Are there racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality?: A critique of Lynn's (2002) racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality

Lynn's claim that certain races or ethnic groups have a higher incidence of psychopathic personality is not substantiated by large scale community studies in America that show no differences between these groups in the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. No consistent racial differences are found in traits closely associated with psychopathy, sensation seeking and psychoticism, and, Lynn to the contrary, the Psychopathic Deviate scale of the MMPI. Antisocial behavior in Blacks is less related to personality than in Whites. The results on criminality are not compatible with Rushton's r/K theory of evolutionary selection, as claimed by Lynn, because Native Americans and Hispanic groups are of Siberian Mongoloid origin in the case of the former and mixed Central-American Indian and Spanish Caucasoid in the case of the latter. The differences between African-American, Native-American, Hispanic, and European-American groups in antisocial behavior seems to be more a function of social class, historical circumstance, and their position in Western society rather than racial genetics. Following Rushton (1988), Lynn (2002) has presented a pastiche of population statistics on delinquency, criminal and sexual behavior, truancy, parenting, aggression, and disorders like Conduct Disorder (CD) and Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to support the hypotheses that: (1) the races and ethnic groups differ in the incidence of "psychopathic personality"; (2) these population differences are based in strong part to genetic differences between the populations; (3) the differences have their distal origins in the different evolutionary histories of the races (Rushton's r-K theory of race differences). Lynn claims that Rushton's theory "...has now become widely accepted by scholars", citing only those who support the theory and ignoring those who have criticized it (Lynn, 1989; Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, Ziegler, 1990; Zuckerman, 1990; Zuckerman & Brody, 1988). Consequently, some of those criticisms as well as those based on more recent data are addressed to the specific arguments in Lynn's article. (C) 2002 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.