Hi All - Sorry to be a bit delayed in responding. My time is very limited (dealing with some deadlines), so I will need to be relatively succinct (they may not seem succinct, but I have a lot more to say!) in my responses below.
(1) Re: Beth's original email, the Huffington Post article (note that I did speak with any reporters there, nor did any of them try to contact me) is not inaccurate per se, although the headline is, not surprisingly, sensationalized and oversimplified. We did indeed find that some, but not all, of the traits associated with psychopathy, namely those linked to boldness (fearless dominance), such as fearlessness, social potency, risk taking, and immunity to stress as rated by presidential biographers and experts, were associated with a number of independent historical ratings of presidential success and effectiveness. They were also related to several largely objective historical indicators of presidential success. At the same time, it would be wildly oversimplified to imply that psychopathic traits make for good presdiencies, or that psychopathic traits in general (as the Huff Post title perhaps implies) are related to presidential success. In fact, in our analyses, we found that psychopathic traits linked to poor impulse control, egocentricity, and a tendency to externalize blame were either unrelated or negatively related to presidential effectiveness. When I've spoken directly with reporters about our study, I've made these important caveats quite clear, but of course one has no control over what reporters (especially those who pick up the story from other news sources) will say. Incidentally, I do not agree with Martha Stout (quoted in the article) that it's self-evident that politicians are more psychopathic than non-politicians, nor am I aware of much good (or even lousy) evidence bearing on this issue. To my knowledge, our study is the first to show that some politicians (the U.S. presidents) may (given the inherent limitations of historical ratings by biographers) have higher levels of some psychopathic traits than people in the general population, but even here that was true only for the fearless dominance traits of psychopathy, not to the antisocial/impulsive traits of the disorder. Re: Stout's conjecture, I worry about the misuses of an availabilty heuristic here. No doubt, there are plenty of psychopathic politicians out there, but those are the ones we often hear most about. Although some features of psychopathy (e.g., shading the truth, superficial charm, self-promotion) may well predispose to political success in some cases, other features (e.g., poor impulse control, difficulties in delaying gratification, low frustration tolerance, short fuse) might make long-term political success more difficult. (2) Mike Palij raises the interesting question of right-wng authoritarianism (RWA). We did not examine this variable in our analyses, although we might (?) be able to address Mike's question in some subsidary analyses (not sure...I'll poke around in a week or two once the dust settles, as we have a lot of personality data on each president that might allow us extract estimates of authoritarianism). My own hypothesis, however, would be that RWA is quite different from fearless dominance, and that it would differ in its implications for presidential success/failure. RWA tends to load positively on the higher-order dimension that Tellegen terms Constraint (opposite pole is often called Disinhibition, as in Lee Anna Clark's model), whereas Fearless Dominance tends to be weakly negatively associated with Constraint (largely due to its inclusion of fearlessness/reversed harmavoidance, which is a potent Constraint marker). Moreover (and consistent with the Constraint findings), data suggest that RWAs are highly sensitive to threat cues, whereas high fearless dominance scorers tend to be relatively insensitive to threat cues (for example, in several published studies, they show slightly weaker fear-potentiated startle to aversive stimuli than do other individuals). But I may be able to examine this question indirectly with some of our extant data; not sure. Re:: the interesting interactional John Dean hypothesis that Mike raises, I don't know of anyone who has tried to test it using presidential data. We might be able to do so obliquely using some extant trait estimates, but I'm less sanguine. (3) Mike also asked about the terminological and conceptual differences between psychopathy and sociopathy. Put simply, this is a muddle. Some authors, like Stout, appear to use the terms interchangeably. Going back to G.E. Partridge, whom I believe coined the term sociopathy in 1930, some writers have used this term in much the way Mike implies, viz., a conditiion of enduring antisocial/criminal behavior that is presumably largely social/environmental in etiology. My late Ph.D. mentor David Lykken revived this usage in his 1995 book, "The antisocial personalities." And still other authors, like those in the Washington University group (Lee Robins, Guze, Feighner), used the term siociopathy in the 1960s and 1970s atheoretically to refer to a condition of chronic antisocial/criminal behavior that was the precursor of the DSM (1980) diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. So, depending on whom one listens to, sociopathy or psychopathy are either (a) the same, (b) different in etiology, or (c) different in that sociopathy focuses on overt antisocial/criminal behaviors whereas psychopathy focuses largely on trait-like dispositions (e.g., lack of guilt, lack of empathy, narcissism, low physical fear). For these reasons, few experts in the field use the term sociopathy today. Gotta run, so please forgive typos and sloppy sentences above (and forgive a likely non-response to subsequent emails given that I'm under the gun with deadlines for the next day or two). But I do hope that at least some of this info is helpful. Take care, all ...Scott ________________________________________ From: Jeffry Ricker, Ph.D. [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2012 5:09 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] Can Psychopathic Traits Be Adaptive? On Sep 15, 2012, at 5:47 PM, Beth Benoit wrote: > I was chagrined to see our Scott Lilienfeld's name hooked up with this story. I didn't have the same reaction (i.e., chagrin). And I know that others have studied correlations between psychopathic traits (which, of course, are dimensional) and success in areas such as business, politics, etc. (e.g., see Hall & Benning, 2006). An Emory University news release provides a nice summary of the study (http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2012/09/psychopathic-boldness-tied-to-us.html). It's no substitute for reading the journal article of course, but I mention it only because it provides a bit more information than the Huffington Post piece. The following seems to be the study's take-home point: > fearless dominance, linked to low social and physical apprehensiveness, > appears to correlate with better-rated presidential performance for > leadership, persuasiveness, crisis management and Congressional relations, > the analysis showed. Scott is quoted in the news release providing a bit of nuance with respect to the study's conclusions: > “The way many people think about mental illness is too cut-and-dried,” > Lilienfeld says. “Certainly, full-blown psychopathy is maladaptive and > undesirable. But what makes the psychopathic personality so interesting is > that it’s not defined by a single trait, but a constellation of traits.” It's a very complex issue, and I know that referring to the "successful psychopath" is controversial. But I don't think there is a great deal of controversy about correlations between psychopathic traits (which vary dimensionally, as do all personality traits) and success in areas such as politics. Best, Jeff Reference: Hall, J. R., & Benning, S. D. (2006). The "successful" psychopath: Adaptive and subclinical manifestations of psychopathy in the general population. In C. J. Patrick (Ed.). Handbook of Psychopathy (pp. 459-478). 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