Pop-Culture Psychopathy: How Media Exposure Affects Laypersons’ Recognition of Clinical Psychopathic Traits
Abstract
Entertainment media has proven to be an essential source of information about mental disorders and crucial in educating the public about these conditions. Consequently, how the media portrays the mentally ill is very important, yet they continue to be depicted alongside images of violence and crime. Psychopathy has been portrayed as a disorder of deceit, manipulation and charm despite research continually confirming otherwise. The inaccurate portrayals of psychopathy have far-reaching consequences, most alarmingly in the criminal justice system. These ‘psychopaths’ work alongside stigmatisation, categorisation theories and social learning and cultivation theories to encourage false beliefs about the disorder. This study uses a quantitative approach, collecting responses to a questionnaire through social media, to investigate the influence of inaccurate media depictions on the layperson’s ability to diagnose psychopathy accurately. The study compares psychopathy to participants’ ability to diagnose antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia. The author then looks for a relationship between participants’ ability to diagnose psychopathy, their confidence in their knowledge about psychopathy and their interaction with media depictions of psychopaths before finally investigating the influence of several demographic characteristics. A non-parametric repeated measures ANOVA revealed that participants’ ability to diagnose psychopathy is significantly worse than their ability to recognise the other conditions in vignettes. A multiple linear regression analysis revealed that a participant’s ability to identify psychopathy increased as their confidence increased and decreased as their media diversity score increased, however only the relationship between ability to identify and confidence was significant. Finally, multiple ANOVAs revealed that age and previous psychological knowledge had a significant impact on a participant’s ability to identify psychopathy accurately.
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BibTeX
@misc{marshall2026popculture,
title = {{Pop-Culture Psychopathy: How Media Exposure Affects Laypersons’ Recognition of Clinical Psychopathic Traits}},
author = {Robyn Marshall and Samuel Bennett},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/sbrcu_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/sbrcu_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Pop-Culture Psychopathy: How Media Exposure Affects Laypersons’ Recognition of Clinical Psychopathic Traits
AU - Robyn Marshall
AU - Samuel Bennett
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/20
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/sbrcu_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/sbrcu_v1/
AB - Entertainment media has proven to be an essential source of information about mental disorders and crucial in educating the public about these conditions. Consequently, how the media portrays the mentally ill is very important, yet they continue to be depicted alongside images of violence and crime. Psychopathy has been portrayed as a disorder of deceit, manipulation and charm despite research continually confirming otherwise. The inaccurate portrayals of psychopathy have far-reaching consequences, most alarmingly in the criminal justice system. These ‘psychopaths’ work alongside stigmatisation, categorisation theories and social learning and cultivation theories to encourage false beliefs about the disorder. This study uses a quantitative approach, collecting responses to a questionnaire through social media, to investigate the influence of inaccurate media depictions on the layperson’s ability to diagnose psychopathy accurately. The study compares psychopathy to participants’ ability to diagnose antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia. The author then looks for a relationship between participants’ ability to diagnose psychopathy, their confidence in their knowledge about psychopathy and their interaction with media depictions of psychopaths before finally investigating the influence of several demographic characteristics. A non-parametric repeated measures ANOVA revealed that participants’ ability to diagnose psychopathy is significantly worse than their ability to recognise the other conditions in vignettes. A multiple linear regression analysis revealed that a participant’s ability to identify psychopathy increased as their confidence increased and decreased as their media diversity score increased, however only the relationship between ability to identify and confidence was significant. Finally, multiple ANOVAs revealed that age and previous psychological knowledge had a significant impact on a participant’s ability to identify psychopathy accurately.
ER -