But consider the correlation between blond hair and blue eyes. Both traits coexist at higher-than-chance rates, but neither trait brings about the other. Similarly, itching and wheezing resulting from exposure to an allergen are concomitant symptoms with a shared cause, but they lack a causal connection.
Another poorly understood statistic is the power of a correlation—how much variability within a group the correlation actually explains. Mathematically, this is obtained by squaring the correlation. By point of example, let’s say we study the relationship between freckles and red hair in a group of people and come up with a correlation of +.60. This means that red-haired people tend to be freckled and vice versa (without saying anything about causality). However, there will also be plenty of red-haired people without freckles as well as freckled people without red hair (statisticians call this “scatter”). Squaring .60 (.60 X .60), we obtain .36, or 36 percent, which means that slightly over a third of the group can be classified as red-haired and freckled. That may still be important, but it’s a long way from the majority status implied by the .60 correlation itself. Failure to understand the correlation-squared index is one reason nonscientists are often overly impressed by scientific data.
Given all these caveats, let’s look at more of the data on environment and violence, criminality, and psychopathy.
Several studies of violent children, most of them based on small samples, indicate an extremely high degree of family chaos and child abuse in the backgrounds of kids who kill (9–13). Paternal absence is common, as are disproportionately high rates of fathers with a history of imprisonment and/or drug and alcohol abuse and/or psychopathy.
Fathers with a specific constellation of personality traits—high reactivity to stress, alienation, and aggression—seem to keep cropping up as progenitors of violent kids (32). The importance of paternal input makes sense when we remember that boys learn how to handle aggression from their fathers—or, when fathers are absent, from surrogate males, mainly peers, such as fellow gang members or mass-media figures. When one recalls that most violence is committed by males, the role of fathers looms especially large.
Of course, biological theorists would attribute these paternal factors to genetics: angry, alienated criminal men pass along their maladaptive traits to their sons. There is also information supporting the biological connection between gender and violence that bears consideration, specifically the well-known finding that the male sex hormone, testosterone, is positively related to levels of aggression, while the female hormone, estrogen, increases passivity.
All normal men and women have both chemicals coursing through their bloodstream, but testosterone is higher in men, and estrogen is higher in women. Even in women, levels of testosterone seem to make a difference: In a study of female prisoners, older inmates had lower testosterone levels and were less violent than younger cons (34).
Testosterone reaches its peak in adolescence and young adulthood and diminishes with age. Does this mean that a teenage psychopath fairly new to the crime game is actually more of a threat than a forty-five-year-old seasoned con? Not necessarily, because statistics say nothing about individuals, and individual factors play a large role in predicting violence. However, it is clear that as a group, young criminals—age seventeen through twenty-five—produce the highest rate of crime. Testosterone may be another reason, in addition to low impulse control and faulty judgment, why the crimes of young villains—urban gangbangers and teenage thrill killers—are often so horrifying, though it probably had little to do with Johnson and Golden, whose smooth, rosy-cheeked faces screamed prepubescence.
Diminishing levels of testosterone in middle age may also help explain a fascinating phenomenon: the tapering off of criminality observed in older psychopaths (35). This so-called criminal burnout is interesting in that what seems to be affected is the psychopath’s energy level, not his soul. As psychopaths grow older, their impulsivity drops, as do their arrests. However, callousness and cruelty remain high. The same reduction of drive has been observed in heroin addicts lucky enough to survive into advanced middle age: Often the craving for the drug, previously impervious to any sort of treatment, simply vanishes on its own.
The bad guys stay bad, but they’re too pooped to pop.
Whatever role biology plays, given what we know about the strength of imitative learning in children, it’s not much of a logical leap to list role models who behave violently and who justify violence and aggression as valid problem-solving techniques as factors in child criminality. And today’s kids, urban and suburban, are exposed to astoundingly high rates of actual violence (in one study, 90 percent of a sample of middle-school students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds reported knowing someone who’d been robbed, beaten, stabbed, shot, or murdered, and nearly 50 percent had been personally robbed, beaten up, stabbed, shot, or caught in gun crossfire) (36).
Another avenue of research along these lines has been the study of corporal punishment. It has been asserted that children disciplined physically are more likely to turn out violent than those who are controlled using “psychological” techniques such as withdrawal of attention and privileges. During the forties, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu went so far as to hyperbolize it this way: “Spanking the baby may be the psychological seed of war.”
Several studies have shown a consistent association between corporal punishment and child aggression, criminality, and domestic violence (37). Recalling the distinction between correlation and causation, one might suggest, alternatively, that these findings have nothing to do with the deleterious effects of spanking per se. Perhaps aggressive and violent children are spanked more because they misbehave more. Or that, once again, the mode of transmission is genetic—kids inherit patterns of violent behavior from violent parents, who are least likely to spare the rod.
But research into how children learn suggests that biology cannot completely explain away the association, and at least one longitudinal study that followed boys for thirty-three years found that while sons of fathers convicted of crimes were more likely to become criminals, even when the paternal factor was eliminated statistically, the relationship between corporal punishment and criminality endured (38). This makes perfect sense: Children identify with and imitate their parents and other caretakers in thousands of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Why would aggression and violence be exceptions?
This is not to suggest that occasional spankings create murderers, but rather that a consistent pattern of beating to the virtual exclusion of other disciplinary techniques may teach the child the unhealthy lesson that violence works, in addition to preventing the development of guilt, shame, and conscience.
Think of the learning process that goes along with beating as a primary mode of behavior control, as opposed to disciplinary methods that guide the child toward self-examination and reflection (“Now, go to your room and think about what you did and why it’s wrong”). Kids encouraged, urged, and pressured to reflect are being taught the foundations of morality. They are also being shown that misbehavior can be dealt with in ways other than through physical aggression.
Kids who are hit never go through this learning process. Corporal punishment tends to be swift and brutish. Typically, its recipients are smacked, punched, or kicked, then thrown back onto the streets like undersized fish. Case closed. There’s no extended period in which to mull. The lesson absorbed by kids who are frequently beaten is that slugging someone is okay if you’re big enough to get away with it.
“Might makes right” is the psychopath’s first commandment.
The link between an outlook that justifies violence and actual violent behavior is supported by studies of aggressive boys who, when asked why hitting was wrong, tended to come up with answers involving the avoidance of punishment. Their less aggressive peers were more likely to focus upon the morality of violence.
There is also evidence that childhood violence is not a unitary concept, and that different types of aggression may resu
lt from different pathways.
One group of researchers studying boys who were aggressive at a very young age discerned two patterns of childhood violence that appeared to differ from each other with regard to family background (8).
The first group, termed reactively aggressive, consisted of youngsters exhibiting “hot-blooded” anger and hostile, violent rage brought about by perceived threat—the cornered-animal syndrome. When compared with nonaggressive kids, reactively aggressive youngsters tended to be highly impulsive and began to exhibit serious conduct problems from around the age of four. They were also more likely to have been harshly disciplined and abused at home, to come from poorer families, and to have experienced more family stress and problems with peers. These boys displayed more of the impulsive aspect of psychopathy.
In contrast was a scarier bunch, whose behavior displayed more of the interpersonal characteristics of psychopathy (callousness, cruelty). These were the proactively aggressive boys, youngsters who displayed a consistent pattern of highly organized, cold-blooded bullying and violence. They began misbehaving slightly later—at around six and a half—and appeared no different from nonaggressive boys in terms of environmental factors. In fact, none of these nasty little fellows was reported to have been abused.
However, these researchers used a highly questionable measurement of harsh discipline: asking the mother of both groups to describe any spanking or abuse. Since parents are unlikely to admit to beating their child, and especially not to extreme abuse that could result in criminal prosecution, this study may have grossly underestimated levels of punishment for the entire sample.
More important, the discrepancy may not have been uniform, for if the cold-blooded, manipulative kids were more likely to have been raised by cold-blooded, manipulative mothers who lied more in order to cover up, their rates of abuse would have been disproportionately underreported.
Nevertheless, some other information from this study may shed some light on motivation for violence.
The hot-blooded kids were angry and poorly accepted by their peers and saw their aggressive behavior as a means of protecting themselves in a hostile, threatening world. The cold-blooded kids were more likely to talk about the positive outcomes of violence—to perceive aggression and hurting others as reliable and rewarding techniques for getting ahead in life. This protopsychopathic attitude may be the result of social learning—growing up in families and/or societies where the rewards of violence are high—or it may be a biological factor. Or both.
To the extent that this study does indicate genuinely higher levels of abuse in the hot-blooded kids, it’s possible to theorize that kids from chaotic families who are beaten consistently develop a heightened sense of threat, as well as a repertoire of coping skills that emphasizes violence. This gives comfort to the liberal-environmentalist notion of the victim striking back.
Inconsistent with this model, of course, are the cold-blooded bullies with no apparent unusual stressors in their background who learn—or are born with—a tendency to believe that violence gets the goodies. The fact that cold-blooded boys start to show problems at a later age than the hot-blooded kids (six and a half versus four) might be seen as shifting the scales toward the environmentalist point of view, in that a genetic flaw might be expected to manifest itself earlier, not later. But this is not true. Genetic traits can make themselves apparent at any age. Perhaps the “defect” simply shows up around first grade.
If the cold-blooded boys were indeed not abused, does this mean they’re born to be cruel?
Not necessarily. A social-learning approach would posit that, lacking the personal experience of being victimized, the cold-blooded kids are nonetheless picking up cues from nasty parents and disruptive surroundings that teach them it pays to hurt.
Other issues to consider when interpreting the role of corporal punishment and violence involve degree and exclusivity: How much spanking predisposes a child to aggression? More important, how strong is the association between even high levels of corporal punishment and subsequent adult criminality? The fact remains that while over 90 percent of American children are spanked, the vast majority do not turn into career criminals (37).
No definitive answer to these questions exists, but the most thorough epidemiologic studies of the connection between corporal punishment and overall violence in society have produced correlations in the .30 to .35 range. Using the correlation-squared formula, this leaves us with about a 9 or 10 percent loading.
A 10 percent contribution is important, but clearly other factors must be at play. Some of these variables may correlate with violent discipline, but others may be completely independent of it.
In addition to the previously noted biological factor—men with congenitally violent temperaments and other types of brain damage are more likely to beat their kids—environmental factors might include poverty, education, and social class. Many researchers have suggested that poorer children and those growing up in less educated households are beaten more often than are middle-class kids. In fact, many social theorists hold that poverty is the most important predictor of criminality, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent studying and attempting to remedy the issue.
Unfortunately, the data do not support the primacy of poverty as a predictor of violence. Though crime rates are higher in poor communities and hot-blooded violence is somewhat associated with lower socioeconomic status, the vast majority of poor people are not criminals, nor is there any indication that poverty leads to the most frightening types of cold, cruel crimes committed by violent, career psychopaths. Furthermore, poverty statistics as they relate to crime may be misleading because, lacking the resources for escape and defense, poorer criminals may be more likely to be caught and convicted of felonies.
A well-run, large-scale study of mostly poor, inner-city kids found that while some of the life stresses associated with poverty correlated with antisocial behavior (at relatively low levels), poverty per se did not (39). This is also consistent with clinical interviews of incarcerated criminals by researcher Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, who discovered that, contrary to the notion that felons steal and rob because they lack the opportunity to earn money legally, a surprising number of cons possess excellent job skills and talents that they choose not to exploit because they are lazy, believe themselves too wonderful to have to work, and perceive crime as their profession (40). Recall thirteen-year-old Tim’s early “business” dealings, complete with engraved calling cards.
Yochelson and Samenow also discovered that some criminals maintained steady employment as a means of enhancing their criminality, one example being the air-conditioning repairman who used maintenance calls as an opportunity to case the homes in which he worked.
The issue of race as it relates to psychopathy also bears mention. Approximately 45 percent of inmates in U.S. prisons are black, a figure that is approximately four times the rate of blacks in the general population. The notion that blacks have a biologically determined higher rate of criminality and/or psychopathy is laden with racist overtones and is sure to be met with anger and counterclaims that black crime is primarily a reaction to oppression (a special subset of hot-blooded aggression). A study comparing black and white inmates offers some support for this, but it also suggests that psychopathy is a good predictor of criminality when applied to blacks as well as whites (41).
These researchers, using the most widely accepted and reliable test of psychopathy, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, found that black psychopaths showed more similarities than dissimilarities to their white brethren. And for both black and white convicts, psychopathy was positively associated with violence as adults. Furthermore, in a related study of the same inmate sample, black psychopaths exhibited some of the same distinctive learning problems displayed by white psychopaths.
However, important differences also emerged. All the raters in the study were white, and they judged black prisoners to be more psychopathic than white prisoners, ra
ising the suspicion that racism and/or unfamiliarity with black culture contribute to an “overpathologization” of blacks. Supporting this is the finding that black psychopaths are less similar to whites on certain core factors of the interpersonal aspect of psychopathy—callousness, cruelty, glibness, tendency to lie—but much more consistent on impulsive items pertaining to an unstable, poorly socialized lifestyle. In addition, for blacks, the Hare test didn’t discriminate cleanly between interpersonal and impulsive factors, suggesting, again, that cultural bias may have influenced the psychopathy ratings.
Overall, these results indicate that while the concept of psychopathy shouldn’t be abandoned when studying black criminals, standard tests of psychopathy may be measuring different factors in blacks and whites, with the former perhaps more influenced by “hot-blooded” elements related to abuse and poverty.
Ironically, a social-liberal approach could theoretically be more comfortable with the idea that blacks exhibit higher rates of psychopathy, for if antisocial behavior is nothing more than a learned reaction to oppression, blacks, a group clearly subjected to more racism and socioeconomic deprivation than whites, could be expected to be more psychopathic. And if family breakdown is a causal factor for psychopathy, the fact that 95 percent of black teenage mothers are unwed bears some serious notice. (Though, with a 65 percent rate, white and Hispanic girls aren’t far behind.)
Whatever the statistical specifics, we should not be deterred from identifying and segregating severe psychopaths of any ethnicity. Whether a cold, cruel, habitual criminal is black, white, yellow, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist is of little solace to his victims. The fact remains that once he’s locked up for a long time, the rest of us will be safer.
The most reasonable conclusion that can be drawn about environment and psychopathy is that some combination of environmental stressors—physical abuse, social chaos, parental drug use and alcoholism, and overall rotten families, especially rotten and/or absent fathers—contributes to severe antisocial behavior in young boys. In many cases this develops into psychopathy and a lifetime of criminality.
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