Psychopathic traits mediate guilt-related anterior midcingulate activity under authority pressure.

ABSTRACT: Coercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram's famous studies on obedience to authority. While some individuals exhibited high levels of guilt-related anxiety and refused orders to harm, others followed coercive orders throughout the whole event. The lack of guilt is a well-known characteristic of psychopathy, and recent evidence portrays psychopathic personalities on a continuum of clustered traits, while being pervasive in a significant proportion in the population. To investigate whether psychopathic traits better explain discrepancies in antisocial behavior under coercion, we applied a virtual obedience paradigm, in which an experimenter ordered subjects to press a handheld button to initiate successive actions that carry d

SUBMITTER: Cheng Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8295253 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature