Psychopathy and Moral Judgment

This video answers the question: What is the relationship between psychopathy and moral judgment? When we talk about the concept of psychopathy, a lot of times we think of the diagnosis antisocial personality disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, but really psychopathy is similar, but it's still a distinct construct. We see a lot of the same symptoms with psychopathy that we see with the antisocial personality disorder and some symptoms we would expect only to see with psychopathy. It's also important to remember that psychopathy is not a mental health disorder. With psychopathy we see symptoms like violating society's norms, criminality, being manipulative, callousness, being impulsive, being irresponsible, and having lack of empathy. Usually when we conceptualize psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder, we usually think of it this way: just about everybody who has psychopathy would qualify for diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, but not everybody who qualifies for diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder would have psychopathy. If we look at those characteristics I mentioned, it's easy to see why there's this theory that there's a deficit and moral competence with psychopathy. When I use the term moral competence, I'm specifically talking about the ability to distinguish right from wrong. When we look at the research on psychopathy and moral judgment, we know that the major theory is that moral competence theory, which says there must be a deficit in the ability to distinguish right and wrong, but there's also a theory about the moral conventional distinction, that is this difference between harming somebody and violating a social norm. One of the theories with psychopathy is that individuals with these traits have difficulty making that distinction. They can't tell the difference between harming someone and violating a social convention. There's been a lot of research on psychopathy and moral judgment, but a lot of the studies don't analyze moral judgment directly. It's an abstract concept, so they look at concepts that are related to moral judgment and infer that individuals with psychopathy have deficits in that area. When we look at some of the studies that attempt to directly measure moral judgment, we see that they fail to identify any type of deficit in the area of moral dilemmas, moral justification, or that moral conventional distinction I spoke about a moment ago.

Young, L., Koenigs, M., Kruepke, M., & Newman, J. P. (2012). Psychopathy increases perceived moral permissibility of accidents. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 121(3), 659-667. doi:10.1037/a0027489