Psychopathy Deconstructed and Reconstructed: Identifying and Assembling the Personality Building Blocks of Cleckley's Chimera

The psychopathy field has long been beset by confusion and contention regarding the boundaries and features of this chimerical condition. We propose that this disagreement stems largely from the historical separation between psychopathy and basic personality psychology. Using findings from a meta‐analysis of the correlations between the Psychopathy Checklist‐Revised (PCL‐R) and normal‐range personality traits as a launching point, we (a) deconstruct widely used measures of psychopathy into their constituent subdimensions and (b) examine the associations of these subdimensions with higher‐order and lower‐order personality dimensions drawn from the Big Five and Big Three frameworks. Our review of the adult psychopathy literature reveals broad agreement that psychopathy measures are imbued with low Agreeableness and low Conscientiousness. Nevertheless, substantial disagreement revolves around the place of largely adaptive features, especially high agentic Extraversion, low Neuroticism, and high Openness, within the psychopathy construct. We propose that ongoing debates regarding the nature and boundaries of psychopathy reflect a focus on two differing operationalizations of this condition, each of which reflects a different “species” of individual.