Contribution
A review by the PCL-R’s author and a structural modeller that does two things. It answers the charge that the PCL-R has “drifted” from Cleckley, by arguing that Cleckley’s profile was never an assessment instrument and rests on an unrepresentative sample. And it sets out the structural, genetic, longitudinal and personality evidence for a four-factor construct held together by one superordinate factor.
Key insight
Psychopathy, as measured, is not an emotional deficit with antisocial consequences. It is a covarying cluster of interpersonal, affective, lifestyle and antisocial features, none of them its essence. The affective features are tied to the antisocial ones “psychometrically, genetically, and longitudinally”, so “there appears to be no basis for holding one component of psychopathy as more essential than other components” (p. 231).
Assumptions
- That a latent-variable model with good fit, replicated across samples and methods, can be “adduced” as evidence for a construct, though fit does not prove that causal latent variables exist (pp. 231–232).
- That the PCL-R, while it “cannot be equated with the construct of psychopathy” (p. 232), measures it well enough for its factor structure to speak for the construct.
- That personality disorders are defined by maladjustment: “Psychiatric disorders, including personality disorders, typically are defined in terms of maladjustment, not in terms of positive adjustment” (p. 227).
- The samples behind the four-factor model are mostly offenders and forensic patients, with some community and youth samples (p. 232).
Key results
- The instrument (p. 219). The PCL-R “uses a semistructured interview, case history information, and specific scoring criteria to rate each of 20 items on a 3-point scale (0, 1, 2)”. Totals run 0–40; 30 is the usual cut for research and “diagnostic” purposes (p. 220).
- The four factors (pp. 219–220), 18 items:
- “Interpersonal (glibness/superficial charm, grandiose sense of self worth, pathological deception, conning/manipulative)”;
- “Affective (lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callous/lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for actions)”;
- “Lifestyle (need for stimulation/proneness to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility)”;
- Antisocial “(poor behavioral controls, early behavior problems, juvenile delinquency, revocation of conditional release, criminal versatility)”. “Two other items (promiscuous sexual behavior, many short-term relationships) do not load on any factor but contribute to the total PCL-R score.” (p. 220)
- Two higher factors (p. 220). “The Interpersonal/Affective dimensions and the Lifestyle/Antisocial dimensions comprise, respectively, the PCL-R Factors 1 and 2”.
- Psychopathy versus antisocial personality disorder (p. 219). “The PCL and PCL-R combined personality traits and antisocial behaviors, whereas the emphasis in APD was, and continues to be, antisocial behavior”.
- One superordinate factor (pp. 233–234). In large offender and forensic samples a single factor explains most of the variance in each of the four. The authors read it as “the broad dissocial nature of psychopathic traits” and “believe that psychopathy can best be understood in terms of the interrelations of these dimensions, akin to a general factor in personality theory” (p. 234). So “antisocial tendencies are fundamentally tied to other psychopathy dimensions since all four PCL-R factors stem from a cohesive higher-order factor” (p. 234).
- Dimensional (pp. 220, 234). “there now is good evidence that the structure of psychopathy is dimensional in nature” (p. 220); traits “are best viewed as existing on a continuum” (p. 234).
- Genes and development (pp. 238–239). The four factors load on a single genetic factor in an adolescent twin sample, and the traits are moderately stable from childhood into adulthood.
- Cleckley’s own construct (pp. 222–230). His 16-item Clinical Profile (listed p. 222) was a clinical synopsis, not an instrument. Its “positive adjustment” items (good intelligence, absence of delusions, absence of nervousness, suicide rarely carried out) do not belong (pp. 225–229). He took the fundamental factor to be “an inability to participate in, or understand, the emotional aspects of humanity” (p. 226, the authors’ paraphrase), yet he also called the psychopath “simply a basically asocial or antisocial individual” (p. 230, quoting Cleckley 1976, p. 370).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | 18 PCL-R items form four correlated factors, which pair into Factors 1 and 2 | strong | confirmatory factor analysis on N = 6929 offenders and forensic patients; replicated across samples (pp. 219–220, 232) |
| C2 | One superordinate factor explains the four | strong | Neumann et al. (2007) and Neumann et al. (2006), reported pp. 233–234 |
| C3 | No component, affective or antisocial, is more essential than the others | moderate | inference from C2 and from genetic and longitudinal covariation (pp. 231, 234, 238–239) |
| C4 | Psychopathy is dimensional, not a taxon | moderate | taxometric and community studies, cited (pp. 220, 234) |
| C5 | Cleckley considered antisocial deviance part of psychopathy | moderate | his profile items and case histories, and his own words (pp. 229–230) |
| C6 | Cleckley’s profile is not a sound standard for the construct | moderate | unrepresentative, overinclusive sample; unscorable items; no empirical evidence it would do better (pp. 223–227) |
Concepts
- psychopathy — a dimensional, superordinate construct of covarying interpersonal, affective, lifestyle and antisocial traits and behaviors, as measured by the PCL instruments.
- Factor 1 / Factor 2 — the Interpersonal/Affective and Lifestyle/Antisocial pairs of the four factors.
- construct drift — the charge that the PCL-R measures something other than Cleckley’s psychopath; the authors would call any real difference a “construct shift”, present from the start (p. 224).
- antisocial personality disorder (APD) — the DSM category, which emphasizes antisocial behavior where the PCL-R combines it with personality traits (p. 219).
Connections
Answers Patrick (2006), Salekin (2002) and Cooke and colleagues (2001, 2005) on construct drift and on the place of antisociality. Builds on Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity (1941/1976), on Hare’s earlier PCL (1980) and on the authors’ four-factor modeling. The earlier programmatic statement is Hare (1996, LIT-1427), which this record has not read.
Bearing on the record
Filed for the owner’s corporate-psychopathy question. Bakan’s The Corporation (2004) applies Hare’s checklist to the corporation, and the record will ask which features could transfer. This reading bears on that in five ways.
- The features, sorted. The Affective factor holds lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callous/lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for actions. The Interpersonal factor holds glibness or superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying and conning or manipulation (p. 219). The behavioral factors are Lifestyle (stimulation seeking, parasitic lifestyle, no realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility) and Antisocial (pp. 219–220). Two of the affective items are states of feeling (shallow affect, lack of remorse or guilt). Two are closer to conduct: callousness shows in how others are treated, and failure to accept responsibility shows in what is said and done after the fact. The latter pair, and most of the Interpersonal and Lifestyle items, can be scored from a corporation’s record without settling whether it feels anything. Several Antisocial items are tied to an individual’s development (early behavior problems, juvenile delinquency) and have no corporate counterpart except by analogy.
- No essential core. The authors deny that the affective component is the essence (p. 231) and read the construct as the covariation of all four, under one superordinate factor (p. 234). A corporate-psychopathy thesis that borrows only the affective deficit, or only the antisocial conduct, borrows less than the construct. A corporation scored on antisocial conduct alone would sit nearer APD, which is the behavioral category (p. 219).
- The method does not transfer as such. The PCL-R is scored from “a semistructured interview, case history information, and specific scoring criteria” (p. 219). A corporation can supply a case history but cannot be interviewed as a person is, so applying the checklist to one is an analogy built on the items, not an assessment.
- Feeling, mimicry and the Velasquez objection. Cleckley’s core was an absence of “the emotional aspects of humanity” (p. 226), and a psychopath can mimic emotion so well that he “appears to react with normal emotions” (p. 228, quoting Cleckley 1976, p. 239). For the corporation the question is whether the affective items describe a deficit or a capacity that was never there. That is where Velasquez’s objection (LIT-1429, LIT-1432, unread) bites: if corporate intentions are only “as if”, so are corporate remorse and callousness. The record’s accounts of corporate agency and responsibility, THEORY-131 (French) and THEORY-139 (Pettit), ascribe intentions and normative judgment to a corporation, not affect.
- A matter of degree. On this construct “psychopathic” names a high position on a continuum (p. 234), not a kind. A corporate version of the thesis is then a claim of degree, which is easier to defend and harder to test.
Limitations
The four-factor evidence comes mostly from offender and forensic samples (p. 232). The review is partisan: it defends the authors’ instrument against named critics, and Hare discloses that he “receives royalties from the sale of the PCL-R and its family of instruments” (p. 240). The section on biological and cognitive features is a pointer to other reviews, not a review (pp. 239–240). It says nothing about collective or organizational psychopathy.
Open questions
Whether the superordinate factor reflects a single cause or only covariation; the authors grant that good fit “does not prove the existence of causal latent variables” (p. 231). For the corporate question, whether the covariation itself, which is evidence about individual persons, has any analogue in organizations, or whether an organization could score high on some factors and not others.