Moral strategies and psychopathic traits

Abstract

Psychopathy is a personality construct encompassing impaired interpersonal-affective functioning, combined with the inclination to lead an erratic lifestyle and to engage in antisocial acts. Individuals with elevated psychopathic traits often make decisions that have a negative impact on others. Some findings suggest that a lack of empathy and guilt is a key explanatory factor, while other results point toward a decreased sense of fairness in individuals with elevated psychopathic traits. The goal of the present study was to directly compare these hypotheses. Eighty-six healthy individuals completed the Self-Report Psychopathy scale and performed the Hidden Multiplier Trust Game, a socioeconomic decision-making task designed to untangle the roles of guilt and fairness during decision-making. Computational modeling of choice data identified five types of moral decision strategies: inequity aversion, guilt aversion, moral opportunism, greed, and generosity. The model-free results demonstrated that psychopathic traits were associated with lower levels of reciprocity. The model-based results suggested that a reduced sense of fairness, associated with affective traits, was driving this behavior. Our findings stress the importance of treating guilt and fairness as independent concepts, and highlight the importance of improving conceptual precision in untangling the individual impact of fairness and guilt, as this could help explain the mixed results in moral decision-making literature. Elucidating the psychological motivations underlying the relationship between psychopathic traits and poor social decision-making opens new avenues for research on the underlying cognitive mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).