Investigating Behavioural Characteristics for Psychopathic Personality Traits

Abstract

In this work, a survey was conducted in five selected towns in Osun State, Nigeria, based on seventeen identified behavioural characteristics using a developed structured questionnaire to collect data on identified behavioural characteristics that could trigger psychopathy personality traits. Psychopathic traits have eroded our society as they increase daily, thus leading to increased crime. It refers to the full range of physical and emotional behaviours that humans engage in. Physical or verbal aggression between spouses, siblings, or parents who use it as punishment for their children begins at home. Because of misunderstandings, neighbours frequently demonstrate hostility, pessimism, trust, and envious behaviours. Two personality traits considered in this work are aggressiveness and goal setting, while the considered behavioural characteristics are family upbringing, confidence in government, society values, industrialization, civilization, unemployment rate, technology advancement, socio-political class, impunity, environmental impact, embracing foreign culture based on materialism, religion believes, peer group influence, academic attainment, high wealth procession, family believes, and power intoxication. The data harvested from the questionnaire on behavioural characteristics from the five hundred and eight respondents were subjected to principal component analysis to investigate behavioural characteristics that are likely to be responsible for psychopathic traits in humans. Results from the principal component analysis confirmed that family upbringing, confidence in government, society values, industrialization, and civilization significantly contributed to psychopathic traits. Goal-setting is highly influenced by foreign cultures, high money possession, religious views, power intoxication, and technical advancement. These findings were obtained from a binary logistic regression study that used aggression and goal-setting as dependent factors. Conversely, it was discovered that the aggression personality trait was significantly influenced by power intoxication, environmental impact, impunity, and government confidence. Therefore, based on the available data in this study and the analysis carried out, civilization and confidence in government are the main significant behavioural characteristics that trigger personality traits in the region covered in the study. Future works can be extended to cover the entire country for a more robust study in investigating psychopathic behavioural characteristics.