Moral identity in psychopathy
By Andrea L. Glenn, Spassena P. Koleva, Ravi Iyer, Jesse Graham, Peter H. Ditto. Judgment and Decision Making, 2010
128 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one’s sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly associated with immoral behavior — psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traits may display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Information Systems and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/754d515955a551cc7eb42fb8233c310224e641a7
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In Clinical Psychology
In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes (2014, background): “Moral values have been implicated in a diverse array of phenomena, from political ideology (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009) to psychopathy (Glenn et al. 2010), and the theory is widely employed across subfields of psychology.”