The Anatomy of Violence (21 page)

In this analysis, socialized individuals develop a feeling of uneasiness even thinking about stealing something or
assaulting someone. That’s because such thoughts elicit unconscious memories of punishment that took place early in life, for mild misdemeanors like theft or behaving aggressively. Haven’t you sometimes said when discussing a crime to your friend, “I could never even
think
of doing such a thing”? Now you can understand part of the reason. You rarely if ever contemplate such events because even the
thought
of such acts generates previously conditioned emotional responses that produce discomfort in you. Criminal thoughts then get rubbed out of your cognitive repertoire—they are off your radar screen.

There’s another side to this that I find interesting. There are some
offenses that have an almost unnatural feel about them—they don’t seem all that criminal. Think about cheating on your taxes, for example. Imagine pumping up your yearly charitable contributions from $100 to $200. This act does not seem quite as “offensive” as other offenses. I
mean, you did give $100 to charity, didn’t you? You’re not such a bad person, are you? And perhaps the reason it does not seem so bad—and why you might do it—is that there is no convincing analogue of
tax evasion in childhood. Parents do not punish us for these “
white-collar crimes” but instead focus on more obvious things like stealing and fighting. Consequently, some of us have not developed much of a “conscience” for these acts. That may be why white-collar crimes are committed by people who are supposedly reasonable citizens in society—and why you might think they are not as serious as other criminal offenses.

Plagiarism is another example. It is absolutely rampant in students. The self-report survey I conducted on
Hong Kong undergraduates showed that 67 percent had passed off other people’s essays as their own work. Similarly, 66.6 percent had copied others’ work to meet a course requirement. Despite strict institutional prohibitions against such actions, it goes on unchecked. Perhaps less surprising to you—likely because you have done it too—is that 88.3 percent had bought pirated software or DVDs, while 94.2 percent had illegally downloaded music or movies. Again, there is no convincing childhood analogue of these actions that gets punished, and hence little or no conscience about perpetrating those acts. Parents may pass off their own ideas as their child’s when helping them in their schoolwork—and praise their child when rereading that terrific-looking piece of work a few days later. We may even be unknowingly socializing our children into white-collar antisocial habits.

Now to the evidence. A systematic review of all studies conducted on adult criminals, psychopaths, and antisocial adolescents concluded that there is overwhelming evidence for poor
fear
conditioning in offenders.
⁶¹
Nevertheless, living a criminal way of life might cause the poor conditioning, rather than poor conditioning being a causal agent of later crime. While dozens of studies found poor fear conditioning in criminals and psychopaths, none prospectively tested whether poor fear conditioning
early in life predicted adult crime. What was really needed was a prospective longitudinal study to prove the point.

Onto the conditioning stage steps
Yu Gao, from
Beijing Normal University in mainland
China. Gao had come to study for her PhD with me at the
University of Southern California in 2003. In a collaboration that
would span three academic generations, she shed light on the darker developmental question of whether poor fear
conditioning predisposes someone to crime.

My own PhD supervisor,
Peter Venables, had taken a long look at the fear-conditioning data he had collected in Mauritius and concluded that there was no conditioning. I bought into Peter’s conclusions because, well, he was after all one of the world’s leading authorities on psychophysiology. You are hardly going to question your own supervisor, are you?

Gao was less gullible and more gutsy. It was an example of where fresh minds give rise to new perspectives, innovation, and progress. We had the help of
Mike Dawson, a world-leading authority on fear conditioning. Gao launched herself into the data and with her strong statistical expertise she convincingly demonstrated that fear conditioning had indeed occurred in the three-year-olds. Peter had been too pessimistic—his conditioning paradigm had indeed worked.

Of course, like everything else in life there are differences between us in the degree of fear conditioning. Some condition, and some do not. That’s the interesting bit that Gao pounced on. Recall that mothers brought their three-year-old children into the laboratory—1,795 of them in all. Small electrodes were placed on the little
fingers of the toddlers to measure
skin conductance. Headphones were placed on their heads to deliver the auditory tone stimuli. They sat on their mother’s lap for security and comfort. Then the conditioning experiment began.

On some trials, a low-pitched tone predicted that ten seconds later the children would be blasted with an unpleasant loud noise. On other trials, a high-pitched tone would be presented and nothing would happen. The children were not told about the association between the low-pitched tone and the nasty noise. And yet in just three conditioning trials their brains worked it out. As a whole group, the children gave a bigger skin-conductance response to the low tone than to the high tone. They had become conditioned and developed anticipatory fear to the initially neutral tone that had been paired up with the aversive tone.

We sit back and let twenty years go by. The tots are now twenty-three-year-old adults. We search all the court records on the island to see which children grew up to become adult criminals. Out of the 1,795 subjects, 137 had had a conviction. Gao matched each offender with two non-offenders on gender, age, ethnicity, and social adversity—a total of 274. This epidemiological “
case-control design” ensures that any group
differences cannot be due to group differences on these demographic measures. Gao then looked at how the two groups fared in their ability to develop conditioned fear twenty years earlier, at age three.

Figure 4.1
   
Fear
conditioning at age three in relation to crime at age twenty-three. A greater response to the
CS+ compared to the CS– indicates fear conditioning.

The results were striking. Remember that to show fear conditioning you must show a larger skin conductance response to the low-pitched tone, called the CS+, that predicts the unpleasant tone compared with the high-pitched tone, the CS, that does not predict the aversive tone.
Figure 4.1
illustrates the finding. The normal control group showed significant fear conditioning. Their sweat response to the low-pitched (CS+) tone was much bigger than their response to the high-pitched (CS–) tone. Yet the criminals-to-be, back at age three, showed no sign of conditioning at all. They were flat-liners—as a group they did not show
any
fear conditioning. This finding by Yu Gao demonstrated for the first time that an early impairment in autonomic fear conditioning acts as a predisposition to criminality in adulthood.
⁶²

Gao’s research took the field a lot further than before because she documented that a lack of conscience, which normally gives us that
sense of guilt and which puts the brakes on outrageous behavior, has its origins very early in life—well before the onset of childhood
conduct disorder, juvenile delinquency, and adult violence. It was also not an obvious by-product of the social environment. It’s likely, therefore, that this autonomic
under-responsiveness stems from a neurodevelopmental condition—from the
brain that does not develop normally over time.
⁶³
What part of the brain is critical for fear conditioning? The
amygdala—that part of the brain that we saw in the previous chapter to be burned out in fearless
psychopaths.

From the very periphery of the body’s anatomy, the fingertips, we are able to get an insight into the inner workings of the brain and neurobiological dysfunction that partly causes offending. Kids who condition poorly become criminals. Nobody is born bad, but some may develop a bit crookedly.

Yet life is never simple. In the anatomy of violence there are twists and turns as biology ebbs and f
lows in shaping the people that we are. As we have seen with
Raj and
Joëlle, the same biology and temperament may result in different life outcomes. And as we saw with Randy
Kraft and
Antonio Bustamante in the last chapter, there can be different causes for why two different people both end up as killers. Divergent beginnings, shared endings.

This variability is a real lacuna in our knowledge on the biology of violence. Why doesn’t everyone with a slow heartbeat become violent and psychopathic? Can there be two types of adult psychopaths? I believe there can. Rather than showing poor fear conditioning, some psychopaths have surprisingly good autonomic and brain functioning. You likely work with one. One may be a friend or acquaintance. And whether you know it or not, you could even be in a relationship with one. Worse still, you may be one yourself. Let’s take a further look.

You’ve had a sense of psychopaths from our discussions of evolutionary
cheats and Jolly Jane
Toppan. They can be fearless stimulation seekers who are also selfish,
charming, and grandiose. As
Robert Hare, the world’s leading researcher on psychopathy and the creator of the
Hare Psychopathy Checklist, succinctly summed it all up in the title of his book, psychopaths are
Without Conscience
.
⁶⁴
When you lack a conscience you may gain some psychopathic traits. Yet I do not believe that all psychopaths
have poor
frontal functioning and autonomic under-arousal. Successful psychopaths—those who are not caught and convicted—may be a different beast that we have to contend with.

My interest
in successful psychopaths goes back to my accounting days. After I packed in accounting with British Airways for the cloud-capped towers of
Oxford University, I was intellectually rich but financially broke. So during my first summer I went back to London and registered at a
temporary-employment agency to earn money. It was there, I believe, that I met my first successful psychopath. I had found work as an auditor, and at the company that hired me I met
Mike, who was also a temp. I got to know him over drinks in the pub after work. Charming, witty, engaging, and very quickly liked by the permanent staff, Mike was an impressive and professional young man with fascinating life stories and a thirst for adventure, but he soon revealed to me that he was pilfering what he could at work whenever he had a chance, both at this job and, apparently, other jobs. It’s not that he admitted to a lot, but I got the sense that he was revealing just snippets of his antisocial lifestyle.

There’s nothing more dramatic to say about Mike, except that my memory of him and a few other temps who lived life on the edge stayed with me. I never thought more about Mike until years later as an academic in Los Angeles. I had previously worked with convicted psychopaths in English prisons. I was now working with caught murderers on the verge of execution. I got to wondering whether offenders who were not caught would look the same—biologically, at least—as their caught counterparts. But where would I get “free-range” offenders? Then Mike fleetingly came to mind, along with the answer—temporary-employment
agencies.

It was a long shot, but intrigued by the idea, I did a pilot study at the nearby temp agency. I hired temps and paid them to work in my laboratory for three days. The work they did for me? Taking part in experiments. My team and I asked them what crimes they had been committing recently. It sounds a bit naïve. Who would ever tell you about crimes they had committed? And yet before long they were singing like canaries about the robberies,
rapes, and even homicides they had committed. My memory of Mike had borne fruit. We quickly got into business, recruiting more temp workers and collecting more data.

To place what I was finding into a research context: the base rate of
antisocial personality disorder—lifelong recidivistic offending—is 3 percent
in males in the general population. In our temp-agency sample the base rate was an astonishing 24.1 percent—more than eight times the national average.
⁶⁵
Furthermore, a full 42.9 percent met the adult criteria of antisocial personality disorder
⁶⁶
—nearly half the sample.
⁶⁷
Temp agencies were antisocial gold mines, and we started to dig deeper.

Those with “antisocial personality disorder” were perpetrating much more than the mischief I got up to in my youth. Forty-three percent had committed
rape. Fifty-three percent had attacked a stranger, causing at the least bruises or bleeding. Twenty-nine percent had committed armed
robbery. Thirty-eight percent had fired a handgun at someone. And twenty-nine percent had either attempted or completed homicide.
⁶⁸
I was realizing that compared with the tigers among my temp-agency recruits, Mike back in England was just a pussycat.
⁶⁹