By Nicole Findlay
As a child, Kendra McGuffin vacillated between visions of becoming a ballerina or an undercover detective. Neither career option proved as interesting as one devoted to studying crime.
Now a forensic psychology MA student, McGuffin recently took a look at the biases psychologists might apply when deciding whether or not someone is a psychopath.
Kendra McGuffin
McGuffin worked with existing data collected from international training sessions organized by her graduate advisor, Adelle Forth. McGuffin anticipated that psychologists’ gender and the culture from which they came would influence their interpretations of psychopathy assessments.
“We expected women might be more sympathetic to offenders with difficult backgrounds,” said McGuffin. “We also hypothesized that the rater’s profession might influence their scores.”
She found the opposite in fact. Women tended to rate subjects higher on the psychopathy scale than did men. However the psychiatrists and psychologists’ nationalities did not influence the scores they gave.
McGuffin’s research has real implications. If she had found substantial differences in the scoring results it could have been an indication of an unreliable testing tool. A designation of psychopathy can mean the difference between a life spent in prison or the possibility of rehabilitation and parole.
There is more work to be done in the area.
“We all know that different political parties have different opinions on crime and criminal justice,” said McGuffin. “It would be interesting to know if differences in opinions about how to deal with offenders spill over into areas like psychopathy assessment.”