Bargaining with the devil: Using economic decision-making tasks to examine the heterogeneity of psychopathic traits

• Four economic decision-making games were used to examine factors of psychopathy.
• The PPI-R scales demonstrated differential behavioral and correlational profiles.
• Psychopathy may be expressed heterogeneously depending on levels of the factors.
• Fearless Dominance contributed little to decision-making.
• Coldheartedness appears integral to some decision-making processes in psychopathy.

We examined the three key dimensions of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R), Fearless Dominance (FD), Self-Centered Impulsivity (SCI), and Coldheartedness, to obtain a comprehensive view of the implications of the trait components of psychopathy for economic decision-making. 210 university undergraduates completed four economic tasks and five personality instruments with the aim of ascertaining the correlates of different factors of psychopathy. FD, SCI, and Coldheartedness were associated with distinct behavioral responses and personality scores: Coldheartedness and SCI were predictive of economic selfishness, whereas FD was largely uncorrelated with behavioral tasks. Implications for the conceptualization of the factor structure of psychopathy are presented, and a phenotypic approach to psychopathic traits confluent with the recently proposed dimensional restructuring of personality disorders is discussed.