Psychopathic men have more children than others study finds

Psychopathic men tend to have more children than the rest of the population according to a new study that examined the links between psychopathic traits and the number of kids generally produced by the population. 

Published in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, researchers concluded that prototypical psychopathy was associated with a higher number of children among men but not women according to a review of the study by PsyPost. 

The conclusions may not make sense if you aren't an expert in psychology, but they were very worrying since prototypical psychopathy is associated with a whole host of issues that would make an individual quite unfit to be a parent. 

For example, a December 2022 study reviewing the current science on the disorder explained that prototypical psychopathy was associated with higher levels of neglect as well as impulsivity and irresponsibility in those that it affected.

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Moreover, prototypical psychopathy may be a contributing factor to criminal behavior, a problem that certainly wouldn’t lead to the right environment for a child. However, there has been lots of research into this concerning disorder and child-rearing. 

Previous research has suggested that psychopathy may have evolved as a strategy for “higher offspring production” according to PsyPost, but the psychology news outlet also noted that findings on the topic have been inconsistent. 

There is contradictory research that suggests men with pronounced psychopathic traits have fewer children than those without them, especially when compared to non-criminal adults and women. So which studies should be believed?

The goal of the new study was to clarify the current science by looking at the links between psychopathic traits and offspring totals present in a general population of men and women. Here’s how the researchers went about it. 

Kristopher Brazil and Anthony Volk gathered together a group of 243 women as well as 253 men and asked them to complete a short survey that consisted of twenty-nine measures that assessed their level of possible psychopathic traits. 

The research can get a little complicated but it's important to know that the study's participants were asked a series of questions that assessed their interpersonal traits and affective characteristics as well as their lifestyle tendencies and antisocial behaviors. 

Each question was answered on a sliding scale of five responses that had participants rank their agreement with a question from one, which was ‘strongly disagree’ up to five, which was ‘strongly agree.’

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Examples of some questions included: “I never feel guilty over hurting people,” which measured affective characteristics, as well as questions like: “I enjoy doing wild things,” which measured lifestyle tendencies. 

Each of the participants also provided details on their age, income, relationship status, and the number of children they had. Using the data collected, Brazil and Volk were able to make a number of startling conclusions. 

Brazil and Volk noted that men’s “interpersonal, affective, and antisocial traits correlated positively with number of children." However, this was not the case with women who had psychopathic traits. 

Only women who had antisocial traits were found to have a higher number of children, and the study's authors noted that a female's relationship status and age more accurately influenced a woman’s likelihood of having a lot of children. 

“Our findings add to past research that used justice-involved and high-risk samples by extending the relation between psychopathic traits and number of children to community men,” Brazil and Volk wrote in the abstract of their study. 

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