Data from: General trust impedes perception of self-reported primary psychopathy in thin slices of social interaction

Little is known about people’s ability to detect subclinical psychopathy
from others’ quotidian social behavior, or about the correlates of
variation in this ability. This study sought to address these questions
using a thin slice personality judgment paradigm. We presented 108
undergraduate judges (70.4% female) with 1.5 minute video thin slices of
zero-acquaintance triadic conversations among other undergraduates
(targets: n = 105, 57.1% female). Judges completed self-report measures of
general trust, caution, and empathy. Target individuals had completed the
Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy (LSRP) scale. Judges viewed the videos in
one of three conditions: complete audio, silent, or audio from which
semantic content had been removed using low-pass filtering. Using a novel
other-rating version of the LSRP, judges’ ratings of targets’ primary
psychopathy levels were significantly positively associated with targets’
self-reports, but only in the complete audio condition. Judge general
trust and target LSRP interacted, such that judges higher in general trust
made less accurate judgments with respect to targets higher in primary and
total psychopathy. Results are consistent with a scenario in which
psychopathic traits are maintained in human populations by negative
frequency dependent selection operating through the costs of detecting
psychopathy in others.