Psychopathic personality traits, intelligence, and economic success

Abstract

A wealth of research has revealed that psychopathy and psychopathic personality traits are associated with criminal involvement. Comparatively less research, however, has examined whether psychopathic personality traits influence economic outcomes in adulthood. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The results of the analyses indicate that psychopathic personality traits are negatively related to a number of economic outcomes, including household income and employment history measures. Individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits were found to have lower household incomes and to be fired more frequently than individuals with lower levels of psychopathic personality traits. Unexpectedly, psychopathic personality traits were also found to be negatively associated with household debt. There was also some evidence that the effect of psychopathic personality traits was moderated by intelligence in the prediction of household income. We discuss what these findings mean for the psychopathy and economics literatures.

Keywords:

• Psychopathy
• intelligence
• economic outcomes

Acknowledgments

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and is funded by grant PO1-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Special acknowledgment is due to Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for their assistance in the original design. Persons interested in obtaining data file from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population Center, 123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 ([email protected]).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A reviewer pointed out that it would be interesting to examine the potential association between psychopathic personality traits and the odds of being fired 50+ times. We attempted to estimate this association, but only six participants in our final analytic sample reported being fired 50+ times, and thus we were unable to examine this association.

2. A reviewer indicated that it would be interesting to examine the relationship between psychopathic personality traits and income for individuals with high levels of intelligence. We re-estimated the analysis for individuals with high levels of intelligence (above the 90th percentile) and our results indicate that psychopathic personality traits have a negative association with income and intelligence has a positive association with income. In addition, the psychopathic personality traits X intelligence interaction term is still significantly associated with household income.

3. A reviewer suggested using a debt-to-income ratio as opposed to a measure of household income to estimate the association between psychopathic personality traits and economic success. Using a debt-to-income ratio as a measure for economic success reveals that psychopathic personality traits still have a negative association with economic success; however, the psychopathic personality traits X intelligence interaction term is no longer significant.

4. We examined collinearity diagnostics for all of the OLS regression models that were estimated. The results of the variance inflation factors were between 1.04 and 1.05 and the tolerance values were all above .89. Together, these statistics indicated that the OLS models were not hampered by harmful levels of collinearity or multicollinearity.

5. For this plot, the intelligence categories were created so that high intelligence refers to intelligence levels at least one standard deviation above the mean and low intelligence refers to intelligence levels at least one standard deviation below the mean.

6. A reviewer suggested that time incarcerated may influence the household income of individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits. We have re-estimated the models including a measure for time incarcerated (in months) and our results indicate that psychopathic personality traits are still negatively related to household income; however, the psychopathic personality traits X intelligence interaction term no longer reaches the level of significance.