No sympathy for the devil: Attributing psychopathic traits to capital murderers also predicts support for executing them.

Abstract

Mental health evidence concerning antisocial and psychopathic traits appears to be introduced frequently in capital murder trials in the United States to argue that defendants are a "continuing threat" to society and thus worthy of execution. Using a simulation design, the present research examined how layperson perceptions of the psychopathic traits exhibited by a capital defendant would impact their attitudes about whether he should receive a death sentence. Across three studies (total N = 362), ratings of a defendant's perceived level of psychopathy strongly predicted support for executing him. The vast majority of the predictive utility was attributable to interpersonal and affective traits historically associated with psychopathy rather than traits associated with a criminal and socially deviant lifestyle. A defendant's perceived lack of remorse in particular was influential, although perceptions of grandiose self-worth and a manipulative interpersonal style also contributed incrementally to support for a death sentence. These results highlight how attributions regarding socially undesirable personality traits can have a pronounced negative impact on layperson attitudes toward persons who are perceived to exhibit these characteristics.

Adolescent Male Conduct-Disordered Patients in Substance Use Disorder Treatment: Examining the “Limited Prosocial Emotions” Specifier

“…LPE was chosen to replace the term callous-unemotional because of concerns the latter term is potentially stigmatizing (Frick, Ray, Thornton, and Kahn, 2014), but the two terms may be conflated among clinicians and researchers. Prior research has shown that labels such as psychopathy can be stigmatizing and affect legal decision making (Edens, Clark, Smith, Cox, and Kelley, 2013; Edens, Davis, Fernandez, Smith, Guy, 2013). Thus, there is some urgency for the research community to develop standard methods for LPE categorization and assure that LPE validly identifies an important subtype of those with CD.…”

Jury Panel Member Perceptions of Interpersonal‐Affective Traits of Psychopathy Predict Support for Execution in a Capital Murder Trial Simulation

“…Given prior findings that lack of remorse is a powerful predictor of death verdicts (Edens et al, ), Table also reports results for ratings on the remorselessness item in isolation. As can be seen, this lone item generally was as predictive, or more so, of death verdicts relative to the entire affective‐interpersonal subscale.…”

“…Separate from mock jury studies on the effects of direct testimony concerning psychopathy, research has relatively recently started to examine how pre‐existing attitudes and beliefs regarding a defendant's level of psychopathic traits might relate to case dispositions, independent of expert evidence (Edens, Davis, Fernandez Smith, & Guy, ; Guy & Edens, ). That is, to what extent do perceptions of criminal defendants as being psychopathic relate to how punitively individuals respond to those defendants?…”

“…Aggregating data from three earlier studies examining attributions about psychopathic traits in capital murder cases, Edens et al () found that the more psychopathic a defendant was viewed to be (independent of any expert testimony concerning this disorder), the greater the likelihood that both male and female participants would support execution. Affective and interpersonal features of psychopathy in isolation predicted death verdicts slightly better (AUC = 0.73) than global ratings of this disorder (AUC = 0.68), with multivariate analyses indicating that the remaining features of psychopathy explained essentially no additional variance in these outcomes.…”

“…Previous studies (Edens et al, ; Guy & Edens, ) have focused exclusively on psychopathy content from the PCL‐R in terms of examining its relationship with support for capital punishment. Given that Hare's model is only one of many conceptualizations of psychopathy, in this study we expanded our list of putatively psychopathic traits to consider a wider array that might be associated with support for death verdicts.…”