Social orders are often built on the assumption that potential punishments for their violation should deter a significant portion of individuals who would otherwise boldly commit any crime. To some extent, this is indeed true; however, the degree to which a person is susceptible to the threat of punishment also depends on what kind of personality they have.
As was recently found, individuals with psychopathic predispositions demonstrate reduced sensitivity to pain, which affects their ability to learn from painful consequences. In one experiment, while performing a task in which participants could receive either a reward or an electric shock, possessing more pronounced psychopathic traits led to a poorer ability to learn from painful experience. Due to the more rapid development of pain tolerance, participants with high psychopathy scores quickly returned to their initial expectations and did not change their behavior.
Earlier studies show that if psychopathic individuals are asked to learn how to navigate a maze using various levers, while simultaneously avoiding those that cause painful shocks, they handle only the first task well. And in the case of a gambling experiment, in which two decks contained cards leading to high wins but also high losses, making long-term winning impossible, while the other two decks led to small wins but also small losses, making long-term winning possible, psychopathic individuals were poor at learning not to choose cards from the first two decks, whereas ordinary participants had no such problem. Apparently, they easily concentrate on faster and larger gains, ignoring the accompanying risks. Additionally, one MRI study showed that the brains of violent offenders with high psychopathy scores process punishment stimuli in an atypical way, which may lead to an inadequate assessment of benefits and punishments.
There is also a suggestion that psychopaths may actually derive pleasure from experiencing fear and deliberately place themselves in situations that induce it. This is supported by one study in which individuals with higher psychopathy scores, and especially its primary factor (traits such as lack of empathy and superficial charm), expressed more pleasure from watching videos with content aimed at inducing fear than participants with lower scores. Furthermore, researchers of corporate psychopathy studying information security in the banking sector note that fear of immediate or direct punishment is unable to prevent unethical behavior on the part of psychopathic people. Therefore, they, among others, propose conducting screening for psychopathic predispositions before hiring anyone.
It can be observed that individuals with psychopathic predispositions tend to inadequately assess the benefits and negative consequences of their behavior, and threatening them with punishment is often simply pointless. Therefore, in their case, instead of punishment, it is certainly worth considering a therapeutic approach that corrects the dysfunction of the violence inhibition mechanism, because of which they possess high psychopathy scores.
