Ethnic Differences in Psychopathy

Psychopathic personality disorder comprises a distinct collection of deviant affective, interpersonal, and behavioral features. Results of psychopathy testing can sway life-altering decisions for the examinee, including granting of parole, outcome in sexually violent predator civil commitment trials, gaining access to treatment, and even being sentenced to death. Because the disorder is strongly predictive of violent and general criminal recidivism, it has had an impact on correctional theory, public policy, and legal decision making on an international scale. Although psychopathy is one of the most researched disorders within the field of psychology and law, until recently most empirical investigations involved White male prisoners and forensic psychiatric patients in North America. Given that assessments of psychopathy occur regularly and as a matter of law in many contexts, it is crucial to ascertain the extent to which the primarily White male research base generalizes to other relevant populations, such as individuals of other ethnic backgrounds. Research indicates that the Psychopathy Checklist– Revised (PCL–R) measures the disorder in an unbiased way across ethnocultural groups within a single culture (White vs. Black within North America, Scottish vs. English and Welsh within the United Kingdom). However, there is some evidence of crossnational metric invariance: That is, North Americans obtain PCL–R scores that are 2 to 3 points higher than those of Europeans, given equivalent levels on the underlying trait of psychopathy. Moreover, whereas there is little cross-cultural bias in ratings of affective symptoms of psychopathy, bias does exist for ratings of the interpersonal and behavioral symptoms. In light of the substantial weight placed on PCL–R results when important decisions about individual liberties are made, it is crucial that cross-cultural research continue, preferably using more culturally informed classifications of ethnic status and with varied samples, including women and girls and individuals outside of Europe and North America. Such research may also shed light on the etiological bases underpinning the divergent manifestations of psychopathy.

Ethnicity refers to differences in culture and ancestry. In social sciences research, the term race is often used interchangeably with ethnicity, although the former term generally denotes more fine-grained genetic differences. In psychopathy research, race typically is based on self-identification rather than biological or genetic classification. In this entry, the term ethnicity is used to refer to ethnic, cultural, and racial groups as conceptualized within the relevant research literature on ethnicity and psychopathy. Three key issues have been addressed within this research base: (a) the degree to which similar patterns of associations between external correlates of psychopathy are observed across groups, (b) measurement generalization across groups, and (c) mean levels of psychopathic traits across groups.