From Hurting to Helping?: Psychopathic Traits, Primes, and Costly Helping

Abstract

Psychopathy is characterized by traits such as callousness, egoism, and a lack of empathy. Research suggests that those high in psychopathic traits are incapable of altruism, yet recent studies have demonstrated that psychopaths may engage in heroic helping and that some helping can be mediated by prosocial priming. The present study sought to investigate how psychopathic traits influence costly helping (i.e., helping another at a cost to oneself) as a function of a helping prime (no prime, prosocial, asocial, antisocial) and charity locality (on-campus, local, national, international). Participants (N = 290) completed measures of psychopathic traits and empathy, followed by random assignment into one of the helping prime conditions. Participants then played a standardized game measuring costly helping (i.e., the Altruism/Antisocial Game; AlAn’s Game; Sakai et al., 2012). Throughout the game, participants distributed $20 between themselves and the charity. After the game, participants were asked to make a real-time choice regarding how they wanted their participation funds distributed (i.e., do you want to donate all or some of the money to the charity or keep it for yourself?). Overall, participants demonstrated self-oriented decision making, with no effect of charity locality or priming on donation decisions. Those high in psychopathic traits allotted twice as much money to themselves than to charity in real-life contexts versus in-game contexts. This research suggests that psychopaths may appear to be helpful on the surface, but their everyday giving when it counts relates to their own instrumental gain.

Keywords: psychopathic traits, priming, costly helping, empathy

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kristine Peace