An examination of psychopathy's relationship with two indices of moral judgment

- We examined psychopathic traits' relations with moral judgment while adopting some methodological enhancements to provide novel insight into this relationship.
- Our results provide minimal evidence that psychopathic individuals suffer from an overarching moral knowledge deficit.
- We found preliminary evidence that psychopathic individuals may draw on unsophisticated reasons when making moral decisions.
- Our findings raise the possibility that individuals who exhibit pronounced psychopathic traits are more capable of understanding morality than traditionally assumed.

Although psychopathic individuals are often considered immoral in their thinking, research support for this view has been inconsistent. We examined psychopathy's relation to two indices of moral reasoning and decision-making, namely (1) Kohlbergian moral dilemmas and (2) sacrificial moral dilemmas in an undergraduate sample (N = 191). We hypothesized that psychopathic traits would not be strongly associated with moral reasoning on Kohlbergian moral dilemmas, but that they would be associated with a greater willingness to engage in utilitarian moral judgment by virtue of psychopathic individuals' affective deficits and emotional detachment. We expected these relations to be most pronounced for the psychopathy subdimensions Fearless Dominance and Coldheartedness. Counter to prediction, we found only a modest negative association between psychopathic traits and Kohlbergian moral reasoning. Psychopathic traits did not relate consistently to utilitarian decision-making. These results suggest that, despite the common perception that psychopathic individuals are deficient in moral understanding, psychopathic traits may be largely unassociated with profound moral reasoning deficits.