Custodes Futurifor the advancement of humanity

Psychological factor, barrier 8 of 8

Antisocial and self-serving traits

Narcissism, manipulativeness, psychopathy, and greed mainly harm other people and institutions. Caution: everyone has these traits to some degree, and their worst forms trace largely to early-life disadvantage. The evidence supports improving childhoods, not labeling or excluding people.

Evidence

  • Work behavior. A meta-analysis of 245 samples (43,907 people) found narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy were all associated with counterproductive work behavior, with effects that depended on context (O'Boyle et al., 2012).
  • Leadership. Narcissism predicts who emerges as a leader but not how effective leaders are (Grijalva et al., 2015). Among 111 computer-industry CEOs, narcissism was linked to bold strategies and extreme results but not to better or worse performance overall (Chatterjee and Hambrick, 2007).
  • Greed and class. People higher in dispositional greed kept more money in economic games and were more likely to accept a bribe in a laboratory study (Seuntjens et al., 2015, 2019). A widely cited claim that higher social class causes unethical behavior failed two preregistered replications (Jung et al., 2023).
  • Concentrated costs. In the Dunedin cohort, the 9% whose childhood conduct problems persisted accounted for 53% of criminal convictions, and one-fifth of members accounted for 81% of convictions (Rivenbark et al., 2018, Caspi et al., 2016). Records of 1.7 million New Zealanders and 2.3 million Danes showed the same concentration, with early-life disadvantages in that group (Richmond-Rakerd et al., 2020).

What can be done

Actions rated on the strength-rating scale (A strong and replicated, B solid but limited, C weak or debated, D contested or failed), applied to the specific claim made.

  • Long-term prevention for high-risk children (B, one large trial). In the Fast Track trial with 891 high-risk children, the program prevented psychiatric diagnoses among those at highest risk (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 2011), and at age 25, 59% of the intervention group had an externalizing, internalizing, or substance problem versus 69% of controls, with lower violent and drug crime conviction scores (Dodge et al., 2015).
  • Parent training for conduct problems (B). Incredible Years reduces disruptive behavior (see "Chronic and toxic stress" in the biological factors), starting earlier in childhood was no more effective (Gardner et al., 2019), the families with the least and most severe problems attend fewer sessions (Melendez-Torres et al., 2024), and a meta-analysis of 20 GenerationPMTO studies found improvements in parenting and child behavior (Cai et al., 2022), though one Icelandic trial found no effect on observed parenting (Sigmarsdottir et al., 2013).
  • Remove lead from the environment (B). After correcting for publication bias across 24 studies, lead still raises crime, though by less than popular claims suggest, and lead removal may explain 7 to 28% of the fall in U.S. homicide (Higney, Hanley, and Moro, 2022).
  • Choose leaders with structured, job-related methods rather than impressions of charisma (B). Narcissism predicts who emerges as a leader but not how effective they are (Grijalva et al., 2015), and structured methods predict performance better than unstructured ones (see "Cognitive biases" in the psychological factors). No trial shows that this reduces later misconduct.
  • Protect and reward whistleblowers (B). Employees detected 19% of large U.S. corporate frauds, against 6% for the regulator, and monetary rewards increased detection without more frivolous cases (Dyck, Morse, and Zingales, 2010).
  • Contested: cognitive behavioral programs in the justice system (C). Across 58 mostly nonrandomized studies, these programs were associated with about 25% lower reoffending (from about 40% to 30%) (Landenberger and Lipsey, 2005, Lipsey, Landenberger, and Wilson, 2007), but a meta-analysis of randomized trials found no significant effect once small trials were excluded (Beaudry et al., 2021).
  • Weak: early childhood education as crime prevention (C). Perry Preschool's social rate of return was estimated at 7 to 10% (Heckman et al., 2010), and Abecedarian participants had better adult health (Campbell et al., 2014), but samples were tiny, and after correcting for multiple tests long-term benefits held for girls but not boys (Anderson, 2008).
  • Not effective outside the developers' trials: multisystemic therapy (D). A meta-analysis found small effects that depended on country and study quality (van der Stouwe et al., 2014), a Cochrane review found no significant difference from usual services (Littell, Popa, and Forsythe, 2005), and an independent English trial found out-of-home placement of 13% versus 11% with usual care (Fonagy et al., 2018).

Proposed and experimental methods

Methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places, or tried and then failed. Each shows a stage label and an evidence rating. A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works. The stage labels are explained on the psychological factor page.

  • Treatments tailored to callous-unemotional traits in children (Early trial, C). Add-ons to parent training target callous-unemotional (CU) traits, meaning low guilt and empathy, for example emotion recognition training and PCIT-CU, an adapted Parent-Child Interaction Therapy. Emotion recognition training had no effect in 195 clinic-referred children overall but improved affective empathy and conduct problems among those with high CU traits, a subgroup finding (Dadds et al., 2012). In an open pilot with 23 families, PCIT-CU was followed by fewer conduct problems and CU traits and more empathy (d = 0.7 to 2.0) (Kimonis et al., 2019), and in a randomized trial of 43 families both PCIT-CU and standard PCIT improved during treatment, but gains held better with PCIT-CU over 3 months (d = 0.4 to 0.7) (Fleming et al., 2022). Samples are small and mostly from one research network, and in line with the stance above, CU scores are used here only to tailor treatment, not to label or exclude children.
  • Intensive treatment for youth with high psychopathy scores (Early trial, C). The Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin offers intensive treatment to highly violent delinquent boys instead of usual correctional care. Among 141 adolescent offenders with high psychopathy scores followed for 2 years, those in usual juvenile corrections (n = 85) were more than twice as likely to reoffend violently as those treated at Mendota (n = 56), with no major difference in general or nonviolent reoffending (Caldwell et al., 2006a). A comparison of 101 treated boys with 101 matched boys in usual treatment estimated benefits more than 7 times the costs (Caldwell et al., 2006b). Assignment was not random and both studies come from one site evaluated partly by its own staff, but the approach treats high-trait youth as treatable rather than excluding them.
  • Lottery selection for citizens' assemblies (Approved but not scaled, C). Selecting members by lottery (sortition) is proposed to remove the advantage of people who seek power for its own sake. A fair-selection algorithm chooses representative panels with selection chances as close to equal as possible, has been used to select more than 40 citizens' assemblies, and gave substantially fairer selection probabilities than the previous method in data from ten assemblies (Flanigan et al., 2021). No study was found showing that lottery-selected bodies behave less self-servingly, and most assemblies are advisory.
  • Machine learning to target anti-corruption audits (Theoretical, C). In policy simulations with Brazilian municipal budget data, a machine-guided targeting policy could detect almost twice as many corrupt municipalities as random audits at the same audit rate (Ash et al., 2025). It has not been deployed and evaluated in practice.
  • Oxytocin as a pro-social drug (Early trial, contested, C). Intranasal oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, has been proposed to raise empathy. In 100 male adolescents in residential care, a single dose increased empathy on a laboratory task compared with placebo only among those with high CU traits (Fragkaki and Cima, 2019), and high CU traits are associated with greater oxytocin receptor gene methylation, lower blood oxytocin in older boys, and receptor gene variants (Dadds et al., 2014a, Dadds et al., 2014b). However, the largest pediatric treatment trial, in 290 children and adolescents with autism over 24 weeks, found no benefit on social withdrawal (difference -0.2, 95% CI -1.5 to 1.0) (Sikich et al., 2021), and a methods review concluded that intranasal oxytocin studies are generally underpowered and that most published findings probably do not represent true effects (Walum, Waldman, and Young, 2016). No treatment trial in children with CU traits was found.
  • Biomedical "moral enhancement" (Theoretical, D). Persson and Savulescu argue that human moral psychology has not kept pace with humanity's power to affect the planet and the future, that education and social reform may act too slowly, and that biomedical means of changing moral motivation may be needed (Persson and Savulescu, 2008, Persson and Savulescu, 2012). Critics argue that the only reliable moral enhancers are socialization, education, and parental supervision, or cognitive enhancement that is general rather than targeted, and that targeting specific moral emotions has little prospect of success (Harris, 2011). No tested method exists, the oxytocin results above support the critics' practical point, and any version that screens or treats people by trait scores would conflict with this document's stance against labeling people by traits.
  • Not shown to help: term limits as a check on corruption (In wide use, contested, C). In Brazil, mayors who could run for reelection misappropriated 27% fewer resources than mayors without reelection incentives, which suggests that ending the chance of reelection can weaken accountability (Ferraz and Finan, 2011). A 2025 reanalysis of audit reports from 2003 to 2015 replicated the original result for 2003 and 2004 but found a smaller effect over the full period, significant for only one of three corruption measures and near zero from 2005 to 2012 (Dahis, Mattsson, and Sales, 2025).

Sources cited on this page

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Every source for this factor is listed on the psychological factor page.