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May 28, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:50
3303 Genetics and Crime | Kevin M. Beaver and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So we're back with...
Dr.
Kevin Beaver.
He is a professor at Florida State University and is one of the preeminent researchers in the field of biosocial criminology.
What is that, you ask?
Fine question.
We'll get into that in a moment.
He's published over 150 articles, which is better than me because mine are all on Blogspot, more than 25 book chapters, and is the author or editor of 10 books, including Biosocial Criminology, a primer.
Thanks, of course, Dr.
Beaver, for having the time to chat today.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Okay, biosocial criminality.
As you've written, it is the fastest growing line of research within the field of criminology and seems to be encountering just a smidgen of resistance from the established fortress of academia.
Could you help my listeners just sort of understand what biosocial criminality is to begin with?
Sure, absolutely.
So in the field of criminology, historically, really since the 1950s, 1960s, what we've seen is is focused solely on how environmental factors produce criminal behavior.
So looking at things ranging from the economy, to cultures, to subcultures, to peers, to parental socialization.
Virtually every single theory ever published, and any empirical study ever published, had focused only on the environment.
It was really only about 10 to 15 years ago Where we started to see a change, and not just a change from environment to genetics, but a slower change where it wasn't just a focus on environment, but there was beginning to trickle into the field an interest in the possibility that individual differences in personality traits, temperament, things of that nature, might also explain some differences in criminal behavior across people.
And so I think that sort of set the stage a little bit.
For a small group of researchers to come in and begin to look at the possibility that genetic differences across people might account for part of the reason why individuals are different in terms of criminal behavior.
And so that's sort of the historical backdrop, a short historical backdrop, to sort of what led into biosocial criminology.
But more generally speaking, or more specifically speaking, Biosocial criminology is interested in examining all of the potential causes of crime, whether they be environmental, whether they be genetic, biological, whatever they might be.
Biosocial criminologists will study all of those typically at the same time and in combination to see not only how, say, genes in the environment each contribute to criminal behavior, but also how they may interact, how they might modify each other Yeah,
and I mean, certainly the way that I grew up intellectually, the idea was that human beings are sort of like this liquid and you pour them into the environment and they just kind of merge.
And then, of course, the argument that follows from that is to some degree, at least politically, sort of social engineering, redistribution of income and so on.
Is going to change outcomes.
And the idea that we are a lot more fixed in our natures than people think, it's kind of a challenge to, I mean, more than just your field, but the entire way that we think, you know, the idea that the Soviets could create the Soviet man, you know, change the economic environment and you get a new type of human being.
That is a significant challenge.
So what are the resistances that you're finding in the spread of this information?
I think we get a lot of resistance, and it stems from the fact that people don't, A, fully understand how and in what ways genes work for complex human behaviors, but also failing to realize that many of the same criticisms that they level against biosocial criminology could be leveled against their own line of research.
And so I'll give you a common sort of example.
People come and critique biosocial criminology by saying, oh, you're looking for a crime gene.
And let's say you find a single gene that causes crime and it's sort of a deterministic in nature.
So if you have this gene, you'll become a criminal.
And if you don't have this gene, you won't become a criminal.
Well, what types of policy implications would flow from that?
And, you know, so they're sort of setting up a straw man because that's not how genes work.
But they're looking at it as though genes are deterministic, and that's a very dangerous approach.
But what the logic of their theories rests upon is the belief that the environment is the only thing that matters, and that people are sculpted solely from the way in which they encounter different environments and from the different socialization that they receive.
And so their belief is that, you know, for whatever reason it might be, they believe that the environmental explanations are sort of morally superior to genetic explanations, but the outcome is in many ways the same, you know, that genes are the only thing that matters according to them, or the environment is the only thing that matters according to them.
And if you can think of the dangers that would sort of flow directly from this if they were correct and the environment was the only thing that matters, think about what that would mean.
You could take, you know, 100 or 100,000 people at birth and sculpt them into whoever you want them to be.
They would obey you.
They would listen.
They would do whatever you want them to do.
Solely because you have complete control over the way that they're socialized and the types of environments that they encounter.
So there are many different sort of clashing views, if you will, between a biosocial perspective and an environmental perspective.
But I would say that most of these disagreements stem largely from setting up a straw man, such as saying the only thing that matters is a single gene or the only thing that matters is genes.
And then it frees sort of these critics up to make these arguments that seem like they hold some water, but when you sort of dissect them, clearly they fall apart because they're based on erroneous assumptions.
Yeah, and of course the idea that the pursuit of truth should be conditioned by our perception of positive or negative outcomes is to say that the truth should be manipulated to give you the kind of world that you prefer, and that's more propagandistic, I would argue, than a pursuit of truth itself.
And my argument for years has been that, let's say that there's a family history of heart disease.
And it's genetic.
It's not because we eat a lot of fried food or whatever.
I've got a genetic family history of heart disease.
I would want to know that information.
Because if I don't know that information, it seems rather inevitable that I'm going to die of heart disease.
But if I have that information, then I can take positive steps to counteract the genetic undermining of my heart health by a more exercise, better food, whatever it is that I would do.
So knowledge would give you power to avert an outcome that otherwise would be deterministic if you didn't have that knowledge.
Absolutely.
I couldn't agree more.
I always say very much the same thing, that knowledge is power.
And the more that we understand the etiology of whatever it is we're studying, in this case criminal behavior, the better able we are to be in a position to do something about it.
I think the point you made about sort of ideology or what's good or what's bad, conditioning sort of what we study and what we believe is spot on.
It may be noble for some people to say the only thing that matters is the environment, right?
And they might think that this is a very progressive way of thinking, that this is a very open way of thinking that allows everyone to be sort of treated somewhat equally or at least come into the world equally.
And that might be good for some people.
It's not scientific, but it might make these individuals feel better about themselves or try to make others feel better.
But let's say that we follow their logic, that this is sort of the more noble pathway, this is the more progressive way.
It still doesn't tell us anything about the causes of crime.
So if everybody sort of jumps on the bandwagon and says, wow, yeah, you know, these environmental explanations are progressive and these bio-social explanations are oppressive, Well, that doesn't tell us about the cause of the crime.
It might tell us which one makes us feel better.
But if we truly don't understand the cause of the crime, then we can't do anything about it.
And so that's why I think when we look at the study of crime, a lot of times I'm tagged as a biosocial criminologist, and that's what I'd call myself.
But really what I see myself as is an objective empiricist, someone that evaluates the data, someone that examines research questions and tries as much as they can to not let subjective Or political ideologies penetrate into findings or penetrate into what I want to occur or the way I want a study to come out.
I try to be as objective as possible.
I think when we're talking about social science researchers and criminologists more specifically, that's very rare.
I think that what we tend to see are certain ideologies, certain beliefs permeate the field.
And if you publish research or if you show research findings that are supportive of that ideology, you're much more likely to be published.
And if you go against the grain and you show research that challenges those views, you're much less likely to be published and much more likely to be held to a standard of science that probably most social scientists can't ever reach.
Oh, yeah.
So this is, I think, a good thing to touch on, which you've written a whole paper about, which is...
The peer review is supposed to be the gold standard.
I kind of like the market review myself, as in can you sell it and does it have value to people else?
But the peer review in sort of the academic scientific community is considered to be the gold standard.
But it also seems to me that the peer review, particularly in the more difficult to quantify, like the softer sciences outside of physics and math and so on, that it can be used for a very conservative kind of gateway to protect an existing edifice of thought Rather than...
Everybody's got a bias.
Everybody's got a self-interest.
And of course, people who've invested their careers in a particular worldview are not always the most friendly to ideas that challenge that worldview.
Do you think that it's possible that the peer review process can be used as a gatekeeper to keep new ideas out of an existing structure?
Absolutely.
I mean, there's no doubt.
I mean, I've seen it firsthand.
I've heard from others that have experienced stuff that's very similar.
I mean, if you think about...
What gives researchers in any particular discipline status is publications, but more than publications, it's publishing in top journals.
And so what a lot of times, you know, colleagues do is they'll evaluate how influential a researcher is or sort of quote-unquote how good of a researcher is by looking at whether they publish in the field's top journals.
Well, who are the editors of these journals?
Well, sort of the bigwigs, the big names, the more established folks in the field who have published sort of in this particular realm, whatever it is that they published in, but they published in a way that allowed them to move their way up the food chain so that now they're the editors of these big journals.
They're typically more established, full professors that have been around a long time that have a solid publication record and that are highly respected.
Well, what happens then when other researchers come in and try to publish research that may go against the grain, that may go against everything that these editors have published in their career, or that may go against the entire field's ideology?
They're much more likely to sack that paper.
And it can be sort of a hidden way of doing it.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the editor is going to write you back and say this paper is bad for these reasons.
But any topic that...
Researchers study.
We can identify people who are for that particular finding and those who are against it.
So if you publish a study or you submit a study for publication and it's testing theory A, whatever that theory might be, and it shows no support for that theory, an editor who ultimately selects the reviewers for that paper knows people who are for that theory and people who are against that theory.
And so if you show no support for that theory, You could easily send that paper to three reviewers who are known proponents of that particular theory and know full well that that paper is going to be sacked by those reviewers.
So it sort of sets up this facade where editors can say, well, we're blind.
We're just following what these reviewers say, and these are expert reviewers on this topic, and they all came back and said this paper was flawed in these ways.
And we just followed the reviewers' advice and didn't publish that paper.
And so it creates this facade or this mirage that, look, we're being objective editors, when in reality we know that editors are typically far from objective, at least within criminology, and that they have certain beliefs, they have certain findings that they want to get published,
and it doesn't take much to hear backstories about An editor who likes this or an editor who wants that or an editor who's more open to publishing on this topic or an editor that's more likely to publish a paper showing something that goes against the ideology.
And so, yeah, absolutely.
What we see in the social sciences in general, but particularly criminology, is probably a very filtered view of what ultimately is submitted for publication and what ultimately comes out in terms of published research.
Yeah, I mean, because there's no end customer who is determining sort of the value of the material, if the horse and buggy manufacturers got to decide whether the car got manufactured, they'd probably say no.
But it's the customers who kind of override their decisions.
But in this situation, there is no sort of third-party customer who is thirsty for the information and will overthrow, in a sense, the biases of those defending an older or, I guess, more traditional way of I think that's one of the challenges.
When you don't have the end customer who can bypass the gatekeepers, I think the capacity or the environment where this kind of subtle corruption can flourish seems almost inevitable.
Absolutely.
And you think the stakes can be relatively high.
There's limited page space for journals to publish research.
And so if they're publishing on something that's more controversial, they're not publishing stuff that's less controversial or that falls in line with what most people believe.
And if you think about the editors, most of the editors are well-respected in the field.
That's how they got elected or ultimately got to the position of being an editor.
And what happens when they're confronted with research that goes against them and what they believe and what many of their friends and colleagues believe?
If they publish it, they may think, whether correctly or incorrectly, that they're sort of putting their stamp of approval on it.
And others will look at them and they'll lose that status.
They'll lose the way that people view them.
And it could be a cycle.
Absolutely.
And why I think this, obviously, you know, you feel infinitely better than I do, but from the outside, Dr.
Beaver, why I think there is such high stakes is not just people's individual careers, but, you know, biosocial criminology is something that impacts society outside and in particular questions of racism or bigotry and so on because we did a presentation last fall The truth about crime and we sort of pointed out that crime is not evenly distributed among ethnicities and also there are other potentially genetic
constituencies of those ethnicities that are also not evenly distributed such as an IQ and we talk about the warrior gene and so on.
So there is, of course, the internal ambitions, but, you know, as we've seen from people in the past, you know, people like Richard Lynn or, of course, Charles Murray, Jason Richwine and so on, people who have decided to bubble up some of the...
I guess human biodiversity challenges that society might be facing.
There is a significant backlash in particular from the media who are generally populated by people on the left and who are environmental determinants, so to speak.
So I think there's that aspect as well that is keeping this conversation away from the general public at a time when I think it's more desperately needed than ever.
Sure.
I wouldn't disagree at all.
When you're talking about crime, you're talking about a behavior that everybody seems to care about and that everybody is an expert in.
And I always tell my students that when someone asks you and they say, oh, you're studying criminology, everyone will be an expert when it comes to crime.
They'll tell you what causes crime, why crime went up, why they were robbed, why this happened.
Without ever asking you, without really even caring, they already have their ideas in their mind about what causes crime, and it's not going to change, at least for most folks.
And so it is an interesting topic to pursue from sort of a scholarly or academic perspective because of the quote-unquote everybody's an expert mentality when it comes to it.
Well, and that's, of course, called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And trust me, Dr.
Bieber, it's not any different in the realm of moral philosophy, where people who haven't studied it will tell you exactly what right and wrong is and exactly why.
And, yeah, people who aren't good at stuff generally lecture the experts with no self-consciousness as to how uninformed they are.
It's just one of the crosses you have to bear when you become an expert in something.
Right, right, right, right.
So you've written, and I thought this was a great sentence, which I think we should break down if we can.
The continued advancement of the biosocial perspective, particularly the continued uncovering of new and important pieces of information about the causes of crime, rests on two key factors.
The collection of biosocial criminological data and the development of biosocial theories that piece together The known biosocial findings.
Now, that's probably a little bit opaque to a lot of my listeners.
I'm not saying it's perfectly clear to me either.
But could you help people sort of understand how rapidly, I guess, particularly with the Human Genome Project and, of course, the gathering of additional data like the longitudinal studies of youth and so on, what is driving the acceleration of insights and connections coming out of biosocial perspectives?
It's a good question, you know, and I think the context within which I wrote that is that if you look across all fields of study, so say we're looking across criminology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and so on, what you see is differential focus on genetics.
So in sociology, there's no discussion of genetics.
In criminology, there's very little.
In psychology and psychiatry, you see a significant amount more research devoted to that line of research.
And so, if we're just looking at criminology, what happens is that the journals do not publish much research that's devoted to or that examines genetics or bio-social contributors to crime.
There are a number of reasons for that.
I've seen people write that, well, if they're not interested in it, they'll leave it to biosocial criminologists to study.
But one of the more common sort of knee-jerk reactions is that, well, this is a very interesting line of research, but there are no criminological data sets that include that type of information on a widespread basis.
So the argument is that we have all these criminological data sets that are out there, But most of them don't include genetic information or twins or other biological data that could be used to understand more closely the biosocial contributors to criminal behavior.
And so I think that the first point that I made in that statement was that we need a more varied and more widely concerted effort to include Genetic and Biosocial data in every criminological data set that's collected from here on forward.
Not only that, many of the criminological data sets that are in existence, we could go back and add genetic markers to them.
That would allow a whole discipline to have access to genetic markers, to biological markers that could then be used to test at a much more sort of rapid pace The way in which biological, genetic, and environmental influences contribute additively and interactively to criminal behavior.
Because right now, if we leave it up to other fields of study, their focus isn't as much on crime as it is on other types of human phenotypes, things like aggression or violence or dominance-related behaviors, things like that, which may overlap quite significantly with crime.
But they're different.
Not all aggressive behaviors are criminal.
Not all violent behaviors are criminal.
And so if we want to really channel our resources, if we really want to fully understand what causes criminal behavior, we have to begin by changing the types of data that we collect.
Once it's sort of institutionalized that we collect information from the genome or from other biological correlates to crime, Then it will become standard place and it'll become a lot more, I think people will be a lot more open to it because they'll have those data readily available that they can then analyze and say, oh yeah, you know, I saw this study out there that showed this biological correlate to crime.
I have that biological correlate to crime in my data set.
And I show the same thing, so I'll need to control for that, or I think it could fit in, you know, with an interactive effect with this type of environment or whatever.
I think it would spawn a lot of discussion, a lot more collaboration, and ultimately, I think we would have a lot more information on the biosocial underpinnings to criminal behavior if we saw something proceed in that fashion.
Okay, good.
So that was the first part of it.
The second part was about theory, right?
Isn't that what you said?
So what we need to do then is be able to piece these pieces of information together in a coherent theory, in a theory that would allow us to understand how all of these biosocial correlates sort of fit together To explain crime in general or specific types of crime.
Right now what we have is we have a lot of findings.
So, for example, we have found that alleles for the MAOA gene differentially contribute to violence.
We've shown time and again that around 50 to 80 percent of the variance in criminal behavior is due to genetic influences.
Research has shown consistently that heart rate is related to violence and delinquency.
But what we haven't done is sort of sat down and said, okay, what findings, biosocial or otherwise, are consistent across all studies?
And then start to lay them out and say, okay, we know that this variable and this variable and this variable and this variable are always found to be related to criminal behavior.
And how do these variables fit together in a coherent way that we could then explain sort of the development of criminal behavior and the development of criminals in a way that's based on all this research that's out there.
So what we have right now are environmental theories.
We have a bunch of criminological theories that are out there that people maintain are correct or in some cases incorrect.
And then we have a whole bunch of bio-social studies showing differential effects of these bio-social influences.
But these are very separate entities in the sense that environmental theories and bio-social research rarely sort of integrate.
And nobody's done anything.
I shouldn't say nobody.
There have been a few studies that are out there, a few theories that have been set forth, like Lee Ellis' theory.
But very little in terms of theorizing on the way in which we could sort of combine these together to get a coherent theoretical explanation that's grounded in biosocial work.
Right.
And, you know, just to remind the listeners, this unified field theory of criminology is not deterministic.
In fact, without the knowledge, as we talked about earlier, it's deterministic.
So when people say, oh, we're going to use genetics to explain things, that does not make us passive, it makes us active.
You know, if there was a particular gene that caused cancer, we would want to know that and not pray to the gods of political correctness to cure our illnesses.
Right.
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to speak for you.
I just want to make sure that whenever people hear this, they say, oh, it's genetics and we can't do anything about it.
It's completely different.
It's like, no, no, no, no.
That gives us the power to do something about it.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And again, I think that's what the tag bio-social should really clearly demonstrate, is that it's not purely biological or genetic.
It's a combination of factors, biological and social, that combine together that ultimately predispose to criminal behavior.
And genes don't work deterministically when we're talking about complex behaviors like criminal behavior.
They work in a probabilistic way.
So we might have hundreds or thousands of genes that increase or decrease our probability of engaging in crime.
But not a single gene in and of itself, for the most part, would ever say for certain that, yes, indeed, this person's going to become a criminal, or no, they're not.
And what's more is that many of these genetic effects can be amplified or dampened depending on the types of environments that someone might find themselves in.
So an individual with a genetic predisposition of violence, that genetic predisposition may surface when they're in a criminogenic or adverse environment.
But you take that same genetic predisposition and you pair it with a different type of environment, one that's sort of more moderate, and that genetic predisposition may never surface.
And to go back to sort of a medical example, if you think about it, individuals may vary systematically in terms of their genetic potential for heart disease.
If we took two people and they were both at very high levels of genetics or genetic influence for heart disease, that doesn't mean that the individual should say, you know what, my life is determined I'm going to die from a heart attack or whatever it might be, so I'm going to go out and live life without any regard for my health.
In fact, we would see the opposite.
We would look and say, okay, this individual is at very high risk, genetically speaking, for heart disease, so let's monitor them.
Let's make sure that they go to the doctor all the time, that we get them on certain medications that sort of curtail that genetic predisposition, make sure they exercise, right?
Give them different types of reading materials about ways to counteract high risk for heart disease, eat healthy, so on and so forth.
And so in this way, as you had mentioned before, knowledge is power.
If we know that we're genetically predisposed for something, whether it's cancer, heart disease, or crime, presumably we're in a position where we can do something about it.
I mean, the same thing holds for behaviors like addiction.
If we know that addiction, say alcoholism, runs very rampant in our family, then we're in a position where we can abstain from alcohol and then that genetic predisposition would never have a chance to surface.
Or we might monitor ourselves very closely and sort of keep a log on how much we're drinking to make sure that we're not going down that road.
But no matter what we look at, it doesn't matter whether genetic predisposition makes us feel good, What makes us feel bad.
It doesn't change the fact that the research indicates that genes matter for virtually any type of behavior from criminal behavior to impulsive types of behavior.
Knowing more and more about that should put us in a position where we can do more and more about it in a way that's quite effective.
Yeah, I mean, the closest thing to determinism that I can think of is genetic predisposition plus negative environment plus ignorance of the genetic causes.
That, to me, would be the closest thing.
Now, you had mentioned something that I'd not heard of before.
I'm not a massive expert in the field, but, you know, when people sort of ask me about criminality and so on, I say, well, okay, there's already cultural influences, but there's, you know, where...
The stuff is a little bit beyond our control.
We're talking IQ, gender, adrenaline, and testosterone in particular, and so on.
But you also mentioned heart rate.
I've not heard of that one before.
How does that manifest?
Yeah, it's a very consistent finding.
I haven't published directly on that.
Adrian Rain has, and one of my former students, Brian Bautla, published on it.
But it's a very consistent finding indicating that low resting heart rate is a It's an indicator for more antisocial behavior.
And the precise reason for that is, to my knowledge, not fully understood, though there's been a lot of sort of discussion about why that might be the case.
That they're less likely to be affected by the types of behaviors.
You think about people who are nervous.
I wouldn't want to go rob a bank for many reasons, but one of them would be I probably would hyperventilate when I'm going into a bank thinking, oh my gosh, what happens if I get caught or this or that or another thing, whereas other people just might be pretty cool and collected and that might not really bother them that much.
The finding is consistent, the rationale or the explanation for the mechanism that links heart rate to criminal behavior is probably not as well agreed upon.
Oh, it just reminds me of that old song, Don't Worry, Be Happy.
I remember seeing someone wrote somewhere, Don't Worry, Be a Dummy.
And part of me sort of thought, okay, well, maybe there's an IQ relationship that the more intelligent you are, the more you can sort of see around the corner of consequences, and the more you could potentially anticipate bad things.
So maybe if you're not worried about anything, it's because you're really not thinking of anything.
I don't know, just a possibility.
Now, let's turn to the big question, one of the biggest questions, I think, in the U.S., which is ethnic crime rates, which, of course, you know, I mean, as you know, the East Asians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the South Koreans, and so on.
I guess maybe the North Koreans if they were allowed out of their prison country.
But they, of course, called the model minority, you know, lower than Caucasians or whites in terms of criminality, welfare consumption, family breakup, and so on.
And child abuse and then there's Caucasians and then of course Hispanics have a higher rate of crime than Caucasians and the American blacks If not blacks around the world have like truly shockingly high levels of criminality now the general explanation is you know slavery plus Racism plus poverty whatever it is just creates this unholy brew But as far as I understand it there are significant contributions That your field can make to helping people to untangle why there are such Differences
in ethnic positive and negative behaviors in society.
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is one of the key areas, understanding sort of minority, non-minority differences in crime rates.
More specifically, white versus African-American differences.
And I think it's also one of the reasons that people are so concerned about bio-social criminology.
And that's that, well, if you're studying biology, you're studying genetics, and you're trying to explain crime, then it necessarily leads to the question of how this accounts for, how does biology or how do genetics account for disproportionate minority contact in the criminal justice system?
And the critics oftentimes come out and say the only way that we could sort of gain any insight, and the only way that a biosocial approach could account for these differences is It's by saying that African Americans and whites are different, genetically speaking, on functional genes that are responsible for criminal behavior.
And so, in short, there's a genetic difference between minorities and non-minorities, according to critics.
And the answer right now is we don't know.
We don't know what accounts for why African-American males are much more likely to end up in prison than Caucasians.
We don't know that.
We know certain things that might account for it, but we don't know whether we're looking from a biosocial perspective or whether we're looking from an environmental perspective.
Certainly there's a lot of concern right now about racism and prejudice and whether police target minorities more so than whites or whether they're processed differentially through the criminal justice system.
And there's a lot of different studies out there that vary significantly in terms of the quality of the design.
I published a study looking at racism in the criminal justice system a number of years ago and And what I uncovered is that there wasn't any evidence to suggest that there is racism built into the criminal justice system.
Sorry to interrupt, but that of course is such a big point, and it's one of these, well, you don't wake up in the morning and think of gravity, and a lot of people in America don't wake up and think that there might not be racism against African Americans in the criminal justice system.
Help people understand the methodology, if you could, Altwood, about how you would come to those conclusions.
Essentially, what a perfect study would look at is, okay, we've got this outcome here.
And what we know is that African-American males are significantly more likely than white males to be arrested, incarcerated, and sentenced to prison, and even longer sentences.
So the question, obviously, is why?
What accounts for that?
Now, the overarching explanation, the one that most people sort of believe without really critiquing or without really analyzing, is that there's racism.
And there's racism, and many people argue, at every step of the criminal justice system.
So that police are more likely to target minorities than non-minorities.
And so they're more likely to be arrested.
And once arrested, they're more likely to be prosecuted.
And once prosecuted, more likely to be found guilty.
And once guilty, sentenced to longer sentence lengths compared to white males.
And so we looked at this, and essentially what we did is we looked at a sample, a nationally representative sample, and looked to see whether, in fact, there were differences in arrests between African Americans and whites, and whether there are differences, and whether they've been sentenced to probation, and a number of different criminal justice outcomes, and certainly there was.
We found that African American males were significantly more likely to be arrested, more likely to be sentenced to probation, more likely to be incarcerated.
So our findings fell in line with virtually all the research that was out there.
But the difference was that we also looked at individual characteristics.
Specifically, we looked at self-reports of criminal behavior.
And so this question asked both whites and African Americans, how much crime have you been involved in during the past year?
And Once we put that into the equation along with a measure of IQ, what we found is that those two measures accounted for the disparity.
In other words, whether it was IQ or self-reported criminal behavior, and if I recall correctly, most of that difference was accounted for by the self-reported criminal behavior.
So essentially what we have are differences in engagement in criminal behavior.
And so why would African-American males be more likely to be incarcerated than white males?
Well, based on our research, it's because they're committing more crimes to begin with.
They're committing more crimes.
So if they're committing more crimes, they're more likely to be arrested.
They're more likely to be processed through the criminal justice system.
They're more likely to be incarcerated than white males because they're committing more crimes.
And this is not a unique finding.
This is a finding that falls in line with other studies as well, showing that based on self-reports, so you're just asking the individual, how much crime have you committed?
Based on self-reports, they're self-reporting more crime.
And so if they're self-reporting more crime, we would anticipate if the criminal justice system works in any way, that individuals from groups that are committing more crimes would be more likely to be arrested, more likely to be incarcerated as well.
The question that we could not answer, though, is why African-American males are committing more crimes than our whites.
We didn't look at that.
That wasn't part of our study.
So I think that that would be an important place to start.
What accounts for these differential rates of involvement based on self-reports and sort of That's where a whole host of different explanations can be advanced, whether it's due to racism or socioeconomic status or individual differences or whatever it might be.
But based on our study, and again, it's only one study, so other people might find different things, we didn't detect any institutionalized racism that would be a significant contributor to African American males receiving More time in prison or being incarcerated or being arrested when compared to white males.
Well, and I think that there are other ways of approaching that data as well.
And one that I've seen is that since a lot of crimes, of course, are called in, you know, some guy robbed me or some guy beat me up or whatever it is, then, of course, if you compare the descriptions of the people who, like the race of the alleged perpetrator, I guess, the race of the alleged perpetrator, and compare that to arrest records, if, of course, if the arrest records are vastly higher than the general perpetrator, Race description of the alleged perpetrator, then that would be an indication of racism.
But they seem to line up pretty well.
And of course, since most crime is within ethnic communities, then if blacks are reporting blacks as alleged criminals at about the same rate as blacks are arrested, that would not be indication of racism unless we were going to say that blacks are racist against other blacks.
It was a white guy who beat me up, but I'm going to say it was a black guy because that would make no sense at all.
So there are lots of other ways, I think, of trying to get at the same conclusion, all of which seem to point in the same direction that, again, whatever the cause, we can talk about that in a second, but it is the criminal actions that cause the higher proportion of particularly the young black males.
And, you know, the standard is, of course, to compare it to whites, but again, compared to Asians, whites don't look that great, you know?
So it always turns into this black-white discussion, which, of course, brings up all of this I've sort of talked about the Asian ghost in crime statistics.
You can hear them somewhere.
They're in the walls, but you can't ever talk about them because if the idea is that white racism drives criminality, then it wouldn't make any sense.
If whites are racist, then they would also be racist against Asians, but Asians are proportionately lower representation in criminal activities and statistics than whites.
So...
Yeah, so from what I've read, there's a lot of different ways of angling at it, and it's really hard to find any kind of systemic racism in the system.
Yeah, I mean, there are different ways...
Sorry, I'm supposed to be interviewing you here.
No, no, no.
And I think when it comes to something like crime, I mean, there are so many different ways to conduct studies, whether it's, you know, through victimization data, official crime data, self-report data, whatever you might be looking at.
I think the key is having a way to...
Rule out, or at least try to rule out alternative explanations.
And what I mean by that is that a lot of studies are out there that document or identify differences, racial differences, within the criminal justice system.
And so saying, well, African Americans are two, three, four, five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites.
And so that is evidence of racism.
Well, it's certainly in line with an argument of racism in the criminal justice system, but it's in line with basically any other explanation as well.
And so in our study, what we tried to do is rule out some of these alternative explanations.
And when we tried to rule those out, what we found is we accounted for those differences.
But a lot of studies won't try to rule it out.
They'll just show disproportionate minority contact and say, well, that's evidence of racism.
And that line of research is rarely critiqued, at least not on a widespread basis by academics.
So certainly there are data and there are studies that converge with what we showed, but the majority of studies won't take into account differences in terms of behaviors, group differences in terms of behaviors, or take into account that possibility.
Part of the reason we might see disproportionate minority contact is because of differences in actual involvement to begin with.
Okay, but don't we get back to the three deadly words in your field with regards to race relations, which is, you mentioned it earlier, you said, of course, that you normalize by two factors, and one of them was, you said you normalize by IQ. And isn't that the sort of third rail in the field, at least with regards to...
Comments that may be hysterically misinterpreted by the general public this normalized by IQ again as far as I understand it once you normalize by IQ Racial crime differences significantly diminish which is to say that given that American blacks have I don't know where the data is it seems to waver around a little bit but Roughly a standard IQ I think we're good to
to say that whites with an IQ of 85 perform criminal activities roughly similar to blacks who have an average IQ of 85.
And I think, isn't that the really challenging aspect of this discussion, at least when it comes to talking to the media?
In other words, if you say everyone's the same, then of course disparate outcomes would be due to prejudice, right?
I mean, if I say, well, all engineers are the same, but those redhead engineers I'll never hire.
It's like, okay, well, if you end up with fewer redhead engineers, then of course it's got something to do with prejudice.
But this idea that we're all the same and therefore disparate outcomes, I mean some people argue it's cultural and some people say it's genetic and of course the truth is it's probably a mixture of the two.
But I think that is the great challenge is the starting point that we're all the same therefore disparate outcomes must be due to prejudice but the idea that we're all starting out the same does not seem to be supported by like more than a century of IQ research.
Yeah, I mean, we see differences in starting points, not just for, say, early levels of IQ, but really across many, if not all, measurable characteristics.
We see differences very early in life when it comes to behavior, the way that individuals interact, personality, temperament, so on and so forth.
And these differences that emerge early in the life course then are carried forward.
I mean, we see high, high, high levels of stability in behaviors and human traits.
Change is the exception.
Stability is the rule.
And so, obviously, even if we take that as a given, which not everybody does, but if we take that as a given, it still doesn't give us insight into, okay, what accounts for these differences in starting points?
And if you see what we've talked about so far today, We've moved from talking about crime all the way back to talking about starting points and individual differences early in life.
Well, if you look at the criminological research, what you see is a focus on adolescence.
We don't even move back into childhood.
We don't even move back into infancy.
We don't even talk about differential starting points unless those different starting points are in adolescence.
So it's sort of a flawed logic that's employed by the vast majority of criminologists.
But it has to be because by the time you've got adolescence you can bring into account racism.
It's a little tougher to explain the fact, say, that East Asian babies are born later than white babies who are born later than black babies, or that East Asian babies learn to walk later than white babies who learn to walk later than black babies, or that black babies can lift their heads up, you know, substantially early.
Like, this, of course, there may be racism, and I'm certain that there is racism out there.
The idea that it's all just black-facing white racism is a complete misnomer.
We live in an ecosystem of in-group preferences as a whole, which biologically would make perfect sense.
But it's really hard to say that white racism causes black babies to be born earlier, or that black women would have substantially higher levels of twinning than Asian women and so on.
I mean, so I think people want to wait to start studying in adolescence because the earlier back they go, the tougher it is to hang the entire infrastructure of dysfunction on the hook of white racism.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
I think that there are, it becomes much more difficult every year you take a step further back in sort of the life course To make those variations or those differences accounted for by racism or prejudice or whatever it might be.
Absolutely.
And particularly when we're talking about crime, it would make it a lot more difficult if we see behaviors emerging during the very first few years of life where individuals from different groups are more likely to stay on one trajectory versus another.
Absolutely.
And, you know, the frustrating thing for me is I think it's sort of like, what is it, $100 billion that was spent on Head Start, right, which was the attempt to make all ethnicities end up doing as well in school, where there were very short-term temporary gains that faded out relatively quickly.
And I think about those resources that could have been applied much more productively to help dysfunctional communities.
That is the most frustrating thing to me.
Everybody wants dysfunctional or higher crime communities to be more functional and less crime-written.
Of course, every decent person wants that.
What's so frustrating is the degree to which, out of this hypersensitivity, actual facts are being withheld from communities that, in possession of these facts, could actually be productively helped.
Sorry, that's a little soapbox thing.
That really is frustrating to me.
No, I agree.
And I think if you look at these programs, whether they're prevention or rehabilitation programs, what we see, particularly with the rehabilitation programs, is they're not very effective.
We're not very effective at preventing crime among high-risk individuals or rehabilitating offenders.
We see recidivism rates hover around 80%.
And maybe part of the reason, if not a large proportion of the reason, that these programs aren't so effective is because they're based on research that simply can't be true or that isn't true.
And so instead of pretending certain things that make us feel good, instead of pretending certain things that might fall in line with sort of the general sentiment of the field, perhaps if we conducted high-quality rigorous studies that were objectively based and that were evaluated on the merits of the study as opposed to what they found then that might put us in a position where we would be able to begin to develop or at least guide the implementation of prevention and rehabilitation programs that are based on strong solid
empirical evidence and then perhaps we would see a reduction in recidivism but you know it doesn't matter if you have a dollar or you have ten million dollars if you're throwing it at a program that's based on research that's not correct It's not going to be any more effective if you throw another $10 million at it.
Hey, people in big houses smoke less, so let's get all the smokers and buy big houses for them.
Now, the last sort of point I want to make is...
Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it because you're the expert.
The last...
Part of the conversation I'd like to bring up goes something like this.
It is one of these things, you know, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it certainly seems to rhyme.
Or as I've pointed out, the history is the same damn story over and over with different costumes.
But there is this pattern in history where people who've come up with new socially uncomfortable information are damned and excluded and attacked and reviled and just considered to be the worst people on the planet by some.
And then, after a certain amount of time has passed, they're viewed as heroes who should never have been persecuted.
And then the next person with new information comes along, and everybody attacks them.
And then a certain amount of time passes, and they become heroes.
Look at the Socrates, Galileo, all these people, right?
Copernicus, and the people who come up with stuff.
And it seems to me that the field that you're working in, the biosocial criminology, it seems to me it's kind of like the heliocentric Version of the solar system, but with many more direct social implications.
And it seems like there is this general discomfort.
And I think people are just, I don't know if they're so sheltered or immature, the discomfort leads to attack and so on.
But it seems to me that enough information is being gathered.
You know, I have to, you know, the way I, why I do what I do is because I believe that the truth wins out.
And you've made that same case, if I remember rightly.
Do you think that we're close to any kind of tipping point where people will just be able to say, okay, I get it.
The evidence is so overwhelming.
Ptolemaic system gone, Copernican system in.
Is there any, are we close to any tipping point?
I got to think the speed at which we're mapping human genetics and so on.
Is there an accumulation where there's just going to be this bump?
And suddenly, not always perfectly, but the information can be out there.
Intelligent, empirical conversations can be had.
I wish I could say yes.
Maybe five years ago, I would have thought...
Oh, please say yes!
I would have been a lot more optimistic than I am today.
I've been doing this probably for about the past 10 years, and there's sort of peaks and valleys, if you will, and there are times where I'm like, wow, this is great, and there seems to be a change, and then Everyone pulls back and sort of doubles down and makes it a lot more difficult.
I think that we're at a crossroads right now in the field of criminology where there's probably a lot of resistance, particularly among those who have been in the field a long time.
They see that this body of research is here.
They're nearing the end of their career and they're having to make a decision about sort of what to do and what to say.
And thus far, I think that for the most part, what we've seen is hostile sort of opposition in a way that's sort of in your face and in a way that is designed to take down people's careers.
But at the same time, I think among the younger generations, it's sort of like, yeah, we grew up in the 90s or the decade of the brain.
We know about genes.
We know about the human genome.
Certainly, these things probably matter.
But I don't understand how they might matter for crime.
That's not what I do.
But if you do it, that's fine.
So I think you have these sort of two opposing viewpoints.
And then you've got a little bit in between as well.
You've got some younger folks who are trained and sort of anointed as the next big figures in the field, and they probably have a lot more to lose from it.
So, you know, I don't know.
I think time will tell, but I'm not nearly as optimistic today as I was, say, five years ago.
The amount of resistance that I and others who do this have faced in the past five years is beyond what I would have ever imagined.
It'll be interesting to see.
Max Planck said once that sometimes you think that knowledge and research and another study is what's needed to change a field, when in reality it's just the death of the older sort of bigwigs in the field.
And I think that's sort of where we're at.
I think we need some of these older generations to die off or retire And I think it'll pave the way for at least a more balanced debate and sort of a more balanced treatment of the biosocial research.
Well, well said.
I mean, I'm obviously so optimistic that I feel that our conversation today is going to solve the entire problem.
So I hope that it's time well spent for you.
And, you know, I sort of want to point out to the people who are listening and watching this, you know, and we're, I don't know, cooking it around...
8 to 10 million views and downloads a month.
So people will listen to this, and there will be lots and lots of people listening and watching to this.
And this is just speaking for me, not for Dr.
Bieber, of course, but I would say really try and get this information out to people.
I know it might make for some startled teacup dropping at your cucumber and salad parties, but this is essential information.
Human knowledge doesn't move forward inexorably.
It's not like some glacier that just follows gravity.
Human knowledge...
Advances as a result of people making decisions to have challenging conversations.
So the best that we can do is to have empirical fact-based conversations, you know, screw our courage to the sticking place.
Actually, that's not really a great analogy because that comes from someone killing someone in Macbeth.
Just have the conversations that are challenging.
Yeah, there are IQ differences between ethnicities, and that is a problem.
And it's not going to go away if we ignore it.
And there are criminal differences between ethnicities.
That is a problem.
It's not going to go away if we just ignore it.
And in fact, I would argue it's going to get worse if we do.
So, you know, it's like that weird mole on your back, you know?
Go to someone and have a conversation about it.
So this is one of the reasons why having researchers like yourself on I think is so valuable because, you know, when I say it, I'm just some guy on the web.
When you say it, you know, you have obviously credentials and experience and data behind you.
But don't just take this information if you're listening.
Don't just take this information and say, huh, that's interesting.
And, you know, the next time you're around people, if crime comes up, if ethnicity comes up, if biosocial compatibilities come up, bring up this information and say, you know what I heard that was interesting and so on?
Because that's how this information is going to spread.
It's not going to spread through the media who seem to stick their pikes against empiricism, perhaps because of leftist fascination with economic determinism.
It's not going to spread through the media.
But academia, you know, they're not going to start up the, hey, race and IQ differences TV channel staffed by a whole bunch of academics who, you know, they're very smart, which means that they can foresee the consequences of their choices.
So it is going to spread because we have this venue of the internet and we have people listening to this.
And it's going to spread because people out there are willing to have this conversation.
That's the only way it's going to spread.
And I think it is one of the most important pieces of information to spread at the moment.
Sorry again for stepping on the soapbox stuff.
I'll certainly give you the last word about things that you want people to know about what it is that you're doing.
Sure.
Well, I appreciate that.
I appreciate the time coming on here and having sort of an open discussion on what I see, obviously, is a very important topic.
But, you know, just to sort of recap some of what we said, I think what's important from a scientific perspective, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about criminology or any other field of study, is objective research.
Objective research where we are able to evaluate data, analyze data, pursue any type of research question that we want, and then have the merits of our research evaluated based on the quality of what we produced.
Not based on whether the findings make us happy or whether the findings align with what you believe or whether the findings align with what you were always told by your mom or dad or somebody else.
That's not how science moves forward.
Science moves forward incrementally and only incrementally if we evaluate research objectively.
And I've come to the position of being a sort of a biosocial research and believing what I'm believing by being free or trying to be free from sort of subjective inputs or from pressures within the academy to study this or not study this.
And I think that if more of us criminologists and more researchers in general Did the same thing.
I think we would make great strides very, very quickly in terms of what we know about the causes of crime and in terms of what we could do about that.
But being politically correct, producing research findings just to get awards, not publishing research because it might make someone feel uncomfortable, in the long run, all that's done is really cloud the waters.
That's really why we don't really know much about the causes of crime.
If you ask 100 different criminologists what causes crime, you're probably going to get about 95 different answers.
And so if we can't agree on the causes of crime, then what that necessarily means is that any programs and policies that flow from that are unlikely to be correct, or at least they're not going to be based on findings that cut across different studies.
So I think if we're really interested about If we want to make a concerted effort to reduce crime, then it really needs to start in the academy and it really needs to start with researchers and professors being true to their word and producing research that can be falsified and that can be evaluated based on the merits of the studies.
Well said.
Well said.
And the opportunity costs of going in the wrong direction are considerable.
And there's a direct human cost, you know, and people are dying because I think the wrong approaches are being taken to solve the problems of crime.
Crime is one of these things that has direct impact on You know tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world every year and and lives hang in the balance and this is one of the areas where you really really want to get things right and you can't get things right in science without empiricism objectivity and the stuffing down to discomfort and just pursuing the truth so Thanks of course so much always a great pleasure to chat and I appreciate as I said last time the work that you're doing and The fact is,
I know it's difficult, and I'm sure there are times where you're like, hey, I could have just been a painter.
But I appreciate the work you're doing.
The information that you're gathering and disseminating is absolutely essential as we grapple with increasingly challenging social problems.
And it's a great pleasure to chat.
Thanks again for the work that you're doing, and I hope we can talk again soon.
Great.
Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
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