Antisocial, without empathy, manipulative, narcissistic, stalking …? Yes, but also deeply pragmatic . The psychopath is a psychological profile that is applied to an individual with certain traits that usually alter the harmony of a society.
However, precisely this lack of empathy can endow them with a very useful pragmatism for societies. And we are referring to deciding on difficult situations, life or death.
In other words, they would not think twice when, for example, shooting down an airplane to prevent it from hitting a structure in a hypothetical terrorist attack; or throw a stranger under a bus to prevent it from running over five people lying on the road.
While these situations may seem like a movie, they are moral dilemmas that security corps people with a medium level of empathy might have to face, and that a person with a psychopath profile would resolve without a shadow of a doubt.
This is the conclusion drawn from a study published by the prestigious journal Scientific Reports .
The research, carried out by a team from the University of Plymouth, consisted of comparing the judgments regarding moral dilemmas of different people , with the aim of measuring their levels of psychopathy. About one in a hundred participants had psychopathic traits.
“Moral dilemmas to me …”
In each dilemma, the participants had to decide whether they would sacrifice a person causing physical harm in exchange for saving the life of a group.
For example, one of the situations consisted of deciding whether to push a victim from a bridge onto a train track, with such force that it would divert their trajectory, avoiding the death of five men who were in the middle of the track, and who would be run over. Although, for this, the pushed victim had to die.
Another scenario: Participants had to decide whether to stab a wounded soldier to death to prevent him from being tortured by enemy troops and revealing vital secrets that could endanger the platoon.
The participants had to respond by pressing a robotic handle capable of measuring the force with which they pressed the button, that is, their level of determination . A weaker grip suggested that they would not carry out the morally dubious action.
Research showed that people with psychopathic traits were more likely to generate harmful actions with greater physical power.
Therefore, according to the authors, in certain circumstances psychopathic traits can be considered beneficial to a society.
According to Dr. Kathryn Francis, co-author of the study while at the Plymouth School of Psychology: “For the first time, we have shown how personality traits can influence the physical power of our moral actions.”
“In the experiment we found that the physical power of the simulated utilitarian responses was predicted by individual levels of psychopathy.”
Psychopathy is generally characterized by antisocial behavior and impaired empathy . Therefore, it is believed that people classified as such are, on the whole, bad for society.
In fact, psychopathic traits have often been blamed for being decision makers that have led to financial crises or immoral political behaviors.
In addition, this study opens the possibility of evaluating psychopathy using novel virtual reality technology, which is vital to better understand how and why people with these behavioral traits act in a certain way.
References:
KB Francis, S. Terbeck, RA Briazu, A. Haines, M. Gummerum, G. Ganis & IS Howard. ‘Simulating Moral Actions: An Investigation of Personal Force in Virtual Moral Dilemmas’. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 13954 (2017). Doi: 10.1038 / s41598-017-13909-9
