People who score higher on certain psychopathic traits may actually have a sharper understanding of other people’s thoughts and intentions, according to new research published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. Specifically, adults who reported more callousness and lack of empathy—traits associated with psychopathic “meanness”—performed better on a test designed to assess how accurately someone can interpret social situations. The findings suggest that this form of psychopathy might be linked to a clearer but emotionally disengaged view of others’ minds.
Understanding how people think and feel about others’ mental states—a skill known as theory of mind—plays a central role in social life. It allows people to predict how others will behave, recognize emotions, and adjust their actions accordingly. This ability can promote kindness and cooperation. But it can also be misused. Individuals who are manipulative or exploitative may use their insight into others’ thoughts to take advantage of them.
This idea is relevant to psychopathy, a personality pattern that includes traits such as fearlessness, emotional coldness, impulsivity, and lack of guilt. While many studies have suggested that people with higher levels of psychopathic traits struggle to interpret emotions or intentions accurately, others have proposed the opposite. Some researchers have argued that certain psychopathic traits might be linked to an intact or even heightened ability to understand how others think—just without the emotional engagement that usually guides compassionate behavior.
Past studies have produced mixed findings. One reason for the confusion may be that many older studies used tests that didn’t clearly distinguish different types of mind-reading errors. For example, someone might misunderstand a social situation because they fail to grasp another person’s thoughts or feelings (known as under-mentalizing), or because they read too much into the situation and wrongly attribute motives (over-mentalizing). Without knowing which type of error is being made, it’s hard to draw conclusions about how psychopathic traits affect social understanding.
To explore these questions more clearly, researchers recruited 92 adults from the community and university setting. The participants were between 18 and 37 years old, with no known history of mental illness or neurological conditions. They completed a series of questionnaires and a specialized task called the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition.
This task involves watching a short film showing four friends interacting over dinner. The story includes moments of flirting, sarcasm, misunderstandings, and emotionally loaded exchanges. At regular points during the film, viewers are asked multiple-choice questions about what the characters are thinking or feeling. The test scores how well participants can infer others’ mental states and whether their mistakes are due to reading too little or too much into the situation.
Participants also completed a self-report questionnaire measuring psychopathic traits, which included three components: boldness (social dominance and fearlessness), meanness (lack of empathy and cruelty), and disinhibition (impulsivity and poor emotional control). The researchers also assessed each participant’s estimated intelligence, autism-related traits, and gender, since these factors are known to influence how people perform on social cognition tasks.
The results indicated that meanness—but not boldness or disinhibition—was linked to better performance on the movie-based task. People who scored higher on meanness made fewer mistakes overall, and particularly fewer mistakes involving misinterpretation of thoughts and intentions. They also made fewer over-mentalizing errors, suggesting they were less likely to exaggerate or misread others’ motives.
These findings held even after accounting for differences in intelligence, autism-related traits, and gender. Notably, men in the sample tended to make more cognitive errors than women, but this gender difference did not explain the link between meanness and performance.
There was no evidence that people high in meanness made more under-mentalizing errors. Instead, they appeared to be more precise in interpreting others’ thoughts while avoiding the tendency to overanalyze or attribute unfounded intentions.
This pattern stands out against earlier research in adolescents, which had found that callous traits were related to more over-mentalizing mistakes. The researchers suggest that this may reflect a shift with age. In younger individuals, difficulties in emotion processing might interfere with understanding others. As people mature, those with higher psychopathic traits might compensate by relying more on logical or cognitive strategies to interpret social situations. This could lead to better performance on certain kinds of tests, even if their emotional detachment remains.
The findings offer a new perspective on how different psychopathic traits relate to social understanding. Rather than showing a blanket impairment, people high in meanness may actually excel in interpreting others’ mental states, at least in terms of cognitive accuracy. This could help explain how some individuals with these traits manage to manipulate others effectively. Their skill in reading minds may not be used to connect or empathize, but to plan and exploit.
The study also raises questions about how we define and measure theory of mind. Past research has often used tasks that emphasize emotion recognition through facial expressions or eye movements, which may not fully capture the complex skill of interpreting real-life social situations. The movie-based task used in this study offers a more naturalistic view of how people think about others in everyday life.
However, the study has limitations. Most participants were young adults and predominantly female, which may limit how widely the results can be applied. The study also relied on self-reported personality traits, which can be influenced by how people perceive or present themselves. The researchers did attempt to reduce bias by using a performance-based task to assess mentalizing, but more research using multiple methods is needed.
Future studies could build on this work by including broader and more diverse populations, such as older adults or individuals with more severe psychopathic traits. Long-term research might also help clarify whether the relationship between psychopathy and mentalizing changes over time. It will also be important to explore how different pathways—emotional and cognitive—contribute to how people understand others.
The study, “Psychopathic meanness is associated with fewer over-mentalizing errors,” was authored by Steven M. Gillespie and Ahmad M. Abu-Akel.
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