Psychopathic Personality: Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Evidence and Public Policy

• Published in: Psychological science in the public interest 2011-12, Vol.12 (3), p.95-162
• Main Authors: Skeem, Jennifer L., Polaschek, Devon L. L., Patrick, Christopher J., Lilienfeld, Scott O.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescents; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Antisocial behavior; Antisocial behaviour; Antisocial personality disorder; Biological and medical sciences; Criminal behavior; Criminal justice; Criminals; Criminology; Emotions; Human aggression; Measurement; Medical sciences; Mental health care; Offenders; Personality; Personality disorders; Personality psychology; Personality traits; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Psychopathy; Social behavior disorders. Criminal behavior. Delinquency; Violent crimes; Violent offenders
• ISSN: 1529-1006; 2160-0031; 1539-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/1529100611426706

Few psychological concepts evoke simultaneously as much fascination and misunderstanding as psychopathic personality, or psychopathy. Typically, individuals with psychopathy are misconceived as fundamentally different from the rest of humanity and as inalterably dangerous. Popular portrayals of "psychopaths" are diverse and conflicting, ranging from uncommonly impulsive and violent criminal offenders to corporate figures who callously and skillfully manuever their way to the highest rungs of the social ladder. Despite this diversity of perspectives, a single well-validated measure of psychopathy, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991; 2003), has come to dominate clinical and legal practice over recent years. The items of the PCL-R cover two basic content domains—an interpersonal-affective domain that encompasses core traits such as callousness and manipulativeness and an antisocial domain that entails disinhibition and chronic antisocial behavior. In most Western countries, the PCL-R and its derivatives are routinely applied to inform legal decisions about criminal offenders that hinge upon issues of dangerousness and treatability. In fact, clinicians in many cases choose the PCL-R over other, purpose-built risk-assessment tools to inform their opinions about what sentence offenders should receive, whether they should be indefinitely incarcerated as a "dangerous offender" or "sexually violent predator," or whether they should be transferred from juvenile to adult court. The PCL-R has played an extraordinarily generative role in research and practice over the past three decades—so much so, that concerns have been raised that the measure has become equated in many minds with the psychopathy construct itself (Skeem & Cooke 2010a). Equating a measure with a construct may impede scientific progress because it disregards the basic principle that measures always imperfectly operationalize constructs and that our understanding of a construct is ever-evolving (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). In virtually any domain, the construct-validation process is an incremental one that entails shifts in conceptualization and measurement at successive points in the process of clarifying the nature and boundaries of a hypothetical entity. Despite the predominance of the PCL-R measurement model in recent years, vigorous scientific debates have continued regarding what psychopathy is and what it is not. Should adaptive, positive-adjustment features (on one hand) and crimi