Boldness and Its Relation to Psychopathic Personality: Prototypicality Analyses among Forensic Mental Health, Criminal Justice, and Layperson Raters

Research on psychopathic personality has been dominated by a focus on criminality and social deviance, but some theoretical models argue that certain putatively adaptive features are important components of this construct. In 3 samples (forensic mental health practitioners, probation officers and a layperson community sample), we investigated adaptive traits as conceptualized in the Triarchic model of psychopathy (Patrick et al., 2009), specifically the relevance of boldness to construals of psychopathic personality. 

Participants completed prototypicality ratings of psychopathic traits, including 3 items created to tap components of boldness (Socially bold, Adventurous, Emotionally stable), and they also rated a series of attitudinal statements (e.g., perceived correlates of being psychopathic, moral judgments about psychopaths). 

The composite Boldness scale was rated as moderately to highly prototypical among forensic mental health practitioners and probation officers and positively associated with other theoretically relevant domains of psychopathy. Across samples, higher composite Boldness ratings predicted greater endorsement of adaptive traits (e.g., social skills) as characteristic of psychopathy. For the individual items, Socially bold was rated as highly prototypical and was associated with theoretically relevant correlates. Adventurous also was seen as prototypical, though to a lesser degree. Only forensic mental health practitioners endorsed Emotionally stable as characteristic of psychopathy. 

Our results provide partial support for the contention that the boldness concept is viewed as an important component of psychopathy, particularly among professionals who work directly with offender populations. 

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By:  Sörman K, Edens JF, Smith ST, Clark JW, Kristiansson M, Svensson O.

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Latent Fairness in Adults’ Relationship-Based Moral Judgments

Can adults make fair moral judgments when individuals with whom they have different relationships are involved? The present study explored the fairness of adults’ relationship-based moral judgments in two respects by performing three experiments involving 999 participants. In Experiment 1, 65 adults were asked to decide whether to harm a specific person to save five strangers in the footbridge and trolley dilemmas in a within-subject design. The lone potential victim was a relative, a best friend, a person they disliked, a criminal or a stranger. Adults’ genetic relatedness to, familiarity with and affective relatedness to the lone potential victims varied. 

The results indicated that adults made different moral judgments involving the lone potential victims with whom they had different relationships. In Experiment 2, 306 adults responded to the footbridge and trolley dilemmas involving five types of lone potential victims in a within-subject design, and the extent to which they were familiar with and affectively related to the lone potential victim was measured. 

The results generally replicated those of Experiment 1. In addition, for close individuals, adults’ moral judgments were less deontological relative to their familiarity with or positive affect toward these individuals. For individuals they were not close to, adults made deontological choices to a larger extent relative to their unfamiliarity with or negative affect toward these individuals. 

Moreover, for familiar individuals, the extent to which adults made deontological moral judgments more closely approximated the extent to which they were familiar with the individual. The adults’ deontological moral judgments involving unfamiliar individuals more closely approximated their affective relatedness to the individuals. 

In Experiment 3, 628 adults were asked to make moral judgments with the type of lone potential victim as the between-subject variable. The results generally replicated those of the previous two experiments. 

Therefore, the present study shows that, in addition to apparent unfairness, latent fairness exists in adults’ relationship-based moral judgments. Moral judgments involving individuals with whom adults have different relationships have different cognitive and affective bases.

Below:  Percentages of participants who decided to harm a lone potential victim to save five strangers from being hurt in Experiment 1

Below:  Percentages of participants who decided to harm a lone potential victim to save five strangers from death in Experiment 2

Full article at:   http://goo.gl/568FgE

By:   Jian Hao,1 Yanchun Liu,2,* and Jiafeng Li3

¹Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, Department of Psychology, College of Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China

²Youth Work Department, China Youth University of Political Studies, Beijing, China

³Psychological Education and Counseling Center, Office of Student Affairs, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, China

Edited by: Shira Elqayam, De Montfort University, UK

Reviewed by: Briony D. Pulford, University of Leicester, UK; Bastien Trémolière, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada

*Correspondence: Yanchun Liu, moc.361@4891_nuhcnayuil

  

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Framing Samuel See: The Discursive Detritus of the Moral Panic over the “Double Epidemic” of Methamphetamines and HIV among Gay Men

After being arrested for violating a restraining order against his husband, on November 24, 2013, Yale professor Samuel See died while in lockup at the Union Avenue Detention Center in New Haven, Connecticut. The death received a media attention around the world, with readers arguing online about whether See's death was caused by police misconduct, as his friends and colleagues charged in interviews and during a well-publicized march and protest. 

When an autopsy revealed that he had died from a methamphetamine-induced heart attack, online commentary changed dramatically, with See's many supporters rhetorically abandoning him and others describing him as a stereotype of the gay meth addict who deserved his fate. 

In this article, I argue that his shift in the interpretation and meaning of See's death can be traced to the discursive structures left by the moral panic about crystal meth in United States (1996-2008), which comprised within it a secondary moral panic about crystal meth in the gay community and its connection to the spread of HIV and a possible super-strain (2005-2008).

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By:   Theodore K. Gideonse

Program in Global Health David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

 

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When Minds Matter for Moral Judgment: Intent Information is Neurally Encoded for Harmful But Not Impure Acts

Recent behavioral evidence indicates a key role for intent in moral judgments of harmful acts (e.g., assault) but not impure acts (e.g., incest). We tested whether the neural responses in regions for mental state reasoning, including the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), are greater when people evaluate harmful versus impure violations. 

In addition, using multi-voxel pattern analysis, we investigated whether the voxel-wise pattern in these regions distinguishes intentional from accidental actions, for either kind of violation. The RTPJ was preferentially recruited in response to harmful versus impure acts. Moreover, although its response was equally high for intentional and accidental acts, the voxel-wise pattern in the RTPJ distinguished intentional from accidental acts in the harm domain but not the purity domain. 

Finally, we found that the degree to which the RTPJ discriminated between intentional and accidental acts predicted the impact of intent information on moral judgments, but again only in the harm domain. 

These findings reveal intent to be a uniquely critical factor for moral evaluations of harmful versus impure acts, and shed light on the neural computations for mental state reasoning.

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By:  Chakroff A1, Dungan J2, Koster-Hale J3, Brown A2, Saxe R4, Young L2.

• 1. Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA alekchakroff@gmail.com.
• 2. Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA.
• 3. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
• 4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

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Moral Parochialism & Contextual Contingency Across Seven Societies

Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. 

Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. 

We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement.

Below:  Reductions in the ranked ‘badness’ of transgressions, aggregated across scenarios, as a function of the consent of an authority figure, temporal distance, or spatial distance, presented as odds ratios and their 97.5% confidence intervals. The odds ratios, computed by exponentiating the beta coefficients (e^β), provide the odds of a badness judgement falling at a given ranked level or below when the factor is present, relative to when it is absent, across all badness levels. Odds ratios above 1 thus indicate reduced judgements of badness.

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/lSBZhu

By:  Daniel M. T. Fessler,1 H. Clark Barrett,1 Martin Kanovsky,2 Stephen Stich,3 Colin Holbrook,1 Joseph Henrich,4,5Alexander H. Bolyanatz,6 Matthew M. Gervais,1,†‡ Michael Gurven,7 Geoff Kushnick,8 Anne C. Pisor,7 Christopher von Rueden,9 and Stephen Laurence10

1Department of Anthropology and Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553, USA

2Institute of Social Anthropology, FSEV, Comenius University, 820 05 Bratislava 25, Slovakia

3Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1107, USA

4Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4

5Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4

6Social Sciences Subdivision, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137-6599, USA

7Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210, USA

8School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia

9Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173, USA

10Department of Philosophy and Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7QB, UK

¹Department of Anthropology and Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553, USA

²Institute of Social Anthropology, FSEV, Comenius University, 820 05 Bratislava 25, Slovakia

³Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1107, USA

⁴Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4

⁵Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z4

⁶Social Sciences Subdivision, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137-6599, USA

⁷Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210, USA

⁸School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia

⁹Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173, USA

¹⁰Department of Philosophy and Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7QB, UK

e-mail: ude.alcu.orhtna@relssefd

^†Present address: Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1414, USA.

^‡Present address: School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2402, USA.

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