How Do Autism, Schizotypy, Psychopathy, OcPD, and OCD Relate to Social and Political Attitudes?

How Do Autism, Schizotypy, Psychopathy, OcPD, and OCD Relate to Social and Political Attitudes?

The autism-schizotypy continuum, psychopathy, and obsessive compulsive traits & personality traits have been hypothesized to relate to aspects of worldviews and certain social and political attitudes (e.g., Andersen 2022; Cloudfindings 2023; Roy et al. 2021). In this post, using the dataset from Cloudfindings (2024a) I look at how the autism-schizotypy continuum, primary & secondary psychopathy, and traits of OCD and OcPD correlate to aspects of social and political attitudes measured in the study, in addition to the findings from principal components analysis that are presented in Cloudfindings (2024a) [Figure 1].

Figure 1

Significant correlations with political factors are presented in table 1.

Table 1

	Schizotypy (vs autism)	Primary psychopathy	Secondary psychopathy	OcPD	OCD
Humanism	0.33
Ostracism of Non-conforming	-0.38	-0.33		0.28	0.30
Political correctness	-0.38
Misogyny (male ingroup bias)		0.27		0.27
Env. Authoritarianism		-0.41
Env. Appreciation		-0.28	-0.32
Rational-Objective		0.39
Rational-open	0.26			-0.31
Selective empathy		0.42		0.46
Harm		-0.40
Moral absolutism				0.34
Misandry				0.29	0.37
Religious ingroup bias				0.34
Traditionalism				0.27
Con. Authoritarianism				0.32
Free market				-0.26
Sexual disgust				0.47
Social liberalism				-0.32
Authority				0.30
Purity				0.35
General disgust					0.38

Autism-Schizotypy

It was found that those toward the schizotypy end of the autism-schizotypy continuum had more humanistic beliefs, were less judgemental and rejecting towards non-conforming or disgust provoking individuals, were less politically correct, and were more open to different perspectives. This is consistent with the predictions of Cloudfindings (2023), where it was predicted that more schizotypal (and less autistic) individuals would have less rule based morality (political correctness being a form of rule-based morality), and would make less harsh moral judgements towards individuals different from oneself or one's culture due to heightened cognitive empathy. Interestingly, moral absolutism did not correlate significantly with autism-schizotypy nor any of the cognitive empathy measures, however loaded diametrically to cognitive empathy and schizotypy with principal components analysis (Cloudfindings 2024a) [Figure 1], and the correlates of autism-schizotypy were closely correlated with moral absolutism. Overall, the autism-schizotypy continuum correlated with attitudes that relate to moral absolutism, consistent with the predictions of Cloudfindings (2023). 

OcPD and OCD

The correlates of OcPD and OCD matched the predictions discussed in Cloudfindings (2023), OcPD predicting higher moral absolutism and correlates of moral absolutism, and OCD predicting these to a lesser extent, but OCD predicting higher disgust, which align with OcPD involving a cognitive empathy deficit and OCD involving high disgust but not a cognitive empathy deficit, both leading to moral absolutism and related attitudes. Both loaded on the moral absolutism dimension as predicted by Cloudfindings (2023, 2024b) [Figure 1].

Psychopathy

Secondary psychopathy was essentially unrelated to all political measures, however primary psychopathy predicted misogyny, lower concern for harm, and selective empathy, which are in agreement with the predictions outlined in Cloudfindings (2024b). Primary psychopathy loaded on the masculine-hierarchical dimension by principal components analysis as predicted by Cloudfindings (2024b) (Cloufindings 2024a) [Figure 1].

1. Andersen (2022) Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind

2. Cloudfindings (2023) Moral Absolutism as a Theory of Mind Deficit

3. Roy et al. (2021) Psychopathic propensities contribute to social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism in predicting prejudicial attitudes in a large European sample

4. Cloudfindings (2024a) The Structure of Political Orientations and Underlying Psychological Causes: Part 1 - Statistical Extraction of a Psycho-Political Compass

5. Cloudfindings (2024b) The True Political Compass: A Hypothesis of the Underlying Psychology of Political Orientations