[Victus]

scathach wrote

Why would you link psychopathy to poor socialization, when there is a fair bit of evidence for altered neurophysiology? I'm not really familiar with the literature on psychopathy outside of what I've read on neurophysiology (sorry, I don't have the refs), but I recall seeing papers on hypoactivity of cortical (and maybe limbic?) structures, and something about smaller orbitofrontal regions. Besides that, I recall there is a component of the diagnostic criteria in DSM-IV that includes manipulative qualities of the psychopath, and as I understand it, psychopaths can be incredibly charming and highly socially skilled when it suits them to be. Anyway, I'm not sure that it's necessary to bring in socialization for the purposes of your study, as socialization is not a variable in your proposed design, nor does it sound like you'll be making any generalizations about socialization from your results.

Your analysis is quite accurate, however dysfunction in the central amygdala in psychopaths has been hypothosized to manifest as failed socialization (Blair, 2005). It is one of the proposed 'causes' (as much as such a thing is possible in a probabistic science) for instrumental aggression.

scathach wrote

Maybe a potential stumbling block here is your sampling population... I don't know the instrument you plan to use, but I suspect it would have to be pretty sensitive to detect a significant difference in psychopathy among non-incarcerated (and hopefully not extremely psychopathic) college students. Is that something that it can do reliably? If so, then you are in good shape. If not, then you might have a problem creating a big enough difference in the means for statistical power.

It has been tested on community samples (including undergraduate students), (Benning 2003, 2005). Your concerns are valid though, as university students are, logically, less likely to have some of the impulsive-antisociality traits associated with psychopathy, in comparison to the general population. Luckily, the primary purpose of the PPI is to detect non-forensic (non-jailed) psychopathy traits. It is seperated into two factors, Fearless dominance (the 'core' traits of psychopathy) and impulsive antisociality (the violent and socially deviant traits commonly associated with, but not needed for, psychopathy). As such the primary predictor being used would be FD traits, with IA traits being of secondary interest. There is no preclusion to persons with high FD reaching the university level (infact their ruthlessness would probably help them advance in some instances).

scathach wrote

I wonder how much trouble you'd have getting this through your IRB? I mean, it's sort of like Milgram's study that revealed to people how vicious and Nazi-like they could be. There would definitely have to be some deception, and you probably couldn't do a full reveal on the debriefing, and I'm not sure you could get an informed consent on that little detail of them not getting credit. Do you have a pretty flexible review board?

The risk would be minimal, as they're not even believing to be hurting anyone else, only stealing abstract 'points' from them. As such, I doubt the ethics board would have a big problem with it. Our ethics guidelines require us to disclose everything about the experiment once its over, and provide contact information to the board as well. Still, I doubt this would make many waves, as taking points from people is probably less traumatic that administering (fake) shocks to lethally punish a person.

scathach wrote

One other thing; and I may not fully understand the context of the study, so please set me straight if I'm not interpreting well, but I'm wondering what would be the point of doing a study to show a correlation between a psychopathic personality type and a score on a game that tests tendency toward instrumental aggression (as a psychopathic personality trait)? If the link between psychopathy and instrumental aggression is already as well established as you indicated, then are you testing the PPI for use as a diagnostic or predictive tool? Or is the correlation between instrumental aggression and psychopathy not as definite as I'm thinking?

I've only seen one study on it (though it is a widely referenced paper and generally accepted as a 'truth' in the field). This was only shown in forensic populations though, and never in community samples (to my knowledge). Studies on community samples are new, as previous tools have only been forensic based. The PCL-R takes way too long to apply in community samples, whereas self-report measures (while admittedly less trustworthy) take less time to complete, score and interpret.

scathach wrote

You might want to try getting permission to access a sampling frame at a prison instead of a college. You will more than likely get a nice sample of psychopaths there. Of course, that might increase the costs of your study, you'd have to pay your participants in cigarettes instead of grade points. (joking... sort of...)

Somewhat defeats the purpose, but yeah. The 'unsuccessful' psychopaths in prison populations would be alot easier and frequent than in the community sample. There is, however, a way around this that has been used in studies with the PPI before. It's called 'extreme group analysis'. We split the top and bottom 10% of PPI scores and make our groups from there. With a large enough sample, it works (apparently, I'm actually quite weak at math).

PS: Thanks for routing anon's post. I couldn't be bothered for sheer idiocy and illiteracy. Excellent critique and questioning.