EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (20 page)

Evil eggs and corrosive coops

Statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that there has been a steady decline in violent crimes — murder, forcible rape, and aggravated assault — committed by 10-18 years old males from 2001-2010, and virtually no change in violent crime rate among females of the same age. The total number of violent crime arrests of youths in 2010 was 75,900, with 82% committed by males. Given calculations of criminal recidivism rates, somewhere between 40-60% of these youths will repeat the same crime, try something new, or escalate. Many of these individuals are on a path to becoming career criminals — a career that criminologists estimate costs society approximately $1.5 million per individual. How does a career of violent crime start? Are there early warning signs? How early? How much starts with the egg and how much with the coop in which it was raised?

Early scientific interests in this chicken and egg problem can be traced to the efforts of the Italian physician and psychologist Cesare Lombroso. In 1876, he published his magnum opus
The Criminal Man
. This was a serious, scholarly book aimed at understanding the biological origins of crime. Based on measurements of both anatomical and psychological characteristics, Lombroso concluded that criminals were born not made. Their defining features were throwbacks to our evolutionary ancestors, dehumanized by biological defects. Modern man was civilized and elegant. Criminal man was barbaric, a savage with slanted forehead, jutting jaw, and excessively long arms. Criminal man was more ape-like than human-like — a claim that harkens back to the Eberhardt studies of dehumanization that I described in
chapter 2
. Because the cause of these differences was biological, Lombroso argued that a life of crime was inevitable. Change through rehabilitation was hopeless. To protect society, these natural born criminals had to be taken out of society, either locked up or executed. These ideas formed the basis of several eugenics’ movements, with the aim of weeding out the undesirable, less than human elements of society, be they less intelligent, not white, and not from the right religious denomination.

Lombroso’s theory of criminality was soon rejected as scholars from a variety of different disciplines unearthed its racial prejudices and shoddy methods, including a failure to include the many people with slanted foreheads, jutting jaws, and long arms who never committed crimes, and those with statuesque anatomy who did. This initiated a general skepticism and even fear of biological explanations, causing a swing in the opposite direction. Criminals were not born but made by corrupt societies. Humans are not born with biologically encoded scripts for behaving with malice or virtue. Rather, we are born with blank slates, waiting for society to inscribe its distinctive signature. So began a pendulous swing from nature to nurture explanations of human behavior. Though the oscillation continues to this day, as documented by the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker in
The Blank Slate
, there is increasing appreciation, perhaps especially in the arena of criminology, that both nature and nurture make important contributions. This change comes, in part, from a far greater understanding of human genetics, combined with long term studies of how humans and other animals develop within environments that are either nurturing or damaging. Understanding this variation is essential as it shapes the outcome of evil’s recipe — of whether the combination of desire and denial results in gratuitous cruelty
⁵⁸
.

Consider the MAOA gene that I mentioned in the last section. This gene produces an enzyme that goes by the same shorthand of MAOA, or
M
ono
A
mine
O
xidase
A
. MAOA is evolutionarily ancient, present in other distantly related animals, and has two different forms —
low
and
high
— that influence the level of serotonin as well as the brain areas involved in social evaluation and emotional regulation. Early evidence for the critical role of this gene in social behavior emerged from a study that knocked it out of operation in mice. The result: hyper-hyper-aggressive mice. These genetically transformed mice had no capacity to regulate their social behavior. Consequently, all interactions were treated as confrontational and handled by aggressive attacks. These results are consistent with a large body of work in animals showing that low levels of serotonin and heightened aggression go hand in hand. These results are also consistent with work on humans.

In 1993, the biologist Hans Brunner analyzed the genetics of a large, extended family. Some individuals within this family were born with a defect that silenced the operation of the MAOA gene, just like the experimental mice. Relative to others in the family, these individuals had a pronounced history of violence, including murder, rape, and arson. Oddly, although this work provided one of the cleanest links between genes and violence in humans, it slid under the radar of scientific attention, only to be resuscitated and enriched about ten years later.

The behavioral geneticists Avshalom Caspi and Terry Moffitt studied a large population of young boys over several years. Though boys and girls have the MAOA gene, its effect on behavior is easier to study in boys because they have only one copy whereas girls have two, one for each of their two X chromosomes. For each boy, Caspi and Moffitt collected information on whether they were raised by parents who were caring, mildly abusive, or severely abusive, and the presence and frequency of their antisocial behavior. For each boy, they also noted whether they had the low or high expressing form of MAOA.

Caspi and Moffitt’s results provide a textbook example of nature’s interaction with nurture. If the parents were mildly abusive, the boys with the low activity form were nine times more likely to fight, steal, bully, and defiantly break rules. For those boys with severely abusive parents and the low activity form of MAOA, 85% developed into violent, delinquent criminals. However, if the parents were caring, the different genetic forms made no difference in their child’s personality or behavior.

What these findings tell us is that in humans, it makes little difference which form of MAOA you have if you grow up with nurturing parents. But if you grow up with abusive parents, your genes make all the difference in the world. Those with the low expressing form of MAOA are more likely than not to develop into delinquents, whereas those with the high expressing form are more likely than not to develop immunity. By a double dose of bad luck, one shot from the genes and one from the environment, some have a high probability of harming others.

The neuroscientist Andreas Meyer-Lindenburg provided a link between the particular form of MAOA and differences in the brain. Those with the low expressing form of MAOA, associated with relatively poor social regulation in Caspi and Moffit’s results, had significantly smaller brains, specifically in regions associated with the control of emotion and social behavior — the amygdala, anterior cingulate, and (only in men) also another part of the prefrontal cortex. These individuals also had less connectivity between these regions, harking back to the importance of our connected brains for normal functioning. Less connectivity translates to less control by the frontal areas of the brain over emotion-relevant areas such as the amygdala. When individuals with the low expressing form viewed angry or fearful facial expressions, the emotionally-relevant brain areas went into hyper-drive, whereas those areas involved in regulating emotions hibernated. Thus, in contrast with individuals who have the high expressing form of MAOA, those with the low expressing form are overwhelmed by emotionally charged experiences, lacking the mental brakes to stay cool. By luck of the draw, the low expressing form of MAOA helps sculpt a child that is more likely to get angry and violent in the face of frustration and other emotional challenges, whereas the high expressing form builds a child that is walled off, immune to the same challenges.

MAOA is not only crucial in long-term human development, but also in everyday, ephemeral social interactions. In a laboratory study, an experimenter offered subjects the opportunity to earn up to $10 on a vocabulary quiz. Once they finished the quiz, they learned that an anonymous person in another room either took some of their earnings or left it alone. With this information in hand, the quiz-taker could either vindictively punish the person by giving them some hot sauce or they could cash out of the game and recover the money lost. In reality, there was no partner in the other room. When subjects with the low expressing form of MAOA lost most of their earnings, they were far more likely to deliver the hot sauce than those with the high expressing form; they were also most likely to deliver the highest amount of the sauce. Like long-term parental abuse, even short-term provocation invoked in a laboratory environment can cause those with the low expressing form of MAOA to act out and attack.

These results link back to my proposed recipe for evil by pointing out that individuals differ in their capacity to resist the temptation of desire, whether it is the desire to attain resources by violent or non-violent means. For those with a low-expressing form of the MAOA gene and a bad upbringing, their capacity for self-control is weak. As a result, they are more likely to follow up on a desire to hurt those who get in the way. This is the kind of evidence that reveals why some individuals are more at risk than others when it comes to harming others. Though the process starts with genetic differences, it is a process that is shaped by what individuals experience.

As with all genes that have different forms, the number of individuals with the low expressing form of MAOA varies by population, including different ethnic and culturally identified groups. Caucasian and Hispanic males show some of the lowest frequencies at 34 and 29 % respectively, whereas Maori, Pacific Islander, and Chinese males show the highest at 56, 61, and 77% respectively. In a study of over 1000 men, individuals with the low expressing form of MAOA were more likely to be in violent gangs, and once in gangs, were more likely to use guns and knives than individuals with the high expressing form. Variation in the frequency of these two forms is interesting as it provides the signature handiwork of natural selection. When the frequency of one form goes up, the most likely explanation is that this form benefits the individual carriers. When the frequency goes down, there is a hidden cost. In light of this teeter-tottering of frequencies, the Maori are of interest. As celebrated by many New Zealanders today, the Maori were a highly adventurous and warring people. Individuals who took risks and fiercely defended their resources were heroes. Heroes may have been carriers of the low expressing form of MAOA. Heroes often leave more offspring, who were also carriers of the low expressing form. In the Maori environment, selection may well have favored this form of the gene. The important point is that different environments will favor different frequencies of the two forms of MAOA. This helps explain both some of the causes of individual differences and the challenges we face in confronting cultures of violence that are fueled by nature and nurture.

Many other labs have followed up on Caspi and Moffitt’s long term, developmental study. Most find the same relationship between the MAOA gene and antisocial behavior. Others add to this account by showing how different genes and early appearing physiological differences contribute to a highly aggressive and antisocial starting state. For example, the psychologist Alexander Strobel put subjects in a brain scanner and invited them to play a bargaining game where they could punish someone who acted unfairly to them — personal revenge — or punish someone who acted unfairly to someone else — impersonal punishment. For each subject, Strobel also collected information on a gene called COMT Met. This gene has three different forms, linked to differences in activity level in the frontal lobe of the brain, which are linked to differences in the levels of dopamine, which are linked to differences in the experience of reward. Given the different forms of COMT Met, at least part of what we experience as the feeling of reward or gratification was determined by our parents, and our parent’s parents, and their parent’s parents, all the way back to our ape-like cousins who evolved this gene. Strobel’s question was: would genetic differences in the anticipation of sweet revenge or punishment influence the decision to punish?

When Strobel looked at the brain scans of his subjects, he found that the same circuitry was engaged for personal revenge and impersonal punishment, with significant activity in two areas that I have mentioned several times before: the striatum — a reward area — as well as the insula — an area involved in the feeling of disgust. When we detect an injustice, we feel disgusted, a feeling that may motivate our desire for retribution. The striatum finishes off the process, rewarding us for our punitive response, and wiping out the negative feeling of disgust. Importantly, individuals with the high expressing form of COMT Met, and thus, higher levels of dopamine, showed stronger activation in the striatum and were more likely to punish those who acted unfairly.

Strobel suggests that those with the high expressing form of the COMT met gene punished more because they anticipated a higher level of reward. If this explanation is right, it has profound consequences for how we think about individual participation in the policing of norms and the honey hits associated with aggression. Some people will shy away from punishment, not because they fail to see the importance of ratting out cheaters, but because they don’t anticipate feeling good about it. Others are more likely to punish even the most minor infractions because they feel empowered and good about it. Those who are empowered to punish because it feels good have forged a stronger association between aggression and reward. Unbeknownst to these individuals, they started life with a bias, one that colored their willingness to harm others. This bias is joined by many others that I discuss in the next few sections.