Racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality

This paper proposes that there are racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality conceptualised as a continuously distributed trait, such that high values of the trait are present in blacks and Native Americans, intermediate values in Hispanics, lower values in whites and the lowest values in East Asians. Part one of the paper sets out the evidence for this thesis. Part two applies the thesis to the unresolved problem in The Bell Curve that racial and ethnic differences in a number of social phenomena such as crime, welfare dependency, rates of marriage, etc. cannot be fully explained by differences in intelligence and proposes that some of the residual disparities are attributable to differences in psychopathic personality. Part three of the paper integrates the theory with Rushton’s r-K theory of race differences.