Social status as one key indicator of successful psychopathy: An initial empirical investigation

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Abstract

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that researchers have subdivided into two types: successful and unsuccessful. Nevertheless, little headway has been made regarding how to conceptualize and operationalize success. We consider various accounts of success from the existing literature and make the case for a two-dimensional view of successful psychopathy. Specifically, we contend that successful psychopathy can be conceptualized with two conditions in mind: (a) high social status and (b) lack of serious antisocial behavior. We emphasize that high social status, best described using socioeconomic status (SES), has been largely overlooked in the literature. We tested this idea using a sample of 591 participants who received measures of the triarchic model of psychopathy (i.e., boldness, meanness, and disinhibition), SES, and personality dysfunction. The results demonstrated that, as predicted, the putatively adaptive features of psychopathy (i.e., boldness) were positively related to SES and personality functioning. In contrast, the putatively maladaptive psychopathy features disinhibition and meanness were negatively related to personality functioning, and disinhibition was negatively related to SES. The relevance of boldness to psychopathy and the benefits of conceptualizing success as a continuous variable are discussed.

Introduction

Psychopathy is a personality disorder (albeit one not formally recognized in the main text of the DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) characterized by, among other features, glibness, grandiosity, callousness (lack of empathy), dishonesty, irresponsibility, and largely unmotivated antisociality. The triarchic model of psychopathy (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009) conceptualizes psychopathy in terms of three broad phenotypic domains that, in conjunction, comprise the full condition of psychopathy. These domains are boldness (i.e., social dominance, fearlessness, emotional resilience, and stress immunity), meanness (i.e., aggressiveness, social detachment, and callousness), and disinhibition (i.e., impulse control deficits and externalization of blame).

Traditionally, psychopathy has been studied mostly in forensic samples, especially those recruited from prisons and jails, and to a lesser extent, non-forensic samples, such as those recruited from community and college samples. Nevertheless, beginning with Widom (1977), who placed advertisements for seemingly adaptive1 psychopathy traits (e.g., adventurousness, self-promotion) in underground Boston newspapers, the study of “subclinical” or “successful psychopathy” began in earnest.2 Both successful and unsuccessful psychopathy have been difficult to define, but the former has received less attention.

Particularly relevant in this literature is the often unappreciated lack of consensus regarding what constitutes success. The forensic and clinical psychopathy (i.e., unsuccessful) literatures are arguably more cohesive than the successful psychopathy literature, but they are still marked by heated debates surrounding, among other issues, the relevance of criminal behavior to psychopathy (Hare & Neumann, 2010; Skeem & Cooke, 2010): Is such behavior central to the construct or merely a correlated behavioral outcome? This issue is also relevant to the successful psychopathy literature, as will become evident in subsequent sections.

In recent years, the psychopathy literature, and the personality disorder literature more generally, has become much more integrated with the normal personality literature (Hopwood et al., 2018; Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005), which has led to an influx of papers on successful psychopathy. This rapidly growing interest is most evident in the emerging Dark Triad literature (i.e., Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy; Paulhus & Williams, 2002). A Google scholar search using the words “Dark Triad personality” (conducted on 2018-03-12) generated 17,600 hits since 2002. This newly integrated literature stems in part from research on the Five Factor Model (FFM; McCrae & John, 1992) or “Big Five” (Goldberg, 1990), which is a taxonomy for organizing both normal and abnormal personality traits into five broad domains (i.e., extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience; e.g., De Fruyt et al., 2013). Using FFM terminology, global psychopathy is characterized by low levels of neuroticism, with the exception of the facets of angry hostility and impulsiveness, which are both pronounced in psychopathic individuals. It is also associated with high levels of some facets of extraversion, in particular assertiveness and excitement seeking, but also low levels of others, especially warmth. Furthermore, openness to emotions is low, and openness to actions is high. All facets of agreeableness are low. The only facet of conscientiousness on which psychopathic individuals typically obtain high scores is competence (which may be an artifact of self-enhancement on self-report measures), with dutifulness, self-discipline, and deliberation being unusually low (see, Brinkley, Newman, Widiger, & Lynam, 2004; Lynam & Miller, 2015).

Although an FFM approach allows for nuanced interpretations of psychopathy profiles (Lynam & Miller, 2015), a gap in the literature remains, namely, that a working definition of successful psychopathy remains elusive. Most current research refers to successful psychopathy without anchoring the term in any particular conceptualization, an omission that that has contributed to considerable ambiguity in the literature. The present study is an attempt to provide a way forward in conceptualizing, operationalizing, and measuring successful psychopathy. We achieve this goal via two steps. First, we analyze six alternative definitions of successful psychopathy to arrive at a proposed two-dimensional view of successful psychopathy. We particularly emphasize that socioeconomic success has been largely overlooked in the literature. Second, we present data on the relations among the triarchic model domains of psychopathy, core adaptive personality functioning, and socioeconomic status (SES) to examine the hypothesis that various psychopathy phenotypes are differentially indicative of success in terms of elevated social status.

Section snippets

Conflicting conceptualizations of success

An array of conflicting definitions has been proposed in an effort to define successful psychopathy (Gao & Raine, 2010; Glenn & Raine, 2014). Based on previous literature, we identified six definitions of successful (or subclinical) psychopathy; each has either been previously used in research, been influential in the overarching literature, or both (see Table 1). There is considerable inconsistency among the definitions, which generates confusion in the literature, especially given that

The present study

The aforementioned conceptualization dovetails well with the triarchic model of psychopathy (Patrick et al., 2009). This model encompasses the domains of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, which are considered singly necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the full condition of psychopathy. Boldness, in particular, is potentially relevant to successful psychopathy given its conceptual and empirical linkages to adaptive and high-functioning personality characteristics. Nevertheless,

Participants

Participant data (N = 591, nmen = 241, nwomen = 350) were collected through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk; for a review of this data collection technique, see Thomas & Clifford, 2017), which has been used successfully in the study of personality disorder traits (Miller, Crowe, Weiss, Maples-Keller, & Lynam, 2017). The MTurk workers, who were limited to U.S. residents, received $3.50 as compensation for participating. The median completion time was 44.35 min (M = 58.39, SD = 58.63). Four

Results

First, we examined the bivariate relations among the measures of the three triarchic constructs (see Table 3). Gignac and Szodorai (2016) established effect size guidelines, where r = 0.10, r = 0.20, and r = 0.30 were recommended as relatively small, medium, and relatively large, respectively. Using these guidelines, the relations among the psychopathy domains, personality dysfunction, and SES were in line with predictions. Boldness was consistently negatively related to the facets of

Discussion

After analyzing six definitions of successful psychopathy, we concluded that success is best conceptualized as a continuous variable, with two conditions in mind: (a) high social status, and (b) lack of serious antisocial behavior. Additionally, we posit that condition (c), high levels of intelligence or other compensatory cognitive and personality functions (e.g., high levels of executive functioning, low levels of disinhibition), is a likely candidate in the moderation of success, although we

Conclusion

In sum, we have argued that successful psychopathy is best conceptualized in terms of two dimensions and that one viable but largely overlooked operationalization focuses on socioeconomic success, which allows for a dimensional view of success. In support, we presented data demonstrating that adaptive features of psychopathy (i.e., boldness) are positively related to socioeconomic status and personality functioning, and that more maladaptive features (i.e., meanness and disinhibition) are

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