What is psychopathy? For a concept that gets endless attention, there’s surprisingly little agreement. Various models have been put forward over the years.
In a bid for clarity, Cristina Crego at Longwood University and Thomas A. Widiger at the University of Kentucky decided to look for shared traits in six people, real and fictional, who have been identified as psychopathic.
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Rather than taking traits that have been associated with psychopathy and checking to see if they matched the personalities of purported psychopaths, they took the reverse approach. They prepared 3- to 5-page-long case histories for each of the six individuals. Online participants read these, then used three different rating forms to score them on a very comprehensive range of traits — then the researchers looked for any patterns in the results.
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The results led Crego and Widiger to identify eight traits as cropping up time and again. These were: low vulnerability, low self-consciousness, low anxiousness, fearlessness, boldness, assertiveness, dominance and excitement-seeking.
However, the traits that really stood out and that overlapped in the cases of [known psychopaths] Bundy, Barrow and Madoff — the most undisputed psychopaths — were ones that related to antagonism. These included callousness, manipulativeness, dishonest, arrogance and cruelty.
