Psychopathy increases perceived moral permissibility of accidents.

Abstract

Psychopaths are notorious for their antisocial and immoral behavior, yet experimental studies have typically failed to identify deficits in their capacities for explicit moral judgment. We tested 20 criminal psychopaths and 25 criminal nonpsychopaths on a moral judgment task featuring hypothetical scenarios that systematically varied an actor’s intention and the action’s outcome. Participants were instructed to evaluate four classes of actions: accidental harms, attempted harms, intentional harms, and neutral acts. Psychopaths showed a selective difference, compared with nonpsychopaths, in judging accidents, where one person harmed another unintentionally. Specifically, psychopaths judged these actions to be more morally permissible. We suggest that this pattern reflects psychopaths’ failure to appreciate the emotional aspect of the victim’s experience of harm. These findings provide direct evidence of abnormal moral judgment in psychopathy.

Initial development of an implicit and explicit approach to assess psychopathy

“…Regarding implicit cognition, poorer moral reasoning ability was equally associated with increased psychopathy scores on both the ACL and the PCL-SV, consistent with previous research noting difficulties in this area with psychopathy (Glenn et al, 2009;O'Kane, Fawcett & Blackburn, 1996;Young et al, 2012). However, in the current study this ability difficulty was focused on the Factor 2 (antisocial behaviour) component of the PCL-SV.…”

“…Moral reasoning was also associating across all measurements of psychopathy, with decreased reasoning ability associated with increased levels of total psychopathy (ACL and PCL-SV) and for both Factor 1 and Factor 2. This again supported evidence for moral reasoning as a core component of psychopathy (Glenn et al, 2009;O'Kane, Fawcett & Blackburn, 1996;Young et al, 2012) but not conventional moral reasoning (Stevens et al, 2012).…”

“…Moral abilities are thought associated with psychopathy (e.g. Blair, 1995;Blair et al, 1995;Glenn et al, 2009;O'Kane et al, 1996;Young et al, 2012) with the current study suggesting that it is not associated globally but specifically; it was not the more traditional element of moral judgement (i.e. conventional reasoning) that appeared to relate (e.g.…”

“…impulsive responding (Blair et al, 2005) and 4.) moral reasoning/moral cognition difficulties which include inferior moral reasoning (Glenn et al, 2009;O'Kane, Fawcett & Blackburn, 1996;Young et al, 2012), being unable to distinguish between moral and conventional reasoning, making less reference to the victim's welfare when judging moral situations (Blair, 1995;Blair et al, 1995), and a tendency to make unethical judgements (Stevens et al, 2012).…”

The Moral Status of an Action Influences its Perceived Intentional Status in Adolescents with Psychopathic Traits*

“…Marsh and Cardinale found that psychopathy is associated with greater acceptance of frightening others (but not causing other emotions, such as happiness, disgust, or anger) (Marsh and Cardinale, 2012). Finally, Young and colleagues found that psychopaths are impaired in judging the moral seriousness of accidental harm-a result that the authors interpret as reflecting impaired appreciation of the emotional impact of even accidental harm to a victim (Young et al, 2012). Together, these results are consistent with the idea that psychopathy reduces the influence of information relating to the distress of a victim when forming moral judgments.…”