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Psychopathy increases perceived moral permissibility of accidents - PubMed

. 2012 Aug;121(3):659-67.

doi: 10.1037/a0027489. Epub 2012 Mar 5.

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Psychopathy increases perceived moral permissibility of accidents

Liane Young et al. J Abnorm Psychol. 2012 Aug.

Abstract

Psychopaths are notorious for their antisocial and immoral behavior, yet experimental studies have typically failed to identify deficits in their capacities for explicit moral judgment. We tested 20 criminal psychopaths and 25 criminal nonpsychopaths on a moral judgment task featuring hypothetical scenarios that systematically varied an actor's intention and the action's outcome. Participants were instructed to evaluate four classes of actions: accidental harms, attempted harms, intentional harms, and neutral acts. Psychopaths showed a selective difference, compared with nonpsychopaths, in judging accidents, where one person harmed another unintentionally. Specifically, psychopaths judged these actions to be more morally permissible. We suggest that this pattern reflects psychopaths' failure to appreciate the emotional aspect of the victim's experience of harm. These findings provide direct evidence of abnormal moral judgment in psychopathy.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Moral judgments on a seven-point scale (1 = morally forbidden; 7 = morally permissible), analyzed across subjects (top) and across items (bottom). Psychopaths (dark bars) judge accidental harms as more morally permissible than non-psychopaths (light bars). Error bars indicate standard error of the differences.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Moral judgments of accidents on a seven-point scale (1 = morally forbidden; 7 = morally permissible). On the x axis, scenarios are in order of increasing moral permissibility as judged by non-psychopaths. Psychopaths (filled-in circles) judge accidental harms more permissible than non-psychopaths (hollow circles) on 37 of 48 scenarios.

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