply responded to the sacrificial moral dilemmas as is typically done in previous research. In an “emotion‐salient” condition, participants had to reason about the emotions of another person after solving moral dilemmas (deliberative processing). In the “emotion‐ambiguous” condition, participants saw images of people in distress, after solving moral dilemmas, but did not have to explicitly reason about such emotions (spontaneous processing). The four PCL‐R facets predicted distinct interference effects depending on spontaneous versus deliberative processing of hypothetical victim's emotions. The findings suggest that the use of a multi‐faceted approach to account for cognitive and moral correlates of psychopathy may help address previously mixed results. Implications and future directions for theory and research are discussed.
Highlights
Psychopathic individuals are characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, deceitful and manipulative traits, and a profound disregard for social rules that often lead to antisocial, law-breaking behavior (Hare, 2003; Hare & Neumann, 2008)
Bivariate correlations revealed no significant relation between the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) total score and the moral dilemma outcome variables, but distinct associations between the four psychopathy facets and the dependent variables
IQ was negatively associated with utilitarian choice of action decisions in the deliberate emotion processing condition, and with the difference scores comparing the deliberate to the spontaneous (3-2) and to the baseline condition (3-1)
Summary
Psychopathic individuals are characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, deceitful and manipulative traits, and a profound disregard for social rules that often lead to antisocial, law-breaking behavior (Hare, 2003; Hare & Neumann, 2008). Their affective callousness in combination with social deviance is often considered the epitome of immoral behavior (Glenn et al, 2010; Leistico et al, 2008). The most common way of measuring moral judgment and decision-making involves sacrificial moral dilemmas (Greene et al, 2001; Thomson, 1986) In these dilemmas, participants are typically presented with an impending problem, and they have to decide whether to sacrifice some people to save a larger number of people. In a more personal variation of the trolley scenario, the footbridge dilemma, instead of administering a switch, the participant can push a large man off a footbridge to stop the train from killing five individuals instead of one person (Greene et al, 2004)
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