Breaking the Rules: A Study on Psychopathy

Abstract

The majority of recent research into psychopathy and rule breaking has focused almost entirely on self report measures of academic cheating. There has been little research into experimental tasks to observe rule breaking. To fill this methodological deficit, we conducted a study where we utilized an in-person task to measure general rule breaking behaviors while replicating the self report measures of criminal history and academic cheating. After completing a host of personality measures that included the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy), subjects completed a series of mazes at varying of levels of difficulty and were explicitly told not to break a series of established rules. Only secondary psychopathy was significantly correlated to rule breaking on the maze task, though primary psychopathy was significantly correlated to criminal history. After multiple regression, a subsection of secondary psychopathy, Machiavellian egocentricity, significantly predicted rule breaking by use of the path verify option on the maze task. Additional research and future directions are discussed.