Altering a dominant response: performance of psychopaths and low-socialization college students on a cued reaction time task.

The passive avoidance learning deficits of disinhibited Ss have been attributed to their difficulty inhibiting dominant responses. To date, evidence for this hypothesis has been derived from complex tasks. In two experiments, a cued reaction time task requiring no learning or memory was used to evaluate the degree to which groups of disinhibited Ss inhibit simple dominant responses. Disinhibited groups were incarcerated psychopaths identified with Hare's (1985) Psychopathy Checklist and undergraduate males who scored low on the Socialization Scale. Both disinhibited groups committed more errors than controls on trials containing misleading cues, but in both sampIes, findings were limited to trials in which Ss expected to make right-hand responses