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Psychopathy is characterized by a lack of concern for other people and social norms. In contrast, individuals with high social anxiety are overly concerned about the approval of others and violating social norms. Therefore, we hypothesized that social anxiety is negatively associated with psychopathic attributes, with males being more psychopathic than females. In order to test this hypothesis, we administered self-report measures of social anxiety, psychopathic attributes, and academic misconduct as an index of adherence to social norms to a sample of 349 undergraduate college students (244 females and 105 males). Males had more psychopathic attributes than females. Social anxiety and psychopathic attributes showed a weak but significant negative correlation in the total sample and also in the subgroup of males and females. Psychopathic attributes were further positively associated with academic misconduct behaviors among females, but not among males. These findings are consistent with the notion that social anxiety and psychopathic attributes are negatively associated.Join our 'From 0 to Social in 27 Days Challenge' for free. Get involved through the new Facebook group: Log into Facebook | FacebookHumans have a general need to be liked, valued, and approved of by others in order to develop supportive peer relationships and engage successfully in social relationships (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). Ostracism from the social group can have a strong negative impact on ones physical and mental well-being (e.g., Sapolsky, Alberts, & Altmann, 1997). As a result, humans naturally fear negative evaluation by their peers and exhibit social anxiety in situations that might threaten their position in the social group (Gilbert, 2001; Leary, 2001). Therefore, social anxiety and its associated fear of violating social norms and negative evaluation by others appear to have an important function for the maintenance of a social hierarchy (Gilbert, 2001).In contrast, other people show very little or no concern for others. In extreme cases, they show a lack of empathy, lack of conscience, manipulative behaviors, and social deviance, among other things (e.g., Cleckley, 1982/1941; Hare, 1993, 1998). Clinical or otherwise abnormal expressions of psychopathic attributes had been termed sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy, depending on the specific definition (e.g., Hare, Hart, & Harpur, 1991; Widiger et al., 1996). Psychopathic attributes are expressed in various degrees whenever social groups are formed. For example, such tendencies among college students are expressed in the form of academic misconduct behaviors (Scanlon & Neumann, 2002; Young, 2001). These characteristics stand in clear contrast to those typically displayed by socially anxious individuals who are overly concerned about pleasing others and adhering to social norms (Hofmann, 2007; Hofmann & DiBartolo, 2001; Hofmann, Heinrichs, & Moscovitch, 2004).Research investigating the nature of social anxiety (Kollman, Brown, Liverant, & Hofmann, 2006), pychopathy (Edens, Marcus, Lilienfield, & Poythress, 2006; Guay, Ruscio, Knight, & Hare, 2007), and psychopathic behaviors and attitudes (Marcus, Lilienfeld, Edens, & Poythress, 2006) suggests that these characteristics reflect dimensional constructs rather than discrete categories. The only other study that reported results supporting a taxonic structure of psychopathy (Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1994) has been criticized on methodological grounds (Edens, Marcus, Lilienfeld, & Poythress, 2006; Lilienfeld, 1998; Marcus, John, & Edens, 2004).Given the defining features of social anxiety and psychopathic attributes, it is possible that these two dimensional constructs are negatively associated. Since the early conceptualization of psychopathy, researchers have hypothesized a link between psychopathy and (the lack of) anxiety (Cleckley, 1941/1982). However, the empirical literature on this issue has been mixed. Some studies have reported a lack of association between trait anxiety and psychopathy (Schmitt & Newman, 1999) or a positive association between general trait anxiety and antisocial behaviors in children (Fergusson & Horwood, 1993) and adults (Butcher, Graham, Williams, & Ben-Porath, 1990; Boyd, Burke, Greenberg, Holzer, Rae et al., 1984). One reason for these inconsistent findings might be related to the differences in the definition between psychopathic attributes and between fearfulness/fearlessness (Frick, Lilienfeld, Ellis, Loney, & Siverthorne, 1999), general trait anxiety, and other forms of anxiety. To our knowledge, no inquiry has been made to specifically examine the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety, despite the direct, negative relationship between these two constructs in some of their definitional criteria. Specifically, the defining features of social anxiety and psychopathy tend to oppose one another: Whereas individuals with social anxiety are overly concerned about violating social norms and being negatively evaluated by others, people with psychopathic attributes typically do not fear violating social norms and show very little or no concern for others.Psychopathic attributes are difficult to measure because of obvious response biases, especially social desirability. Some of the measurement scales include the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R; Hare, 1991), the Hare P-Scan (Hare & Herve, 1999), the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-revised (PPI-R) by Lilienfeld and Widows (2005), and the Social Psychoathy Scale (Smith, 1985; Edelmann & Vivian, 1988). The Hare scales are interviewer-administered scales, and the items are scored by combining interview, case-history, and archival data. The PPI-R is a lengthy self-report instrument consisting of 154 items. The SPS is an 18-item self-report measure with adequate psychometric properties. Because of its brevity and ease of administration, we chose this scale in conjunction with a measure of social desirability.An important variable to consider when examining the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety is participants gender. The literature consistently reports that men tend to show more psychopathic attributes and are more violent than women (e.g., Yang & Coid, 2007). Furthermore, although men and women do not systematically differ in their overall level of social anxiety, some research suggests that social anxiety is associated with the persons self-construal and identification with a traditional gender role orientation (Moscovitch, Hofmann, & Litz, 2005). Therefore, we will examine the association between psychoapthic attributes and social anxiety in men and women separately.We predicted that psychopathic attributes are more common in men and women. Moreover, we hypothesized that psychopathic attributes are negatively associated with social anxiety. Finally, we expected that psychopathic attributes, but not social anxiety, are positively associated with behaviors that violate social norms, as indicated by academic misconduct in an undergraduate student population.The sample consisted of 349 college students (244 females and 105 males) enrolled in an introductory level psychology class at Boston University, a large, private university on the east coast of the United States of America. The majority of the sample was Caucasian (71.6%) and heterosexual (96.1%). Other ethnic groups included Asian-American (17.1%), Hispanic (5.0%), African-American (3.7%) and other (2.6%). The average age of the sample was 18.7 (range 1726, SD: 1.08)This study took place in a group setting. Upon entering, participants received a consent form and a battery of self-report questionnaires. Participants were asked to read and sign the consent form prior to filling out the questionnaires. They were further informed that all information was strictly confidential. Upon completing the questionnaire battery, participants were debriefed and received class credit for their participation.In order to study the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire battery that included the following self-report instruments:The SIAS consists of 20 items that are rated on a 5-point Likert scale. The items are self-statements regarding cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to situations requiring social interaction. The scale shows good temporal stability, as well as good discriminant and construct validity (Heimberg, Mueller, Holt, Hope, & Liebowitz, 1992).The SPS consists of 18 items, each rated on a 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly agree) point scale. The instrument assesses psychopathic attributes with items measuring the tendency to be beguiling, guiltless, manipulative, cynical, egocentric, unempathic, unpuerturbed, restless, and oriented in the present. Examples of the scales items are: I dont see anything wrong with taking items from work to keep as my own and There is always a way to get someone to trust you. The scale shows adequate psychometric properties (Edelmann & Vivian, 1988; Smith, 1985).This questionnaire was developed based on a study by Newstead, Franklyn-Stokes and Armstrong (1996). The scale shows adequate psychometric properties and measures academic misconduct as an indicator of non-adherence to social norms. It consists of 21 items that asks respondents to indicate whether or not they had ever engaged in certain behaviors. Examples include submitting coursework from an outside source (e.g., essay banks), ensuring the availability of books/articles in library by mis-shelving or cutting out pages, lying about medical/other circumstances to get extension or exemption, inventing data, and altering data (e.g., adjusting data to obtain a significant result). The latter two items potentially apply to many participants despite being undergraduates in introductory psychology classes, because participants are heavily involved in formal research at Boston University. Furthermore, even informal research is subject to falsifying data, because this form of academic misconduct can occur as part of presentations in course term papers or introductory biology lab reports, etc. The endorsement rates for these items were sufficiently high. Moreover, the inclusion in the scale was meaningful and informative. Therefore, these items will be presented in the results section.The PANAS is a 20-item measure of two primary dimensions of mood- Positive Affect (PA; 10-items) and Negative Affect (NA; 10 items). Items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale. The PANAS is widely used in experimental studies and has good reliability and validity (Watson et al., 1988). Participants were asked to rate how they feel in general. The PANAS was included because previous studies have reported an association between general anxiety/negative affect and psychopathic attributes.The MCSD scale is a 33-item true-false scale that is commonly used to measure social desirability (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960). Studies have further shown that the MCSD scale measures self-deception and impression management (Paulhus, 1985; Weinberger & Davidson, 1994). Respondents are asked about common negative and positive characteristics of unusual levels of general virtue. The MCSD scale shows good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. The scale was administered to control for participants response bias.To examine whether men and women differed in their psychopathic attributes, social anxiety, positive and negative trait affect, and their academic misconduct behaviors, we conducted a multivariate General Linear Model with Gender as the between subjects variable, the MCSD scale as the covariate, and the scores in the SPS, SIAS, PANAS (negative), PANAS (positive) and ABQ as the dependent variables. Complete data were available from 349 participants.The results showed a significant multivariate Gender effect, F (5, 342) = 14.94, p < .0001, partial 2 = .18, and covariate effect, F (5, 342) = 27.33, p < .0001, partial 2 = .29. The between-subjects effects were significant for the SPS, F (1, 346) = 68.19, p < .0001, partial 2 = .17, ABQ, F (1, 346) = 5.38, p = .02, partial 2 = .15, and PANAS, positive affect, F (1, 346) = 4.97, p = .03, partial 2 = .14 (all other Fs < .1, ps > .3, partial 2s < .003). Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations of the measures in males and females. These results suggest that, consistent with our hypothesis, males scored higher on the SPS and reported more academic misconduct behaviors than females.Gender Differences in Self-Report Measures.Note: The Table shows means, standard deviations (SD) and the results of independent t-tests. SIAS = Social Interaction Anxiety Scale; SPS = Social Psychopathy Scale; ABQ = Academic Behavior Questionnaire; PANAS = Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; MCSD = Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale.The SPS and SIAS showed a significant but relatively weak negative correlation in the total sample, r = .12, p < .02 (without any covariates). Figure 1 shows the scatter plot of the two questionnaire sores.Association between the scores in the Social Psychopathy Scale (SPS) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) in the total sample.In order to further explore the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety while controlling for social desirability, trait affect, and gender, we examined the partial correlations between the SPS and the SIAS among females and males using the positive and negative subscales of the PANAS and the MCSD scale as covariates.Consistent with our hypothesis, the SPS was negatively associated with the SIAS in the female sample, r = 0.16, p < .05, and even more so in the male sample, r = .25, p < .05. The difference in the magnitude between these correlation coefficients was not statistically significant t (336) = 1.29, p > .10. Moreover, the SPS was positively associated with the ABQ in the female sample, r = .20, p < .005, but not in the male sample, r = .07, p > .4. This difference was statistically significant, t (339) = 1.72, p < .05.In order to examine the relationship between the SPS, the SIAS, the positive and negative subscales of the PANAS and the ABQ, we further calculated the partial correlations between these variables with the MCSD scale as the covariate. The correlation matrix of these variables in the female and male subsamples is shown in Tables 2 and and3,3, respectively.Association Between Psychopathic Attributes, Social Anxiety, Trait Affect, and Academic Misconduct Among Females.Note: The Table shows partial correlation coefficients (controlled for social desirability as measured with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale). SIAS = Social Anxiety Interaction Scale; SPS = Social Psychopathy Scale; PANAS-NA (PA) = Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Negative Affect Subscale (Positive Affect Subscale); ABQ = Academic Behavior Questionnaires.Association Between Psychopathic Attributes, Social Anxiety, Trait Affect, and Academic Misconduct Among Males.Note: The Table shows partial correlation coefficients (controlled for social desirability as measured with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale). SIAS = Social Anxiety Interaction Scale; SPS = Social Psychopathy Scale; PANAS-NA (PA) = Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Negative Affect Subscale (Positive Affect Subscale); ABQ = Academic Behavior Questionnaires.It should be noted that academic misconduct was surprisingly common. Only 3.2% of the respondents reported that they never engaged in any of the behaviors listed in the ABQ. The number of academic misconduct behaviors was normally distributed with an average of 6.96, and a mode and median of 7 (SD: 3.97; range: 017 with a maximum score of 21). Some of the most common behaviors were allowing own coursework to be copied by another student (81.6%), copying another students coursework without their knowledge (67.1%), inventing data (52.9%), altering data (e.g., adjusting data to obtain a significant result) (47.1%), and paraphrasing material from another source without acknowledging the original author (45.5%).Psychopathic attributes and social anxiety are both defined by their adherence to social norms and concerns for other people. Therefore, we hypothesized that psychopathic attributes and tendencies are negatively associated with social anxiety. Because most taxometric studies suggest that social anxiety (Kollman et al., 2006) and psychopathic attributes (Edens et al., 2006; Guay et al., 2007) are continuous variables, we examined these constructs in a large undergraduate male and female student sample.Consistent with our prediction, men had a considerably stronger tendency toward psychopathic attributes, as measured with the SPS, than females. The same, but a less pronounced, gender difference as observed for academic misconduct behaviors. In contrast, there was no gender difference in self-reported social anxiety. We further found that social anxiety and psychopathic attributes were negatively correlated in the total sample, r = .12, p < .02. This effect became more evident when controlling for social desirability. This correlation was particularly strong in men, r = .28, p < .005, but was also evident in women, r = .15, p < .05. This effect cannot be explained by general trait affect, because no significant correlations were observed between positive or negative trait affect and psychopathic attributes.Consistent with earlier theorists (Cleckley, 1941/1982) and empirical data (Schmitt & Newman, 1999), we observed that psychopathic attributes are unrelated to negative trait affect. Instead, we observed a weak, but significant negative, relationship between psychopathy and social anxiety.It is possible that the SPS is a measure of primary, rather than secondary, psychopathy - a distinction first introduced by Karpman (1948). Primary psychopaths are defined as selfish, manipulative, callous, and untruthful, whereas the secondary, or neurotic, psychopaths are believed to engage in antisocial behaviors under the influence of emotional disorder. We recommend that future studies specify the precise emotional experience that is examined in connection with psychopathic attributes (Frick et al., 1999).In order to account for a possible social desirability response bias, we controlled all analyses with the MCSD scale. In addition, we gathered additional data to examine the convergent validity of this measure: If the SPS is a valid measure of psychopathic attributes, one would expect that the SPS scores are positively correlated with academic misconduct in a student sample. The findings were in line with these predictions because academic misconduct was associated with psychopathic attributes, but not with social anxiety.Although participants knew that their data would be kept strictly confidential, we were surprised about the prevalence of academic misconduct behaviors in this sample of undergraduate students at a large private university with selective undergraduate admissions standards. The vast majority of respondents (96.8%) reported at least one personal experience with academic misconduct, and most participants reported 7 of 21 possible misconduct behaviors. Similarly, the results of an internet survey on Internet plagiarism with 698 undergraduate students from nine colleges and universities revealed that academic misconduct is not at all an uncommon phenomenon. For example, this survey found that 24.5 % of students reported that they use the Internet to copy and paste text into their papers without citation at least some of the times. Furthermore, the vast majority of these subjects (90%) thought that their peers had done this at least sometimes (Scanlon & Neumann, 2002). This is consistent with the reports by teachers and other officials (Young, 2001).In sum, the results of this study suggest that social anxiety is negatively associated with psychopathic attributes. This effect was apparent in both males and females, but was slightly stronger among males. The findings have important theoretical implications because they point to a possible evolutionary advantage of social anxiety by maintaining cohesion of social groups and adherence to social norms. The most significant weaknesses of the study include the sole reliance on only one assessment instrument of psychopathic attributes, the limitations related to the self-report methodology, and the nature of the student sample. We decided to use the SPS because of its brevity and ease of administration. Unfortunately, however, this scale does not allow the distinction between primary and secondary psychopathy (e.g., Levenson et al., 1995), and between Factor I (affective and interpersonal deficits) and II (chronic antisocial and impulsive lifestyle) traits that would have been possible if we had employed the PPI or the PCL-R. Given the reliance on only the SPS, our findings will have to be interpreted with caution. However, the SPS is a published instrument with reasonable psychometric data of a construct we intended to measure. In addition to the SPS, we also administered instruments to measure academic misconduct behaviors and trait anxiety. It could be argued that our measure of trait anxiety is an index of affective and interpersonal deficits of Factor I psychopathy traits, whereas the academic conduct behavior measure is an index of chronic antisocial behaviors of Factor II. Our findings showed that the SPS is negatively associated with social anxiety, but not with trait anxiety. Moreover, we observed that the SPS was positively associated with academic misconduct behaviors in females. These data suggest that the SPS measured primary psychopathy and Factor II aspects of this construct, and that the SPS is negatively associated with social anxiety but not general trait anxiety. Although these findings are consistent with our hypotheses and the conceptualization of psychopathy as defined by the SPS, future studies will need to further examine the relationship between anxiety, other emotions, and different facets of psychopathy, such as the Primary and Secondary Psychopathy Scale by Levenson, Kiehl, and Fitzpatrick (1995).Despite these weaknesses, the present study supports the notion that social anxiety and psychopathic attributes are negatively associated, possibly because both constructs are related to either an over adherence or a violation of social norms and an over concern or lack of concern about other peoples approval and negative evaluation. The next step of this inquiry is to utilize standard instruments for assessing psychopathic attributes, to examine the relationship between social anxiety and psychopathic attributes in clinical samples, and to study the state trait nature of these variables. Specifically, it would be interesting to examine whether treatment-induced reductions in social anxiety are associated with increases in the level of psychopathic attributes.Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=LSiBsdxcGigC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=psychopaths+social+anxiety&source=bl&ots=noT3ud6h4V&sig=2mcdq9biiacoVuJ3Wjm_WmmakIU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxoY20ltTbAhXOWysKHbqxB1QQ6AEI6QEwGwJoin our 'From 0 to Social in 27 Days Challenge' for free. Get involved through the new Facebook group: Log into Facebook | Facebook

There are several controversial papers written by Dan Everett and his son Caleb Everett. The one that resulted in the most heated debate was Everett (2005), where Dan Everett essentially argued that a language he documented, Pirahã, disproved Universal Grammar because Pirahã was constrained by culture. Everett claims the Pirahã culture prohibited discussing anything that was not immediately present, which causes the language to lack recursion, tense, and other things.Everett made all sorts of highly unusual claims and choices in the paper. For example, he claimed based on the following data, that Pirahã has no quantifiers:Eventually Everett began to gloss those quantificational things as related to size, after arguing they weren't quantifiers. His glosses became frankly, laughable:On this topic, Anna Wierzbicka (at the time she was a lecturer at the Australian National University) objected saying:"in using such glosses, Everett exoticizes the language rather than identifying its genuinely distinctive features. To say that ti ’ogi means, literally, 'my bigness' (rather than 'we') is like saying that in English to understand means, literally, 'to stand under.' To deny that hi’ogi means 'all' is to make a similar mistake."Several dozen linguists and other scientists left comments on the paper pointing out the inconsistencies. Stephen Levinson from the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistikhad this to say for instance:"Blatant inconsistencies likewise do nothing to reassure the reader. For example, we are told that the Pirahã are monolingual, but we find that “often this or that Pirahã informant would tell me (in Portuguese) that. . .” and that “Pirahã have long intermarried with outsiders,” suggesting sustained bilingualism. Elsewhere it is stated that there are bilingual informants, although their Portuguese is poor.Having made the Pirahã sound like the mindless bearers of an almost subhumanly simple culture, Everett ends with a paean to “this beautiful language and culture” with “so much to teach us.” As one of the few spokespersons for a small, unempowered group, he surely has some obligation to have presented a more balanced picture throughout."Nevins, Pesetsky & Rodrigues (2009) wrote a paper arguing against Everett’s where they showed evidence of Pirahã myths and fiction from other papers.For some reason, Dan Everett has become very popular in the Atheist and Atheism Plus crowd, as well as among Conlangers, and lots of non-scientists are his fans. Then the following takes Everett’s claims seriously and asks questions on Quora like:Why don't the Pirahãs believe in God but they believe in spirits?Daniel Everett cites Pirahã grammar as one example that contradicts Chomsky’s universal grammar (UL) and thus argues that UL is not entirely accurate in principle. Nevertheless, Chomskyans refuse to accept Everett’s view. Why?Ok, off this one controversial paper, most of the controversial papers published in the last 20 years have been in Phonology and Historical Linguistics. I’ll get to Caleb Everett’s paper in Phonology.Syntax:In the 90s, many papers initially arguing for Minimalist Syntax were, at the time, quite controversial in linguistics and they still are very controversial in psychology and evolutionary biology, and fields of linguistics that intersect with those fields.Chomsky (1993) essentially threw the leading theory: Principles and Parameters, which he himself had partly started, out the window. Rather explaining language structures with analogs to the brain and biology, through constraint ranking, Chomsky (1993) argued we should examine language as a perfectly optimal system and move from there.The eventual result of this was that language variation, word order, and basically almost everything to do with language, was put on the back burner—no longer the object of study for Syntax. Word order? Since it varies, it cannot be reflective of the LAD (Language Acquisition Device), there must be some area of phonology that handles word order.It essentially disembodied big-L Language even further from the brain, and from observable data.Soon afterwards, psychologists began publishing papers attacking this line of inquiry, characterising it (accurately in my opinion), as no longer trying to actually study language acquisition, how Language interfaces with the brain, and instead just being an abstract theory about an already abstract theory.However, many syntacticians sort of went along with it, and we have now had a few decades of Minimalist Program dominated syntax.In the early 2000s though, Jackendoff first patiently in Jackendoff (2003) tried centering Minimalism around being a theory about how language is acquired, and later much more as an attack in Pinker & Jackendoff (2005) and Jackendoff (2010).In the meantime, Minimalism became even more Minimalist. By 2005, Chomsky had explicitly stated that all he was concerned with was a theory of Recursion.Jackendoff & Pinker replied, quite explicitly, from the Abstract:“…in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is “perfect,” non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.”Since then it has been no punches held back, but syntacticians have been largely ignoring non-linguists, so the punches are not actually landing anywhere in my opinion.Historical LinguisticsThere have really been two different vectors producing controversial papers in Historical Linguistics. One is people casting doubt on widely-accepted families, and the other is computers becoming more advanced and linguists and computer scientists deciding to throw a bunch of data into a computer, then they publish whatever the computer spits out.Many of the papers casting doubt on families are almost like Flat Earther stuff—thoroughly unscientific, often being written by historians in countries that either want to be the centre of the world in a language family (e.g., Greece, Hungary, Turkey), or by people trying to argue that the field of Historical Linguistics itself is rooted in nothing but racism, and that there are not really connections between the languages of northern India that descended from Sanskrit, Persian, and many of languages of Europe.On the other side of things, Maria Gimbutas, who came up with the widely-supported Kurgan hypothesis, started spinning the Kurgan Hypothesis into a theory where the warlike Proto-Indo-Europeans came out of the steppes and rampaged everything.Eisler (1988) then spun it into a very wild hypothesis that the original Indo-Europeans created sexism, racism, and war, and that they preyed on the egalitarian pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe, the Middle East, and India. Before then Eisler (1988) hypothesised that societies existed in a state of ‘Gylany’ where everyone was equal. Eisler (1988) essentially blamed the Kurgans (and Proto-Indo-European speakers) for bringing about an age of male domination, social hierarchy, and conquest.Some papers have been published such as Brouckaert et al. (2012) and Brouckeart, Bowern, & Atkinson (2018) which try to model language families by feeding a bunch of data to a computer, and interpreting the data through the lens of Bayesian Phylogeography.The model itself I find to be a problem when explaining languages, and part of this is because of its origins. Bayesian Phylogeography was originally designed to map the spread of disease. Diseases spread over a matter of days or weeks, whereas languages spread very slowly over years or even thousands of years.What these assumptions look like in the model, when applied to language, are essentially as follows:If a language forks into two languages, one remains in the same location and the other language diffuses out of it.That this language family they are analysing is in fact, one unit (a family).Languages that are geographically closer to each other are more closely related to each other.Terra Nullius—No language in this family ever replaces a language in that same family. The languages only expand to land occupied by people who speak languages of different families.In viruses this makes sense… If a group of people came down with a bout of Ebola, under normal circumstances, Ebola would not spread to the same people who caught it the first time around. They would have built an immunity.In language however, this seems to manifest itself as Terra Nullius.Phonology… last but not leastFor some reason, many linguists and anthropologists have tried arguing all sorts of things in nature cause things in phonology. Typically, these papers take some data showing a correlation, and go through serious mental gymnastics arguing causation.None of these claims I have seen so far have any theory-internal reason for us to believe them: there is nothing in the theories of phonology, acquisition of phonemes, human anatomy and physiology, or any other field to make us think that being in thin air causes ejective fricatives to develop, that living in an extra moist environment causes tones to develop, or that making nasal vowels is caused by cold climate or by being sexually promiscuous. Yet, these authors all have different ideas.The most famous one is Everett (2013), which argued that one factor leading to languages evolving to have ejective stops is high altitude:"Since ejectives are made via the compression of air supra-glottally, we initially speculated that their articulation might be facilitated at higher elevations, since atmospheric air pressure (and therefore the air pressure inside one’s mouth and lungs) is reduced at such elevations. The grounding for our hypothesis follows naturally from some basic principles of air pressurization.The pressure differential created by a velar ejective sound, the most common kind of ejective, can be schematically described by subtracting the air pressure in the pharyngeal cavity prior to constriction (P1) from the pressure after constriction (P2), i.e. P2-P1. P2 can be found via Boyle’s law: P2 = (V1×P1)/V2. In other words, the air pressure differential (P2-P1) is created by compressing the pharyngeal air cavity (V1) at a given atmospheric pressure (P1), by reducing the cavity to a smaller volume (V2)."What is most striking to me, is that this explanation doesn’t actually say why they would develop—only that producing an ejective is easier at altitude due to Boyles Law, or perhaps in the plane at 30,000 ft or while scaling Mt Everest [p’ojls’ lɑː]~[p’ojls’ lɔː].Oddly, many Conlangers read this paper and then started posting stuff on DeviantArt, Youtube, and Conlanger boards referencing it. I saw one member of the My Little Pony fandom create a Pegasus language, and gave the Pegasi (MLP plural of Pegasus) ejective stops because they fly high in the air.Another Caleb Everett paper that has gotten some attention in the Conlanger community is Everett, Blasí, & Roberts (2016) which claimed that humidity causes tone, or rather dryness makes it harder to hear tone.This paper was a lot better argued, and I find the claim a bit more palatable, and the way tone is lost in dry climates is actually explained logically:“Given the heightened articulatory effort and imprecision associated with phonation in desiccated contexts, we suggested that the clear avoidance of complex tonality in arid contexts is unlikely a matter of coincidence. Since fundamental frequency plays such a prominent role semantically in languages with complex tone, our conjectured causal relationship was, we think, both plausible and investigable via further experimental inquiry. After all, ease of articulation is well known to influence the typological distribution of certain sound patterns. Voiced velar plosives are less frequent than their alveolar counterparts at least in part, because it is more difficult to maintain the reduced supralaryngeal air pressure requisite for voicing when air is stopped at the velum rather than at the alveolar ridge.”Alright, so tone is lost in arid environments because it is harder to maintain the contrast, because it is actually harder to hear—if Everett et al can prove that great! A sample spread of languages with tone and languages without tone slapped on a map though, is not enough to convince me.That was the least controversial of these papers. The next two are beyond strange.Fought, Munroe, Fought, & Good (2004) decided that since vowels like /a/ are more sonorous than vowels like /i/, or than consonant clusters, that languages in warm climates must have more /a/ and more open syllables, fewer nasal vowel, and an overall higher sonority score. Why you ask? Well, here’s the explanation in their own words:As distance between speaker and hearer is increased, high sonority levels, more audible at a distance, thus assume heightened importance in carrying intelligible messages. Speech sounds differ in their sonority and hence in their carrying power in ways that are well understood. Societies differ in their daily and seasonal cycles of social activities, and in the degree to which the activities are accompanied or regulated by speech, which is sometimes carried on at close range and otherwise at greater distances and in varying physical environments. We believe that this diversity of resources and variation in patterns of use, viewed as a process operating at all times in societies and in the phonetic systems of their languages, may help to account for differential mean sonority levels in the languages of the world. To repeat, we posit that distal oral communication occurs more often in warm/hot than in cold climates.Apparently, people in warmer climates yell to each other more often, therefore, they use open syllables and fewer consonant clusters. They did not exactly explain why adequately, and there is research to show many Northern European cultures in colder climates have wider personal spaces than Mediterranean cultures in warmer parts of Europe, which would predict the exact opposite.This paper did not show a scatterplot of their data based on cold months, but another paper advocating this same type of research did.Three years later, Ember & Ember (2007) took Fought et al (2004)’s claim, and modified it. They also asked Fought et al for their data. Robert Munroe gave it to them, and Ember & Ember turned it into a scatterplot. It was the worst scatterplot I have ever seen published in my life:The fact of the matter is, Fought et al (2004) quite simply oversampled the languages with zero cold months, resulting in them having a distribution ranging from both high to low sonority. Per the Central Limit Theorem, as the sample size increases, the data gets closer to a normal distribution, so we would expect that if they sample more of the languages with more cold months, we would get a similar spread as the languages with zero cold months.I decided to plug their data into JASP, and I discovered that their statistically significant P value is an artefact of oversampling 0 cold month languages.As is, there was a statistically significant correlation.When I filtered all of the 0 months of cold weather languages (and corrected a few of their datapoints), there was no statistically significant correlation:Now, back to Ember & Ember (2007). It was definitely the worst paper in a peer reviewed journal I have ever read. I wrote a viral answer on that here once Brian Collins's answer to What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?Ember & Ember took Fought et al., (2004), and basically claimed that the reason why their cold month to sonority causal relationship is not perfect, is because nasal vowels are caused by sexual promiscuity.Are there any theory-internal reasons for us to think so? No. But Ember & Ember had other ideas:Lomax (1968) found that premarital sexual restrictiveness predicted two aspects of song style—less vocal width and greater nasality. Lomax describes vocal width as follows: It ranges from singing “with a very pinched, narrow, squeezed voice to the very wide and open-throated singing tone of Swiss yodellers” (Lomax 1968:71). A narrow voice is produced by “raising the glottis, raising the tongue and pulling it back, and tensing the muscles in the throat” (Lomax 1968:71). Nasality occurs when the sound is forced through the nose (1968:72–73). The highest ratings on nasality occurs when nasality is heard throughout a song, regardless of the actual songs sung. In Lomax’s view, the singing voice reflects tension about sexuality (Lomax 1968:194). Could opening the mouth wide to make sonorous sounds be partially explainable as an effect of sexual permissiveness? We explore the effects of eco niche and sexual permissiveness in the section on results below.Everything about this is bizarre. They get the definition of a nasal vowel not from a phonologist, as you would expect, but from Lomax, a Folklorist. Some people have suggested it may have been a prank paper, but I do not think so. On one of the author’s obituaries, it was cited as an example of his interdisciplinary contributions to Anthropology.Ember & Ember (2007) operationalised promiscuity as having extra-marital affairs, and then arranged languages in bar and whiskers plots by frequency of extramarital sex…Clearly, they should have taken a statistics class before trying to do research involving statistics. A terrible scatterplot showing a random spread based on number of months? A scatterplot where the X axis is not a continuous variable and a bar and whiskers plots for frequency of extramarital sex? Arranging frequency of extra marital sex like a Likert Scale???On top of all that, they did a multiple regression when the X-variables were ordinal, instead of a non-parametric test.For SPSS to even let them run multiple regression with ordinal variables, they must not have defined their variables properly.Odds are if you are citing any of these except Brouckaert et al (2012; 2018), Chomsky (1993), Jackendoff (2003), Jackendoff & Pinker (2010), Gimbutas (1982), you are writing something really crazy…References:Bouckaert, R., Lemey, P., Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Alekseyenko, A. V., Drummond, A. J., ... & Atkinson, Q. D. (2012). Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science, 337(6097), 957-960.Bouckaert, R. R., Bowern, C., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2018). The origin and expansion of Pama–Nyungan languages across Australia. Nature ecology & evolution, 1.Chomsky, N. (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In Hale, K., L. and S. J., Keyser, eds. The view from Building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 1–52Eisler, R. T. (1988). The chalice and the blade: Our history, our future. San Francisco: Harper & Row.Ember, C. R., & Ember, M. (2007). Climate, econiche, and sexuality: Influences on sonority in language. American Anthropologist, 109(1), 180-185.Everett, C. (2013). Evidence for direct geographic influences on linguistic sounds: The case of ejectives. PloS one, 8(6), e65275.Everett, C., Blasí, D. E., & Roberts, S. G. (2016). Language evolution and climate: the case of desiccation and tone. Journal of Language Evolution, 1(1), 33-46.Everett, D., & Everett, K. (1984). On the relevance of syllable onsets to stress placement. Linguistic Inquiry, 705-711.Everett, D. (2005). Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã. Current anthropology, 46(4), 621-646.Fought, J. G., Munroe, R. L., Fought, C. R., & Good, E. M. (2004). Sonority and climate in a world sample of languages: Findings and prospects. Cross-cultural research, 38(1), 27-51.Gimbutas, M. (1982). Old Europe in the Fifth Millennium B.C.: the European Situation on the Arrival of Indo-Europeans. In E., Polomé, the Indo-Europeans in the Fourth and Third Millenia. (Vol 14).Jackendoff, R. (2003). Précis of foundations of language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 26(6), 651-665.Jackendoff, R. (2010). Your theory of language evolution depends on your theory of language. The evolution of human language: Biolinguistic perspectives, 63-72.Nevins, A., Pesetsky, D., & Rodrigues, C. (2009). Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language, 355-404.Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: what's special about it?. Cognition, 95(2), 201-236.Lemey, P., Rambaut, A., Drummond, A. J., & Suchard, M. A. (2009). Bayesian phylogeography finds its roots. PLoS computational biology, 5(9), e1000520.

Psychopathy is characterized by a lack of concern for other people and social norms. In contrast, individuals with high social anxiety are overly concerned about the approval of others and violating social norms. Therefore, we hypothesized that social anxiety is negatively associated with psychopathic attributes, with males being more psychopathic than females. In order to test this hypothesis, we administered self-report measures of social anxiety, psychopathic attributes, and academic misconduct as an index of adherence to social norms to a sample of 349 undergraduate college students (244 females and 105 males). Males had more psychopathic attributes than females. Social anxiety and psychopathic attributes showed a weak but significant negative correlation in the total sample and also in the subgroup of males and females. Psychopathic attributes were further positively associated with academic misconduct behaviors among females, but not among males. These findings are consistent with the notion that social anxiety and psychopathic attributes are negatively associated.If you struggle with shyness or social anxiety you can see my story of how I went for 10 years struggling with it to coaching people around the world and get the free complete audiobook on how I turned my life around: Shy to Social Free Audio Book and CommunityEven if you want to ignore my story (which I understand) that audiobook isn't one of these useless feel-good usueless information ones it has real actionable stuff you can start learning from home: Shy to Social Free Audio Book and CommunityHumans have a general need to be liked, valued, and approved of by others in order to develop supportive peer relationships and engage successfully in social relationships (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996). Ostracism from the social group can have a strong negative impact on ones physical and mental well-being (e.g., Sapolsky, Alberts, & Altmann, 1997). As a result, humans naturally fear negative evaluation by their peers and exhibit social anxiety in situations that might threaten their position in the social group (Gilbert, 2001; Leary, 2001). Therefore, social anxiety and its associated fear of violating social norms and negative evaluation by others appear to have an important function for the maintenance of a social hierarchy (Gilbert, 2001).In contrast, other people show very little or no concern for others. In extreme cases, they show a lack of empathy, lack of conscience, manipulative behaviors, and social deviance, among other things (e.g., Cleckley, 1982/1941; Hare, 1993, 1998). Clinical or otherwise abnormal expressions of psychopathic attributes had been termed sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy, depending on the specific definition (e.g., Hare, Hart, & Harpur, 1991; Widiger et al., 1996). Psychopathic attributes are expressed in various degrees whenever social groups are formed. For example, such tendencies among college students are expressed in the form of academic misconduct behaviors (Scanlon & Neumann, 2002; Young, 2001). These characteristics stand in clear contrast to those typically displayed by socially anxious individuals who are overly concerned about pleasing others and adhering to social norms (Hofmann, 2007; Hofmann & DiBartolo, 2001; Hofmann, Heinrichs, & Moscovitch, 2004).Research investigating the nature of social anxiety (Kollman, Brown, Liverant, & Hofmann, 2006), pychopathy (Edens, Marcus, Lilienfield, & Poythress, 2006; Guay, Ruscio, Knight, & Hare, 2007), and psychopathic behaviors and attitudes (Marcus, Lilienfeld, Edens, & Poythress, 2006) suggests that these characteristics reflect dimensional constructs rather than discrete categories. The only other study that reported results supporting a taxonic structure of psychopathy (Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1994) has been criticized on methodological grounds (Edens, Marcus, Lilienfeld, & Poythress, 2006; Lilienfeld, 1998; Marcus, John, & Edens, 2004).Given the defining features of social anxiety and psychopathic attributes, it is possible that these two dimensional constructs are negatively associated. Since the early conceptualization of psychopathy, researchers have hypothesized a link between psychopathy and (the lack of) anxiety (Cleckley, 1941/1982). However, the empirical literature on this issue has been mixed. Some studies have reported a lack of association between trait anxiety and psychopathy (Schmitt & Newman, 1999) or a positive association between general trait anxiety and antisocial behaviors in children (Fergusson & Horwood, 1993) and adults (Butcher, Graham, Williams, & Ben-Porath, 1990; Boyd, Burke, Greenberg, Holzer, Rae et al., 1984). One reason for these inconsistent findings might be related to the differences in the definition between psychopathic attributes and between fearfulness/fearlessness (Frick, Lilienfeld, Ellis, Loney, & Siverthorne, 1999), general trait anxiety, and other forms of anxiety. To our knowledge, no inquiry has been made to specifically examine the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety, despite the direct, negative relationship between these two constructs in some of their definitional criteria. Specifically, the defining features of social anxiety and psychopathy tend to oppose one another: Whereas individuals with social anxiety are overly concerned about violating social norms and being negatively evaluated by others, people with psychopathic attributes typically do not fear violating social norms and show very little or no concern for others.Psychopathic attributes are difficult to measure because of obvious response biases, especially social desirability. Some of the measurement scales include the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R; Hare, 1991), the Hare P-Scan (Hare & Herve, 1999), the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-revised (PPI-R) by Lilienfeld and Widows (2005), and the Social Psychoathy Scale (Smith, 1985; Edelmann & Vivian, 1988). The Hare scales are interviewer-administered scales, and the items are scored by combining interview, case-history, and archival data. The PPI-R is a lengthy self-report instrument consisting of 154 items. The SPS is an 18-item self-report measure with adequate psychometric properties. Because of its brevity and ease of administration, we chose this scale in conjunction with a measure of social desirability.An important variable to consider when examining the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety is participants gender. The literature consistently reports that men tend to show more psychopathic attributes and are more violent than women (e.g., Yang & Coid, 2007). Furthermore, although men and women do not systematically differ in their overall level of social anxiety, some research suggests that social anxiety is associated with the persons self-construal and identification with a traditional gender role orientation (Moscovitch, Hofmann, & Litz, 2005). Therefore, we will examine the association between psychoapthic attributes and social anxiety in men and women separately.We predicted that psychopathic attributes are more common in men and women. Moreover, we hypothesized that psychopathic attributes are negatively associated with social anxiety. Finally, we expected that psychopathic attributes, but not social anxiety, are positively associated with behaviors that violate social norms, as indicated by academic misconduct in an undergraduate student population.The sample consisted of 349 college students (244 females and 105 males) enrolled in an introductory level psychology class at Boston University, a large, private university on the east coast of the United States of America. The majority of the sample was Caucasian (71.6%) and heterosexual (96.1%). Other ethnic groups included Asian-American (17.1%), Hispanic (5.0%), African-American (3.7%) and other (2.6%). The average age of the sample was 18.7 (range 1726, SD: 1.08)This study took place in a group setting. Upon entering, participants received a consent form and a battery of self-report questionnaires. Participants were asked to read and sign the consent form prior to filling out the questionnaires. They were further informed that all information was strictly confidential. Upon completing the questionnaire battery, participants were debriefed and received class credit for their participation.In order to study the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire battery that included the following self-report instruments:The SIAS consists of 20 items that are rated on a 5-point Likert scale. The items are self-statements regarding cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to situations requiring social interaction. The scale shows good temporal stability, as well as good discriminant and construct validity (Heimberg, Mueller, Holt, Hope, & Liebowitz, 1992).The SPS consists of 18 items, each rated on a 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly agree) point scale. The instrument assesses psychopathic attributes with items measuring the tendency to be beguiling, guiltless, manipulative, cynical, egocentric, unempathic, unpuerturbed, restless, and oriented in the present. Examples of the scales items are: I dont see anything wrong with taking items from work to keep as my own and There is always a way to get someone to trust you. The scale shows adequate psychometric properties (Edelmann & Vivian, 1988; Smith, 1985).This questionnaire was developed based on a study by Newstead, Franklyn-Stokes and Armstrong (1996). The scale shows adequate psychometric properties and measures academic misconduct as an indicator of non-adherence to social norms. It consists of 21 items that asks respondents to indicate whether or not they had ever engaged in certain behaviors. Examples include submitting coursework from an outside source (e.g., essay banks), ensuring the availability of books/articles in library by mis-shelving or cutting out pages, lying about medical/other circumstances to get extension or exemption, inventing data, and altering data (e.g., adjusting data to obtain a significant result). The latter two items potentially apply to many participants despite being undergraduates in introductory psychology classes, because participants are heavily involved in formal research at Boston University. Furthermore, even informal research is subject to falsifying data, because this form of academic misconduct can occur as part of presentations in course term papers or introductory biology lab reports, etc. The endorsement rates for these items were sufficiently high. Moreover, the inclusion in the scale was meaningful and informative. Therefore, these items will be presented in the results section.The PANAS is a 20-item measure of two primary dimensions of mood- Positive Affect (PA; 10-items) and Negative Affect (NA; 10 items). Items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale. The PANAS is widely used in experimental studies and has good reliability and validity (Watson et al., 1988). Participants were asked to rate how they feel in general. The PANAS was included because previous studies have reported an association between general anxiety/negative affect and psychopathic attributes.The MCSD scale is a 33-item true-false scale that is commonly used to measure social desirability (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960). Studies have further shown that the MCSD scale measures self-deception and impression management (Paulhus, 1985; Weinberger & Davidson, 1994). Respondents are asked about common negative and positive characteristics of unusual levels of general virtue. The MCSD scale shows good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. The scale was administered to control for participants response bias.To examine whether men and women differed in their psychopathic attributes, social anxiety, positive and negative trait affect, and their academic misconduct behaviors, we conducted a multivariate General Linear Model with Gender as the between subjects variable, the MCSD scale as the covariate, and the scores in the SPS, SIAS, PANAS (negative), PANAS (positive) and ABQ as the dependent variables. Complete data were available from 349 participants.The results showed a significant multivariate Gender effect, F (5, 342) = 14.94, p < .0001, partial 2 = .18, and covariate effect, F (5, 342) = 27.33, p < .0001, partial 2 = .29. The between-subjects effects were significant for the SPS, F (1, 346) = 68.19, p < .0001, partial 2 = .17, ABQ, F (1, 346) = 5.38, p = .02, partial 2 = .15, and PANAS, positive affect, F (1, 346) = 4.97, p = .03, partial 2 = .14 (all other Fs < .1, ps > .3, partial 2s < .003). Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations of the measures in males and females. These results suggest that, consistent with our hypothesis, males scored higher on the SPS and reported more academic misconduct behaviors than females.Gender Differences in Self-Report Measures.Note: The Table shows means, standard deviations (SD) and the results of independent t-tests. SIAS = Social Interaction Anxiety Scale; SPS = Social Psychopathy Scale; ABQ = Academic Behavior Questionnaire; PANAS = Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; MCSD = Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale.The SPS and SIAS showed a significant but relatively weak negative correlation in the total sample, r = .12, p < .02 (without any covariates). Figure 1 shows the scatter plot of the two questionnaire sores.Association between the scores in the Social Psychopathy Scale (SPS) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) in the total sample.In order to further explore the relationship between psychopathic attributes and social anxiety while controlling for social desirability, trait affect, and gender, we examined the partial correlations between the SPS and the SIAS among females and males using the positive and negative subscales of the PANAS and the MCSD scale as covariates.Consistent with our hypothesis, the SPS was negatively associated with the SIAS in the female sample, r = 0.16, p < .05, and even more so in the male sample, r = .25, p < .05. The difference in the magnitude between these correlation coefficients was not statistically significant t (336) = 1.29, p > .10. Moreover, the SPS was positively associated with the ABQ in the female sample, r = .20, p < .005, but not in the male sample, r = .07, p > .4. This difference was statistically significant, t (339) = 1.72, p < .05.In order to examine the relationship between the SPS, the SIAS, the positive and negative subscales of the PANAS and the ABQ, we further calculated the partial correlations between these variables with the MCSD scale as the covariate. The correlation matrix of these variables in the female and male subsamples is shown in Tables 2 and and3,3, respectively.Association Between Psychopathic Attributes, Social Anxiety, Trait Affect, and Academic Misconduct Among Females.Note: The Table shows partial correlation coefficients (controlled for social desirability as measured with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale). SIAS = Social Anxiety Interaction Scale; SPS = Social Psychopathy Scale; PANAS-NA (PA) = Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Negative Affect Subscale (Positive Affect Subscale); ABQ = Academic Behavior Questionnaires.Association Between Psychopathic Attributes, Social Anxiety, Trait Affect, and Academic Misconduct Among Males.Note: The Table shows partial correlation coefficients (controlled for social desirability as measured with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale). SIAS = Social Anxiety Interaction Scale; SPS = Social Psychopathy Scale; PANAS-NA (PA) = Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Negative Affect Subscale (Positive Affect Subscale); ABQ = Academic Behavior Questionnaires.It should be noted that academic misconduct was surprisingly common. Only 3.2% of the respondents reported that they never engaged in any of the behaviors listed in the ABQ. The number of academic misconduct behaviors was normally distributed with an average of 6.96, and a mode and median of 7 (SD: 3.97; range: 017 with a maximum score of 21). Some of the most common behaviors were allowing own coursework to be copied by another student (81.6%), copying another students coursework without their knowledge (67.1%), inventing data (52.9%), altering data (e.g., adjusting data to obtain a significant result) (47.1%), and paraphrasing material from another source without acknowledging the original author (45.5%).Psychopathic attributes and social anxiety are both defined by their adherence to social norms and concerns for other people. Therefore, we hypothesized that psychopathic attributes and tendencies are negatively associated with social anxiety. Because most taxometric studies suggest that social anxiety (Kollman et al., 2006) and psychopathic attributes (Edens et al., 2006; Guay et al., 2007) are continuous variables, we examined these constructs in a large undergraduate male and female student sample.Consistent with our prediction, men had a considerably stronger tendency toward psychopathic attributes, as measured with the SPS, than females. The same, but a less pronounced, gender difference as observed for academic misconduct behaviors. In contrast, there was no gender difference in self-reported social anxiety. We further found that social anxiety and psychopathic attributes were negatively correlated in the total sample, r = .12, p < .02. This effect became more evident when controlling for social desirability. This correlation was particularly strong in men, r = .28, p < .005, but was also evident in women, r = .15, p < .05. This effect cannot be explained by general trait affect, because no significant correlations were observed between positive or negative trait affect and psychopathic attributes.Consistent with earlier theorists (Cleckley, 1941/1982) and empirical data (Schmitt & Newman, 1999), we observed that psychopathic attributes are unrelated to negative trait affect. Instead, we observed a weak, but significant negative, relationship between psychopathy and social anxiety.It is possible that the SPS is a measure of primary, rather than secondary, psychopathy - a distinction first introduced by Karpman (1948). Primary psychopaths are defined as selfish, manipulative, callous, and untruthful, whereas the secondary, or neurotic, psychopaths are believed to engage in antisocial behaviors under the influence of emotional disorder. We recommend that future studies specify the precise emotional experience that is examined in connection with psychopathic attributes (Frick et al., 1999).In order to account for a possible social desirability response bias, we controlled all analyses with the MCSD scale. In addition, we gathered additional data to examine the convergent validity of this measure: If the SPS is a valid measure of psychopathic attributes, one would expect that the SPS scores are positively correlated with academic misconduct in a student sample. The findings were in line with these predictions because academic misconduct was associated with psychopathic attributes, but not with social anxiety.Although participants knew that their data would be kept strictly confidential, we were surprised about the prevalence of academic misconduct behaviors in this sample of undergraduate students at a large private university with selective undergraduate admissions standards. The vast majority of respondents (96.8%) reported at least one personal experience with academic misconduct, and most participants reported 7 of 21 possible misconduct behaviors. Similarly, the results of an internet survey on Internet plagiarism with 698 undergraduate students from nine colleges and universities revealed that academic misconduct is not at all an uncommon phenomenon. For example, this survey found that 24.5 % of students reported that they use the Internet to copy and paste text into their papers without citation at least some of the times. Furthermore, the vast majority of these subjects (90%) thought that their peers had done this at least sometimes (Scanlon & Neumann, 2002). This is consistent with the reports by teachers and other officials (Young, 2001).In sum, the results of this study suggest that social anxiety is negatively associated with psychopathic attributes. This effect was apparent in both males and females, but was slightly stronger among males. The findings have important theoretical implications because they point to a possible evolutionary advantage of social anxiety by maintaining cohesion of social groups and adherence to social norms. The most significant weaknesses of the study include the sole reliance on only one assessment instrument of psychopathic attributes, the limitations related to the self-report methodology, and the nature of the student sample. We decided to use the SPS because of its brevity and ease of administration. Unfortunately, however, this scale does not allow the distinction between primary and secondary psychopathy (e.g., Levenson et al., 1995), and between Factor I (affective and interpersonal deficits) and II (chronic antisocial and impulsive lifestyle) traits that would have been possible if we had employed the PPI or the PCL-R. Given the reliance on only the SPS, our findings will have to be interpreted with caution. However, the SPS is a published instrument with reasonable psychometric data of a construct we intended to measure. In addition to the SPS, we also administered instruments to measure academic misconduct behaviors and trait anxiety. It could be argued that our measure of trait anxiety is an index of affective and interpersonal deficits of Factor I psychopathy traits, whereas the academic conduct behavior measure is an index of chronic antisocial behaviors of Factor II. Our findings showed that the SPS is negatively associated with social anxiety, but not with trait anxiety. Moreover, we observed that the SPS was positively associated with academic misconduct behaviors in females. These data suggest that the SPS measured primary psychopathy and Factor II aspects of this construct, and that the SPS is negatively associated with social anxiety but not general trait anxiety. Although these findings are consistent with our hypotheses and the conceptualization of psychopathy as defined by the SPS, future studies will need to further examine the relationship between anxiety, other emotions, and different facets of psychopathy, such as the Primary and Secondary Psychopathy Scale by Levenson, Kiehl, and Fitzpatrick (1995).Despite these weaknesses, the present study supports the notion that social anxiety and psychopathic attributes are negatively associated, possibly because both constructs are related to either an over adherence or a violation of social norms and an over concern or lack of concern about other peoples approval and negative evaluation. The next step of this inquiry is to utilize standard instruments for assessing psychopathic attributes, to examine the relationship between social anxiety and psychopathic attributes in clinical samples, and to study the state trait nature of these variables. Specifically, it would be interesting to examine whether treatment-induced reductions in social anxiety are associated with increases in the level of psychopathic attributes.The source: What Makes A Psychopath?If you struggle with shyness or social anxiety you can see my story of how I went for 10 years struggling with it to coaching people around the world and get the free complete audiobook on how I turned my life around: Shy to Social Free Audio Book and CommunityEven if you want to ignore my story (which I understand) that audiobook isn't one of these useless feel-good usueless information ones it has real actionable stuff you can start learning from home: Shy to Social Free Audio Book and Community