Current Research in the Behavioral Sciences: Detecting Psychopathy From Thin Slices of Behavior

(Naturalistic Methods) Current Research in the Behavioral Sciences: Detecting

Psychopathy From Thin Slices of Behavior

Katherine A. Fowler, Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Christopher J. Patrick (2009) used a naturalistic research design to study whether personality could be reliably assessed by raters who were given only very short samples (“thin slices”) of behavior. They were particularly interested in assessing psychopathy, a syndrome characterized by emotional and interpersonal defi cits that often lead a person to antisocial behavior. According to the authors’ defi nition, psychopathic individuals tend to be “glib and superficially charming,” giving a surface-level appearance of intelligence, but are also “manipulative and prone to pathological lying” (p. 68). Many lead a socially deviant lifestyle marked by early behavior problems, irresponsibility, poor impulse control, and proneness to boredom. 

         Because the researchers felt that behavior was likely to be a better indicator of psychopathy than was self-report, they used coders to assess the disorder from videotapes. Forty raters viewed videotapes containing only very brief excerpts (either 5s, 10s, or 20s in duration) selected from longer videotaped interviews with 96 maximum-security inmates at a prison in Florida. Each inmate’s video was rated by each rater on a variety of dimensions related to psychopathy including overall rated psychopathy, as well as antisocial, narcissistic and avoidant characteristics. The raters also rated the prisoners on physical attractiveness, as well as estimates of their violence proneness, and intelligence. To help the coders understand what was to be rated, the researchers provided them with very specifi c descriptions of each of the dimensions to be rated. 

    

  Even though the raters were not experts in psychopathy, they tended to agree on their judgments. Interrater reliability was calculated as the agreement among the raters on each item. As you can see in Table 7.2, the reliability of the codings was quite high, suggesting that the raters, even using very thin slices, could adequately assess the conceptual variables of interest.