ABSTRACT:
Sexual behavior is closely associated with delinquency and crime. Although psychopaths, by definition, have many short-term sexual relationships, it has not been shown that sexuality is a core aspect of psychopathy. A Darwinian view of psychopathy led to the hypothesis that psychopaths have a unique sexuality involving early, frequent, and coercive sex. Our subjects were 512 sex offenders assessed on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). Five variables reflecting early, frequent, and coercive sex loaded on the same principal component in exploratory factor analysis on a subset of the sample, whereas PCL-R items pertaining to adult sexual behavior did not. Confirmatory factor analysis of the remaining subjects yielded a measurement model containing three inter-correlated factors – the traditional two PCL-R factors, and coercive and precocious sexuality. Taxometric analyses gave evidence of a natural discontinuity underlying coercive and precocious sexuality. Coercive and precocious sexuality yielded statistically significant associations with other study variables predicted by the Darwinian hypothesis. The present findings are consistent with prior empirical findings and support the hypothesis that psychopathy has been a nonpathological, reproductively viable, alternate life history strategy.
Excerpt from article:
"...We suggest that psychopathy exists because it was selected during human evolution. The human evolutionary environment very likely consisted of stable groups, with strong adherence to rules and reciprocal altruism (Ridley, 1997; Wright, 1994). This created a niche for an alternative strategy involving cheating and exploiting others. An effective cheater needed to be selfish, callous, charming, and aggressive (Frank, 1988)..."
"...One of the most intriguing and knotty aspects of this hypothesis concerns the behavior of psychopaths as parents. The earliest accounts of psychopathy noted poor performance as parents (Cleckley, 1964). A heritable condition causing parents to neglect or abuse their offspring would likely disappear from the population, and by definition, could not have been adaptive. The continued existence of psychopathy, however, can be explained by ancestral male psychopaths relying on maternal investment in their offspring and a quantity-over-quality trade-off. This account depends on the hypothesized centrality of coercive and precocious sexuality to the construct of psychopathy..."
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