Psychology for Dummies (65 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Maybe we commit crimes because it’s simply a part of who we are. Some people have the personality of a natural-born leader. Others could have made a graduation speech to their kindergarten class titled, “Born to Steal.”
Hans Eysenck, a psychologist, proposed that criminality is due to an inborn disposition to perform criminal acts. A
disposition
is an inclination or a tendency to do something. Eysenck’s “born bad” theory is fairly complex. He makes the argument that environmental factors (such as poverty, criminal role models, and a history of child abuse), alone, can’t possibly account for criminal behavior because not everyone from a bad environment commits criminal acts. I traveled in one of the poorest nations in the world, Jordan, and I was surprised to learn that there was very little crime there. I didn’t do any research, but the people left their homes unlocked, for example, and didn’t seem particularly concerned with being ripped off.
Proximal contributions:
Consist of biological aspects of personality such as metabolic rates, hormones, and nervous system activity. Eysenck believes that people with specific abnormalities in these areas may be predisposed to criminality. A popular finding by both Eysenck and Zuckerman is that people who are under-aroused and easily bored engage in sensation-seeking behavior that may often include engaging in thrilling criminal acts.
Distal contributions:
Come from the genetic determinants of our personalities, our DNA. There is the idea that there exists either an inherited key gene or inherited multiple genes that account for the similarity of personality characteristics that lead to criminal behavior between parent and offspring. These causes of criminality are less close to the overt expression of criminal propensity.
Eysenck also identifies three personality types, or characteristics, that he relates to acting out in a criminal manner:
Psychoticism:
Individuals high in this personality type have a better chance of making the criminal cut. They tend to be more antisocial, unempathetic, creative, and tough-minded. All of these traits are consistent with many criminal behaviors.
Extraversion:
People who are carefree, dominant, assertive, and adventurous possess this implicated personality characteristic.
Neuroticism:
This dimension includes people who are irrational, shy, moody, and emotional. They too may lean toward criminal behavior.
Eysenck does not go so far as to say that these personality aspects actually cause criminality, but he does state that they are powerful contributors to the risk for developing criminal behaviors.
High GNP = High crime?An interesting bit of anecdotal support for Hans Eysenck’s challenge to the environmental cause of criminality concept is that crime is directly related to wealth. Ellis and Peterson found that in 13 industrialized nations, the higher a country’s gross national product (GNP) was, the higher the crime rate was. Go figure? Maybe there’s just more to steal in a wealthy country. What am I going to steal in a poverty-stricken nation? Nobody has anything.
There has been a fairly large amount of biological and neuropsychological research on criminality. That is, a lot of scientists have tried to find the origin of criminal behavior in either the genes or the brains of people who commit these acts. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a lot of the research is still inconclusive and very difficult to interpret.
Studies of the biology and neuropsychology of criminality have looked at such diverse topics as genetics, hormones, neurotransmitters, brain waves, body type, brain damage, and learning disabilities. I’m going to narrow things down a little bit in this chapter and only focus on genetics and neuro- psychological abnormalities, two topics that we think we have a pretty good handle on.
Hans Eysenck mentions genetics and other biological functions in his personality theory of criminality. Eysenck believes that our personalities are genetically determined. Some evidence exists to support his claim that genetics do play a part in determining who might be likely to engage in criminal acts and who might not.
Genetic contributions to criminality traditionally have been investigated using the popular
twin-adoption method
of research. The logic is that if you look at sets of identical twins that are not raised together and they act in much the same way, their behavior is probably due to genetics. Why? If they’re not raised together, the likelihood that they had exactly the same environmental influences is slim to none Therefore, the only things they have in common are their genes (because their genes are identical) and their behavior.
Is there a “crime gene?” That would be far too simple. Numerous studies show common criminal behaviors in twins reared together. Langein found that 71 percent of identical twin pairs reared apart had comparable criminal conviction rates. Dizygotic, or fraternal, twins in the same study only had a 12 percent hit rate. Most of the other studies have similar rates, but all have found the same higher rate in identical twins when compared to fraternal twins. The only problem is that these twins grew up in the same, or very similar, environments. Adoption studies have been less conclusive. Crowein found that 15 percent of adopted-out, identical twins of incarcerated women had a similar criminal arrest record compared to 3 percent for fraternal twins. Cadoretin found comparable arrest rates of 22 percent for identical twins versus 0 percent for fraternal twins.
An interesting qualification for most of the research findings in this area is that the percentages hold up for property crimes but not for violent crimes. Still, the propensity to commit crimes in general seems to have some relationship to our genes. The relationships are far from perfect, 15 percent and 22 percent are hardly hardcore predictors. That still leaves approximately 81.5 percent of the differences in criminal behavior not accounted for by genetics. Good thing we have all these other theories. If we relied on genetic theories alone, we’d know very little.
Is there a “criminal” part of the brain? Well, if there is one, nobody has found it yet. Research on the roles of specific parts of the brain is more indirect than direct. In fact, much of the research on neuropsychological abnormalities in people who habitually commit crimes is inconclusive.
Moffit’s theory is perhaps the best-known theory of neuropsychological dysfunction in those who commit crimes. The idea is that there is a pattern of general neuropsychological dysfunction that leads to an individual’s inability to select alternative paths or behaviors to criminality. Moffit proposed that a lot of adolescents “grow out of” their criminal activities, and those who do not have these deficits. These individuals would have problems with attention, abstract reasoning, cognitive flexibility, strategic planning, use of environmental feedback, and inhibition. To this day, however, little research supports Moffit’s theory. It remains a theory, and the search for the criminal brain continues.