A Plea for Preregistration in Personality Disorders Research: The Case of Psychopathy

Abstract

In response to a crisis of confidence, several methodological initiatives have been launched to improve the robustness of psychological science. Given its real-world implications, personality disorders research is all too important to not follow suit. We offer a plea for preregistration in personality disorders research, using psychopathic personality (psychopathy) as a prominent case example. To suit action to word, we report on a preregistered study, and use it to help refute common misconceptions about preregistration as well as to illustrate that the key strength of preregistration-transparency-outweighs its (perceived) disadvantages. Although preregistration will not conclusively settle the many debates roiling the field of psychopathy and other personality disorders, it can help to verify the robustness of empirical observations that inform such debates.

No Impaired Integration in Psychopathy: Evidence from an Illusory Conjunction Paradigm

“…search of the 'best results (Lindquist, 2020;Paret et al, 2022). In the absence of appropriate preregistration and reporting standards, this can cause systematic inflation of type 1 error and incorrect inferences (Flournoy et al, 2020;Verschuere et al, 2021). Taken together, the scientific literature pointing to an impairment in information integration as the root cause of psychopathy is limited at best, and not supported by our present findings.…”

Incremental and interactive relations of triarchic psychopathy measure scales with antisocial and prosocial correlates: A preregistered replication of Gatner et al. (2016).

“…We have well-established concerns with certain aspects of the triarchic model of psychopathy Sleep et al, 2019) and were thus amenable to the conclusions reached by Gatner and colleagues (2016). Even so, we identified within this original study several specific warning signs of potential bias in the existing psychopathy literature (Verschuere et al, 2021), including focus on an actively debated subject (i.e., inclusion of Boldness), lower than ideal power to detect effects of interest (i.e., interactions and curvilinearity), and a more stringent rejection threshold than typically used. Therefore, we hope that this preregistered replication will serve as an instructive example for similar future endeavors.…”

Preregistration and Registered Reports: A Key Pathway to Enhancing Robustness and Replicability in Mental Health Research

“…A fourth concern is that there is an increasing emphasis on the use of preexisting public release data for analyses and worries that because the data already exist this precludes preregistration or the pursuit of RR ( 18 , 19 , 20 ). It is true that preregistration is more challenging when all data are already available, and in theory an author could have conducted all analyses before submission of the preregistration.…”