Psychopathy and Moral Decision Making

Since the 1800s, psychopathy has been regarded as the absence of morality. The goal of our study was to explore whether psychopathic traits can affect the moral decision-making process in sacrificial moral dilemmas. Participants completed multiple self-report measures of psychopathic traits, utilitarian tendencies, and 16 sacrificial moral dilemma vignettes. After each hypothetical vignette, participants decided whether they believed it was morally right, permissible, and whether they behaviorally intended to sacrifice one person to save five people. Positive correlations emerged among all variables, which allowed us to perform a mediation analysis. Instrumental Harm – the idea of sacrificing one individual to save a greater number – accounted for more than half of the relationship between Callous Affect traits and ratings of Permissibility and Behavioral Intent. Specifically, the bias corrected indirect effect for permissibility was 0.07 (95% CI [0.01, 0.14]), which represents 54.5% of the total effect. The bias corrected indirect effect for behavioral intent was 0.08 (95% CI [0.01, 0.15]), which represents 53.6% of the total effect. Results indicated that participants high on psychopathic traits find it permissible and had the intent to sacrifice one person to save five. These findings imply that the concept of “moral insanity,” long associated with psychopathy, may not be an accurate representation of this population. Instead, it seems that individuals with Callous Affect psychopathic traits find it more permissible and are more likely to act on behaviors that minimize suffering for the largest amount of people.