Do affective empathy, conscience, personal integrity, and such, co-vary?

Some speculation

Do affective empathy, conscience, personal integrity, and such, co-vary?

Some speculation

I am guessing, since the research on empathy is not clear to me, that traits such as affective empathy, conscience, personal integrity, and such, co-vary, that is, they cluster together. I also suspect that they, like many traits, are distributed in a bell-shaped fashion. Most folks are not terribly bad, nor terribly good. Then you get that low percentage who are pretty rotten. There must be an equivalent percentage who are pretty damn nice. Most folks would probably cluster in the middle.

I imagine that a lot of people who achieve positions of power cluster at the low end of the curve. Estimates I have seen I suspect are too low because of obvious problems in really assessing those who are powerful.

Where do used car salemen fit in?

I once joked to a colleague that somebody we were talking about was probably like a used car salemen and a politician. My colleague was affronted; it seems his father was both a politician and a used car salesman.

4%? Who knows for sure. I imagine that an even smaller precentage could still do a lot of damage to their fellows. Say, 1% of 8 billion is how many bad actors? Big number is it not?

Then again, far too many folks, who are mostly good, go along to get along, and cause damage in the process. We all do this in vaious contexts.

You don’t have to be that bad to damage the world either.

Having said that, I know an awful lot of good folks - many more than the bad ‘uns.

Like anything, nature and nurture interact to form character.