(Dis)honesty, psychopathy, and their relation to empathic concern

Empathy;Truthfulness and falsehood;Antisocial personality disorders;Psychopaths

Agnello, Connie L.Lishner, David ;

University of Wisconsin

关键词: Empathy;    Truthfulness and falsehood;    Antisocial personality disorders;    Psychopaths;   

Others  :  https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/63493/Agnello%2c%20Connie.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: University of Wisconsin

【 摘 要 】

The goal of the present research was to examine the relation between honesty-humilityand psychopathy, along with their relationship to empathic concern and helping behaviorby manipulating perspective taking and measuring feelings of empathic concern forwillingness to help a person in need. Measures of psychopathy were assessed using theSRP- III, and the PPI-R: SF. The personality dimension of honesty-humility wasmeasured using a portion of the HEXACO-PI-R: SR (100 item version). Empathicconcern was evaluated using the 6 items that Batson (2011) suggests best defines theconstruct. Based on previous work, it was hypothesized that (a) psychopathy andhonestly-humility would be negatively associated with one another; (b) psychopathywould be negatively associated with empathic concern and helping; and (c) honestyhumilitywould be positively associated with empathic concern and helping. Aperspective taking manipulation was used to further examine whether the associations ofthe traits of empathic concern and helping would be mitigated if the participants activelyimagined the perspective of the person in need. Correlational analyses revealed anegative relation between honesty-humility and the psychopathy measures. Whenmeasures of psychopathy were decomposed into facet measures of fearless dominance,impulsive antisociality, coldheartedness, Factor 1 (primary psychopathy), and Factor 2(secondary psychopathy), only individuals higher in Factor 1 reported significantly lowerlevels of empathic concern (after controlling for gender). Logistic regression analysesindicated that the interaction between coldheartedness and perspective takingsignificantly predicted helping behavior, such individuals higher in coldheartedness wereless likely to help, but only when participants were asked to imagine the other?sperspective.