A prospective comparison of two measures of psychopathy in the prediction of institutional misconduct
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 1, 2026

Holistic Facial Composite Creation and Subsequent Video Line-up Eyewitness Identification Paradigm
Published on: December 24, 2015
John F Edens1, Norman G Poythress, Scott O Lilienfeld
1Texas A&M University, College of Liberal Arts, Department of Psychology, College Station, TX 77843-4235, USA. jedens@psych.tamu.edu
Abstract:
This study examined the predictive validity of two widely used measures of psychopathic traits, the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) and the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). Records of institutional infractions were obtained for a young adult sample of prison inmates (N = 46), who were followed for approximately two years following administration of these two scales. The PPI total and two factor scores predicted the total number of infractions committed (r ranging from .28 to .36). PPI Factor I showed some evidence of stronger associations with non-aggressive infractions (r = .36), whereas PPI Factor II was the strongest correlate of aggressive misconduct (r = .24). The total and facet scores of the PCL-R were not significantly predictive of any form of institutional misconduct, with effect sizes ranging from negligible to small (median r = .14, r ranging from -.01 to .21).
Related Concept Videos
Dark Triad and Person Perception
Self-Report Tests of Personality
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Measures of Intelligence
Validity refers to how well a test measures what it claims to measure. An intelligence test should accurately assess intelligence rather than another characteristic, like anxiety. Criterion validity is one way to evaluate this; it...
Psychosurgery
Historical Development of Psychosurgery
In the 1930s, Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz introduced a surgical procedure designed...
Theory of Attribution II: Kelley's Covariation Theory
