New research published in Europe’s Journal of Psychology reveals that voters’ beliefs about authority and social hierarchy can shape how they perceive psychopathic traits in political candidates. The study, which focused on the 2016 United States presidential election, found that people tend to see more psychopathy in the opposing candidate and less in the one they support—particularly if they hold authoritarian views. These perceptions were strongly linked to vote choice, and the pattern held even three years later, suggesting a durable influence of psychological beliefs on political judgments.
Psychopathy is a personality construct characterized by traits such as callousness, manipulation, lack of remorse, and impulsivity. While the term often evokes images of criminal behavior, psychologists view psychopathy as a spectrum. In politics, some traits associated with psychopathy—such as fearlessness and social boldness—can be seen as assets, while others—like deceitfulness or a lack of empathy—can be viewed as disqualifying. Yet research shows that the average person struggles to recognize psychopathy and other personality disorders, often relying on vague impressions rather than accurate psychiatric knowledge.
Against this backdrop, the researchers set out to investigate whether voters’ own personality-related beliefs—particularly their level of authoritarianism—might influence how they judge psychopathic tendencies in political candidates. Authoritarianism is a long-studied belief system marked by a preference for order, obedience to authority, and social conformity.
People who score high in authoritarianism or related constructs such as social dominance orientation are often drawn to strong, hierarchical leadership styles. The researchers hypothesized that authoritarian voters would be less likely to see psychopathy in a dominant candidate like Donald Trump and more likely to see it in a candidate like Hillary Clinton, who campaigned on more moderate and inclusive themes.
“I began the study shortly after the election in 2016 because I realized that the election of Donald Trump would be consequential in many ways. I have followed his career from the time he was merely a real estate developer from Queens because he evidenced from early on a keen, almost obsessive, interest in being in the public eye,” explained study author Paul E. Jose, a professor of psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.
“When he entered politics and eventually became a presidential candidate, I did not take him seriously because he evidenced many dark and politically questionable traits, which I thought would be perceived as disqualifying for office. I, along with a lot of other observers, were surprised that he was elected President in 2016, and since I follow politics through the lens of psychological theory and research, I wanted to understand this phenomenon better.”
The study involved two large samples of voters who reported having voted for either Trump or Clinton in the 2016 election. In the first study, conducted shortly after Trump’s inauguration, 313 participants (159 Trump voters and 154 Clinton voters) completed surveys measuring their authoritarian beliefs and their perceptions of psychopathic traits in each candidate. The psychopathy ratings were based on a modified version of the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised, a widely used clinical tool. Participants also completed the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale and the Social Dominance Orientation scale to assess their ideological beliefs.
A second study, conducted three years later shortly after Trump’s acquittal in his first impeachment trial, used the same design with a different sample of 297 voters. This allowed the researchers to test whether perceptions and their links to vote choice remained consistent over time.
The findings showed that perceptions of psychopathy were highly polarized and depended strongly on political alignment. In both studies, Clinton voters tended to rate Trump as highly psychopathic and Clinton as low on psychopathy. Trump voters, by contrast, rated Clinton as higher in psychopathy and Trump as lower. This “mirror image” pattern was remarkably strong: voters consistently attributed psychopathy to the candidate they did not support while seeing little or none of it in their preferred candidate. The effect was especially pronounced among Clinton voters, who rated Trump’s psychopathic tendencies higher than Trump voters rated Clinton’s.
“The most powerful finding of the study was that attributions of psychopathology were hugely influenced by political choice,” Jose told PsyPost. “Clinton voters attributed far more psychopathic traits to Trump than their own candidate, and Trump voters attributed much more psychopathic traits to Clinton than their own candidate. The aphorism ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ applies here in that voters tend to minimize flaws in their own candidate and maximize flaws in their disfavored candidate.”
Interestingly, when responses were averaged across political groups, there was only a small difference between the candidates in perceived psychopathy, and this emerged only in the second study. On the whole, voters were not uniformly more likely to see psychopathy in Trump than in Clinton or vice versa. Instead, perceptions were shaped by partisanship and, more specifically, by underlying authoritarian beliefs.
“We found that voters, as a large and heterogeneous group, did not attribute psychopathic traits and behaviors to Trump more than to Hillary Clinton at the time of his inauguration,” Jose explained. “Three years later at the time of his first impeachment, however, a slight increase in attributed psychopathology to Trump was found, indicating that the American public was increasingly noticing his unsavory traits.”
To explore how authoritarian beliefs shaped these patterns, the researchers constructed a path model that examined how scores on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation scales predicted perceptions of psychopathy in the candidates and how those perceptions influenced vote choice. Individuals who scored high on authoritarianism tended to see Clinton as more psychopathic and Trump as less so. These perceptions, in turn, predicted their vote for Trump. Conversely, people with lower authoritarian scores tended to see Trump as more psychopathic and Clinton as less, and were more likely to vote for Clinton.
The analysis also showed that the link between authoritarian beliefs and vote choice was partly mediated by these perceptions of psychopathy. In other words, authoritarian voters didn’t just vote for Trump because of shared ideology—they also saw him as psychologically healthier than Clinton, while Clinton voters with low authoritarian beliefs saw Trump as psychologically more dangerous.
“Voters who held authoritarian views (i.e., we should follow tradition and aggressively suppress non-conforming people) strongly supported Trump’s candidacy,” Jose told PsyPost. “He evidenced some authoritarian tendencies in his first term, but his second term is marked by a dramatic increase in authoritarian policies, actions, and stances.”
The second study confirmed and extended these findings. Even three years after the election, the same patterns held. Participants continued to show a strong tendency to perceive the opposing candidate as highly psychopathic. Moreover, perceptions of Trump’s psychopathy had increased slightly overall by 2020, even among his own voters. This may reflect how his behavior during his presidency, including actions related to immigration, race, and executive power, affected people’s judgments.
Despite the passage of time and political events such as impeachment, the core relationships between authoritarianism, psychopathy perception, and vote choice remained stable. This suggests that these are not fleeting political impressions but deeply rooted psychological dynamics that shape how people interpret the actions and personalities of political figures.
The study also connects with a broader literature on mental health literacy—people’s ability to accurately recognize signs of psychological disorders. Prior research has shown that while many laypeople can identify common conditions like depression, few can accurately recognize personality disorders such as psychopathy. In one study, only about 39 percent of respondents correctly identified a description of psychopathy.
This lack of knowledge likely contributes to the strong role that ideological filters play in shaping perceptions. People tend to interpret candidates’ actions in ways that confirm their preexisting beliefs, rather than making judgments based on accurate diagnostic understanding.
“I thought that we would find at least a small difference in overall attributed psychopathy at the outset of the study,” Jose said. “However, the patterns in the data that we obtained suggest that my experiences with psychological theory and research in combination with a long, rich, and varied media exposure (from Fox to MSNBC) provided an unusual lived experience in comparison to that of average American voters.
“As a psychologist, I noticed certain behaviors as possibly diagnostically salient, whereas the average person is not trained to notice these characteristics. The ability to discern mental disorders in everyday life is termed ‘mental health literacy,'” and discussion of its relevance to voters perceiving mental health characteristics in public persons features strongly in the final version of the paper.”
As with all research, there are limitations. The cross-sectional nature of the data means that the direction of influence between beliefs, perceptions, and vote choice cannot be definitively established. And although the samples were large and demographically diverse, they were drawn from an online platform and may not fully represent the general population of voters.
“From samples of about 300 voters at each time point, we made claims about how millions of U.S. voters felt and thought about the two presidential candidates at those two times,” Jose noted. “It is important to realize that our statistical findings are probabilistic, i.e., we believe with a reasonably high level of confidence that our conclusions fairly accurately reflect the views of voters at those time-points. To support this claim, it is relevant that we replicated the findings from our first time-point with findings from a second time-point obtained three years later. Still, larger-scale studies of voters followed over time are needed to verify the key findings of this work.”
Future research could also examine whether the same patterns hold for other political figures, including those outside the United States or on different points of the political spectrum. It may also be helpful to investigate how media framing, exposure to expert commentary, and education in mental health affect voters’ ability to recognize or misrecognize traits like psychopathy in political leaders.
“I would like to encourage American voters and institutions to devote more time and effort to obtaining and disseminating critical information about candidates’ views, policies, and behavioral tendencies,” Jose said. “It is perhaps naive to expect that voters as a block will become familiar with behavioral indices of psychiatric disorders, but I would like voters as a block, media as an industry, and American institutions at large to rely more upon the expertise and knowledge base of our psychological and psychiatric communities of clinicians and academic researchers.”
“The U.S. government is a representative democracy, and, in order for it to function well, the citizenry needs to be well educated, informed about the critical issues of the day, and knowledgeable about where candidates stand on these issues. I would add that voters need to possess a the ability to identify disqualifying personal traits of candidates so that good choices are made for the good of the country. We are presently in a real world test of whether American voters possess this important skill. As I noted at the outset of my comments, the outcome is and will be consequential.”
The study, “Voters’ Attributions of Psychopathic Traits to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton After the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and the 2020 Trump Impeachment Trial,” was authored by Paul E. Jose, Ira J. Roseman, Anna Geiserman, Taylor Winter, and Boris Bizumic.
