Exploring the instrumental and reactive violence dichotomy in the offences of violent psychopaths

In the literature acts of violence are often divided into two dichotomous subtypes: instrumental and reactive violence. The two types of violence are considered to be underpinned by different theoretical paradigms, social learning theory and frustration aggression. This division, although widely criticised and lacking conceptual clarity, appears to be generally accepted in scientific literature. This exploratory study used multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis to see how violence characteristics co-occur in the offences of seriously violent psychopathic offenders; and whether the co-occurrence of offence variables could be explained by the instrumental and reactive dichotomy. The study also explored whether instrumental and reactive violence characteristics differentiate primary and secondary variants of psychopathy, with the hypotheses that primary psychopaths would show more instrumental features in their violence and secondary psychopaths show more reactive features. Findings show that violence characteristics do no co-occur as a mutually exclusive dichotomy and that rather, many violent acts have mix of reactive and instrumental characteristics, reflecting a dimensional rather than a dichotomous structure. This in turn suggests that act specific theories may not be necessary to describe different types of violence. Contrary to prediction, psychopathic subtypes did not differ on violence characteristics.