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Abstract
Although past research has established that the utilitarian bias (increased willingness to agree to personally kill someone for the greater good) in psychopathy on moral dilemmas stems from weaker negative affect at the prospect of harming others due to reduced harm aversion, it remains to be seen if this is owing to reduced aversion to witnessing harmful outcomes (outcome aversion) or performing harmful actions (action aversion). In this study, we show that trait psychopathy is associated with both reduced outcome and action aversion and that only action aversion negatively mediates the influence of trait psychopathy on utilitarian moral judgement. Thus, the increased tendency in psychopathy to make utilitarian moral judgements is in part due to reduced aversion to carrying out harmful actions.
The author gratefully acknowledges Emanuela Liaci for providing Italian translation of the action/outcome aversion questionnaire. Thanks are also due to Paul Conway, Doris McIlwain, Giorgia Silani, and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on the earlier version of the manuscript. The author also wishes to thank Prof. Linden Ball for providing feedback on grammatical mistakes in the manuscript.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
The author gratefully acknowledges Emanuela Liaci for providing Italian translation of the action/outcome aversion questionnaire. Thanks are also due to Paul Conway, Doris McIlwain, Giorgia Silani, and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on the earlier version of the manuscript. The author also wishes to thank Prof. Linden Ball for providing feedback on grammatical mistakes in the manuscript.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Supplementary material
Supplementary content is available via the “Supplementary” tab on the article's online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2015.1004334).
Notes
1 Although it needs to be mentioned that adolescents with psychopathic traits do not differ from control population in terms of how moral valence of an action affects its perceived intentional status; they deem immoral actions to be more intentional than neutral and moral actions (Cardinale et al., Citation2014).