Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2016

Department

Psychology

Abstract

The current study is the first to investigate whether individual differences in personality are related to improved first impression accuracy when appraising psychopathy in female offenders from thin-slices of information. The study also investigated the types of errors laypeople make when forming these judgments. Sixty-seven undergraduates assessed 22 offenders on their level of psychopathy, violence, likability, and attractiveness. Psychopathy rating accuracy improved as rater extroversion-sociability and agreeableness increased and when neuroticism and lifestyle and antisocial characteristics decreased. These results suggest that traits associated with nonverbal rating accuracy or social functioning may be important in threat detection. Raters also made errors consistent with error management theory, suggesting that laypeople overappraise danger when rating psychopathy.

Comments

This article is available through a CC BY-NC 3.0 license. More information is available from the publisher's site: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474704916674947

Publication Title

Evolutionary Psychology

Volume

14

Issue

4

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