Pop-Culture Psychopathy: How Media and Literature Exposure Relate to Lay Psychopathy Understanding

Psychologists conceptualization of psychopathy has gradually evolved over time, with interest peaking in recent decades. Concurrently, the lay publics relationship with psychology has changed from guarded skepticism to acceptance and even demand. The tie that binds psychology and the public has always been mass communication, both in news and popular media format. Reflecting changing trends, mass media has altered the way it objectively describes and popularly portrays psychopathy. Whereas psychopaths were consistently portrayed as villains in the mid-20th Century, today they comprise a growing cast of protagonists. It is currently unclear what effect, if any, these co-occurring changes have had on public understanding or perception of psychopathy. This research sought to explore that dynamic, and found a variety of interesting descriptive and statistically significant findings. Included among those is the finding that great misunderstanding of psychopathy, as a construct, exists in the minds of many lay individuals. Additionally, that misunderstanding might be positively slanted among individuals with high exposure to protagonist portrayals of psychopathy. Said another way, fans of television and movie protagonist psychopaths may conceptualize a kind of romanticized psychopathy. This signals important legal, practical, and ethical implications, including the potential for biased jurors, confounded research about psychopathys effect as a label, and questions about how psychologists should respond to this information. Many of this projects limitations are attributable to its largely exploratory nature, but are discussed at greater length. As for future directions for research, this exploratory investigation offers a foundation toward a psychopathy bias scale - a tool that could be utilized in research on the labeling effects of psychopathy.Ph.D., Clinical Psychology -- Drexel University, 201