No abstract

The five factor trait of conscientiousnessis a supertrait, denoting on one hand a pattern of excessive labor, rigidity, orderliness and compulsivity,and on the other hand a pattern of strict rectitude, scrupulosity, dutifulness and morality. In both respects the obsessive-compulsive personality is conscientious; indeed, it has been labeled a disorder of extreme conscientiousness (Widiger et al., 2009). Antisocial personality disorder, in the present paper, is described as occupying the opposite end of the conscientiousness continuum. The antisocial is impulsive rather than compulsive, illicit rather than licit, and furtive rather than forthright.After clinically comparing the obsessive and antisocial personalities, the present paper invokes evolutionary theory to explain their resultant behavioral, ideological, political and demographic differences.

The present review and critique of extant etiological theories centers on a single finding: Obsessive-compulsive personality is highly heritable (0.78) and not significantly influenced by "common, shared-in-families environmental factors" (Torgersen et al., 2000, p. 424). This finding, though twelve years old, has remained dissociated from existing etiological accounts. Psychoanalytic theories anachronistically maintain that obsessive personality is familially forged. Biological theories, few, unelaborated and weakened by postulating proximate instead of ultimate explanations, fail to seriously reckon with Torgersen's findings. Truly integrating heritability estimates into a functional etiological account of obsessive character, it is argued in the discussion section, will come from an evolutionary model that understands obsessive personality to be an evolved strategy rather than a dysfunctional disorder.

The obsessive-compulsive personality pattern of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy was first described and explained by Sigmund Freud. Freud's description was sound, but his explanation was flawed. Further still, no extant etiology, psychoanalytic or otherwise, convincingly accounts for the existence, and intergenerational perpetuation, of obsessive character. Thus, herein is presented a new etiology; an evolutionary etiology that describes obsessive personality, not as a disorder, but as an extreme strategy whose imbalance is a product of post-dispersal evolution. Migration into northerly latitudes brought about a relative release from biotic selective pressures, such as conflict and conspecific competition, and a corresponding increase in abiotic selective pressures, such as cold and seasonal scarcity. Features such as (1) future-oriented thought, (2) parsimoniousness, and (3) compulsive conscientiousness become both viable and intelligible as a temperamental consequence of struggling more exclusively with the elements. After using comparative animal data to demonstrate their biogeographical distribution, the human distribution of these three traits is also shown to be concentrated within northerly latitudes.