Psychopathy is a personality construct encompassing impaired interpersonal-affective functioning, combined with the inclination to lead an erratic lifestyle and to engage in antisocial acts. Individuals with elevated psychopathic traits often make decisions that have a negative impact on others. Some findings suggest that a lack of empathy and guilt is a key explanatory factor, while other results point toward a decreased sense of fairness in individuals with elevated psychopathic traits. The goal of the present study was to directly compare these hypotheses. Eighty-six healthy individuals completed the Self-Report Psychopathy scale and performed the Hidden Multiplier Trust Game, a socioeconomic decision-making task designed to untangle the roles of guilt and fairness during decision-making. Computational modeling of choice data identified five types of moral decision strategies: inequity aversion, guilt aversion, moral opportunism, greed, and generosity. The model-free results demonstrated that psychopathic traits were associated with lower levels of reciprocity. The model-based results suggested that a reduced sense of fairness, associated with affective traits, was driving this behavior. Our findings stress the importance of treating guilt and fairness as independent concepts, and highlight the importance of improving conceptual precision in untangling the individual impact of fairness and guilt, as this could help explain the mixed results in moral decision-making literature. Elucidating the psychological motivations underlying the relationship between psychopathic traits and poor social decision-making opens new avenues for research on the underlying cognitive mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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道德策略和精神病态特征。

精神病是一种人格结构，包括人际情感功能受损，并倾向于过着不稳定的生活方式和从事反社会行为。具有高度精神病特征的人经常做出对其他人产生负面影响的决定。一些研究结果表明，缺乏同理心和内疚感是一个关键的解释因素，而其他结果则表明，具有较高精神病特征的个体的公平感下降。本研究的目的是直接比较这些假设。86 名健康人完成了自我报告精神病量表并进行了隐藏乘数信任游戏，这是一项社会经济决策任务，旨在解开决策过程中内疚和公平的作用。选择数据的计算模型确定了五种道德决策策略：不公平厌恶、内疚厌恶、道德机会主义、贪婪和慷慨。无模型结果表明，精神病特征与较低水平的互惠相关。基于模型的结果表明，与情感特征相关的公平感降低正在推动这种行为。我们的研究结果强调了将内疚和公平视为独立概念的重要性，并强调了提高概念精确度在理清公平和内疚对个人影响方面的重要性，因为这有助于解释道德决策文献中的混合结果。阐明心理变态特征与不良社会决策之间关系的心理动机为研究潜在认知机制开辟了新途径。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。