The Anatomy of Violence (20 page)

Mauritius is also a wonderful melting pot of cultures, and the country
is again notable in that ethnic tensions are rare. So where is the malevolence in
Mauritius? Let’s put the previous idea of low arousal and stimulation-seeking into a research context that we undertook there.

Why Mauritius, you might ask. Back in 1967, the WHO—
World Health Organization—wanted to learn more about children who were at risk for the development of clinical disorders later in life. It recommended that a study should be conducted in a developing country, that the study should utilize three-year-old children, and that biological methods should be used to identify children at risk for later mental-health problems.
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Initially, the WHO had targeted India as a possible site,
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but a medical director from Mauritius successfully argued for the geographical advantage of his country. Mauritius was a small island with low emigration—factors that would permit subjects to be contacted more readily over time than in India.

The Mauritius study was set up in 1972 by
Peter Venables, from
York University in England, and
Sarnoff Mednick, from the
University of Southern California. Peter was to become my PhD supervisor five years later, while Sarnoff would eventually lure me to the United States eleven years after that. I became the director of the study in 1987 when Peter retired. The sample was a birth cohort consisting of 1,795 three-year-old children all born in one of two towns—Vacoas and Quatre Bornes, both in the middle of the island and conveniently situated. The research laboratories were in Quatre Bornes.

The study began like this. Families came to the research unit. Mothers sat down with their three-year-old children, and new toys were placed around them. Would the child leave the secure home base of his or her mother and explore the toys? At one extreme, some children would not leave and sat clinging to their mother—they were stimulation-avoiders. Some would come and go from their mother, using her as a “safety net” for exploration. Yet others would freely explore the toys and the new physical environment—the stimulation-seekers or explorers. Children were also placed in a sandbox and rated on their engagement in social play with other children. Their friendliness to the experimenter and their willingness to chitchat was also assessed. These four separate behavioral indicators formed a measure of stimulation-seeking.
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Eight years later, when aged eleven, the children were rated by their parents using a checklist of child behavior problems that included
aggression—items like “fights other children,” “attacks others,” “threatens others.”
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I found that high-scoring
stimulation seekers at age three—the top 15 percent—were more aggressive at age eleven. To be sure, not all stimulation-seekers became aggressive. But to some extent, the early behavior of young children predicted later aggression.
Mauritius may be heaven, but like anywhere else, devils roam. Two children in our study illustrate that while arousal and temperament predict aggression, further complexities must be recognized. One little boy, called
Raj, and one little girl, called
Joëlle, had nearly the lowest heart rates and the highest levels of stimulation-seeking and
fearlessness. They fell into the top sixth percentile of their respective gender on these measures when aged three. So how did these two under-aroused stimulation-seekers turn out later in life?

Raj turned out to be not just a stimulation-seeker in adulthood, but also a vicious, psychopathic thug who loved riding motorbikes and terrifying and manipulating people. He was the most psychopathic individual in our entire sample of 900 males, with multiple criminal convictions ranging from theft to
assault to
robbery. In discussing his social relationships and how he came across to others, he admitted, “There are many people scared of me, most of ’em. I’ve got to be dangerous.”
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He actively enjoyed making people uncomfortable. Like many
psychopaths, he took pride in his ability to control and regulate people, especially through his reputation of aggression and violence, which gave him status and power within his peer group. In discussing how his friendships were formed, Raj commented, “I want friends out of fear.”
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When someone expresses desires like that, you get the sense you are dealing with a man who knows no fear himself, yet craves fear in his friends.

Raj’s lifelong fearlessness from age three to age twenty-eight gave rise in part to his aggressive behavior, which in turn allowed him to obtain
rewards and status from those who feared him. It was reinforced so strongly that it became his modus operandi. When asked about his girlfriend, he mused for a while and then laughed. “Yeh … I think she’s scared of me too!” he said.
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It speaks to the callousness and cold-bloodedness that is typical of psychopaths. Just as we saw earlier in our evolutionary perspective on violence and
cheating, psychopathy can be a successful reproductive strategy, with power
and control over others bringing resources that translate into greater
reproductive fitness.

Raj’s authority over others through threats and violence pervaded
even his intimate social relations. His ability to make people frightened likely enhanced his enjoyment of sexual relations with his girlfriend, in a similar way to the enjoyment that sadistic
rapists obtain in terrifying, dominating, and controlling their victims.

Yet was he really that fearless? Surely something must have scared him, sometime. What if he met others like himself?

He really had neither a sense of fear nor a concern for others. Because he lacked the empathy needed to appreciate others’ pain, there was no empathy holding him back from mutilating people’s faces. He lay at the extreme of psychopathy—at the extreme of fearlessness.

Did he sometimes feel sorry for the victims of his
violence? Did he have a sense of conscience? Raj’s reply: “No, ’cos it’s them that searched for it.”
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Psychopaths are always more than willing to
blame others to justify their actions. They apply the “just deserts” principle to defend their heinous actions. Others get what they deserve because of how
they
behave. This gave Raj free license to do almost anything. Life for renegade Raj and other psychopaths is essentially
jeux sans frontières
—games without boundaries. They are playing out a life full of fun and excitement. This mind-set can make for a nasty piece of work—a callous, unemotional, heartless, cold-blooded, stop-at-nothing psychopath. And it’s caused by low physiological arousal, fearlessness, and stimulation-seeking early in life.

The little girl, Joëlle, also turned out to be a fearless stimulation-seeker later in life, but in a very different way. She went on to become Miss Mauritius and obtained her excitement in life though very different avenues.

As an adult, her prevailing memory of herself as a child was one of a thirst for discovery. To try everything out, to explore the world, and to put herself forward. When asked about her memories, Joëlle said, “I wanted to discover so many things about life. The most important thing for me was to express myself.”
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She too wanted to act on the environment, but in a different way from Raj. The desire for discovery, to experience the world, and to give full expression to one’s fearless, stimulation-seeking potential need not always result in criminality.
Joëlle went on to live a fulfilled,
aggression-free life because despite the biological and temperamental predispositions for an antisocial lifestyle, she was a kind, generous, and sensitive person. She had other factors that protected her from the extreme outcome of a psychopath, and perhaps being a girl, combined with all the genetic and environmental baggage that comes along with a woman’s world, made a difference.

In broad terms, the difference between Raj and Joëlle is not unlike that between Ted
Kaczynski and our fearless
bomb-disposal expert. Biology is not destiny. The same biological predispositions can result in very different outcomes. At the same time, these early biological warning signs can give us a sense of potential problems on the road ahead. Indeed, when it comes to understanding outcomes for
violence through the autonomic nervous system, our notion of
conscience is key.

Have you ever thought of killing someone? No? Well, aren’t you a Goody Two-shoes.

Seventy-six percent of “normal”
men have had at least one homicidal fantasy. For normal women the rate is a bit lower, at 62 percent.
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Who do you want to kill? Men think about killing co-workers, while women want to kill their family members, especially stepparents. That latter fantasy fits our evolutionary account of homicide—you kill those not genetically related to you. Why do you want to kill? The most common reason is a lover’s quarrel, but apparently 3 percent of you have
fantasized about killing someone just to experience what it is like to kill someone.
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Alfred Hitchcock had a good sense of the surprising range of violent thoughts throughout American society. In his movie
Strangers on a Train
there is a cocktail party scene where a woman imagines a killing:

And she laughs.

I hope I never meet some of you, and yet I imagine you have not killed anyone. Why? Because when you really think hard about it,
when you put yourself right there in the situation of doing it, you can’t follow through. Something’s holding you back. I know I can’t follow through, no matter how much I’ve wanted to kill some of my critics. This thing we call a
conscience kicks in. It’s made up of gut reactions and feelings generated in part by our
autonomic nervous system and pulls us back from the brink. And it goes beyond heart rate. What we’re talking about here is a symphony of
classical conditioning and autonomic reactions that inspire or dissuade us from taking antisocial actions.

How can we measure something as abstract as “conscience”? Well, sweat is a good place to start—specifically something known as classical conditioning as measured by
skin conductance. Let’s take a quick trip to the laboratory, the kitchen, and then back to the laboratory again.

In the laboratory, skin conductance
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is measured with small electrodes. We place them on the
distal phalanges—the tips—of the first and second
fingers of the hand. We then pass a very small electrical current across these two electrodes—so small you would never feel it. The more you sweat, the better the current will be conducted. These very tiny electrical changes—as small as .01 microsiemens (one hundred millionths of a siemen, a unit of conductance)—are amplified so that they can be seen and measured by computer software.

Variations in the size of a subject’s sweat response to a simple tone played over headphones reflect differences in the extent to which the subject allocated
attentional resources to process the tone.
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When you pay attention to a sound, the prefrontal cortex,
amygdala,
hippocampus, and
hypothalamus are activated.
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Some of these “lower” brain areas—the hypothalamus and
brain stem—stimulate
sweating.
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So people sweat a bit more when thinking or listening to something. Although the sweat response is a peripheral autonomic measure, it is nevertheless a powerful measure of central nervous system processing.
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The bigger the skin-conductance response, the greater the degree of attentional processing.

Let’s get back to the vexing question of quantifying exactly what a “conscience” is. What ultimately gives us that sense of right and wrong in life? I believe the answer lies in biosocial theory.
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We can think of a conscience as essentially a set of classically conditioned emotional responses. Criminals and psychopaths show poor
fear conditioning—in part because they are chronically under-aroused. Because of this lack of fear conditioning, they lack a fully developed conscience. And it is that
lack of
conscience—a sense of what is right and what is wrong—that makes them who they are.
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It goes like this. Classical conditioning involves learning an association between two events in time. When an initially neutral event (the
conditional stimulus) is closely followed by an aversive event (the
unconditional stimulus), that initially neutral stimulus will develop the properties of the aversive stimulus. In the classic case of
Pavlov’s dogs, a bell was paired with the later presentation of food. Food to hungry dogs automatically elicits an unconditional response:
salivation. After a number of pairings of the bell with the food, the bell by itself came to elicit the salivation. The dogs learned a relationship between the sound of a bell and the later presentation of food. They conditioned.

Now from the lab to the kitchen. Young
children are not too different from Pavlov’s dogs. Take the scenario of a small child stealing a cookie from the kitchen.
Punishment by the parent, like scolding or a slap, elicits an unconditional response—the child is upset and hurt. After a number of similar learning trials, the sight of the cookie—or just the thought of stealing the cookie—will elicit an uncomfortable feeling, a conditioned response. It is that discomfort that keeps the child from engaging in the
theft. The storage in the brain of similar “
conditioned emotional responses” developed early in life in lots of different situations accumulates to form what we call “conscience.” And that’s what stops you from killing someone.