The prosocial psychopath: Explaining the paradoxes of the creative personality

Personality predictors of creative achievement and lawbreaking behavior

“…Our findings show a modest but significant association between creative achievement and lawbreaking behaviors. This further supports previous hypotheses about shared psychological features between these dispositional tendencies (Eysenck 1995;Galang 2010). However, this interpretation will need to be framed in terms of the patterns yielded by the larger model.…”

“…Whatever underlies the phenotypic tendency towards lawbreaking could explain the consistent observation of low agreeableness in creative persons. This might be P (Eysenck 1995) or, if we cautiously interpret the trend for creativity to be associated with a resilient profile, it might be the fearless dominance or boldness factor in psychopathy (Galang 2010;Galang et al 2016). Alternatively, this might have been due to the inclusion of the general factor in the model, although we also note that this factor was not associated with creative achievement in this dataset.…”

“…Although Eysenck was more focused on the schizotypal side of P, Galang (2010) took up this line of reasoning in an attempt to explain the consistent association of disagreeable traits with creativity. The result is the Bprosocial psychopathĥ ypothesis, which identifies cognitive and affective disinhibition as important drivers of the features that are expected to be common to both creative personalities and psychopaths (Galang et al 2016).…”

“…The result is the Bprosocial psychopathĥ ypothesis, which identifies cognitive and affective disinhibition as important drivers of the features that are expected to be common to both creative personalities and psychopaths (Galang et al 2016). Dopaminergic mechanisms, especially in mesolimbic and prefrontal brain regions, are thought to partly explain why these features co-occur with creativity (Galang 2010).…”

The Association Between Psychopathic Personality Traits and Criminal Justice Outcomes: Results From a Nationally Representative Sample of Males and Females

“…Analysis of this scale has shown it to have high internal consistency, and the factor structure of the scale typically reveals two different factors (although some studies reveal three-and even four-factor structures; Flores-Mendoza, Alvarenga, Herrero, & Abad, 2008;Fritz, Wiklund, Koposov, Af Klinteberg, & Ruchkin, 2008;Hare & Neumann, 2008, 2010. The first factor, known as Factor 1, contains items related to the affective/interpersonal elements of psychopathy, including callousness and lack of remorse.…”