“Crime and punishment”: The effect of antagonistic personality traits on punitive attitudes and offender dehumanization

This work examined the relationships between antagonistic personality, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), punitive attitudes, and offender dehumanization across Romanian and UK samples. Using a network approach, Study 1 ( N = 636) found a negative partial correlation between psychopathy and punitive attitudes in Romania but not in the UK, while psychopathy showed high centrality in both samples. Study 2 ( N = 679) tested whether primary (PPS) and secondary psychopathy (SPS) predict offender identification and dehumanization across offender traits and crime types, using an experimental procedure. The results showed that PPS consistently predicts identification in both countries, while a three-way interaction in Romania indicated that PPS negatively predicts dehumanization for violent offenders and those with psychopathic traits in white-collar crimes, while neither RWA nor SDO mediate the path between PPS and dehumanization. SPS predicts identification in Romania but not in the UK. These findings advance theory on the relationships between punitive attitudes and antagonistic personality, especially psychopathy. In particular, they challenge the assumption that psychopathy uniformly and positively predicts harsher punishment and dehumanization, highlighting the need for distinguishing between psychopathy subtypes and context-sensitive approaches in research and practice. • Psychopathy’s link to punitive attitudes is negative in Romanian and null in UK samples. • Primary psychopathy predicts offender identification in Romanian and UK samples. • Secondary psychopathy predicts identification and dehumanization in Romanian but not UK samples. • In Romanian samples, primary psychopathy predicts dehumanization based on crime type and offender traits. • RWA and SDO do not mediate the effect of primary psychopathy on dehumanization.