Turning to Crime: Biological - Evaluation Flashcards
Reductionism
Raine:
- Not reductionist as authors stress that the findings do not support the view that violence is determined by biology alone as other factors may also play a role in predisposing an individual to commit an act of violence e.g social and situational factors, hence considers the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts.
Brunner:
- Reductionist as these men were also mentally retarded and only one family studied.
- Extremely reductionist as explains cause as one gene, one behaviour. (Compare to PADS where multiple factors are considered.) Single gene accounting for multiple effects.
Daly & Wilson:
- Reductionist as pinpoints only one cause for behaviour.
- Does no explain all sorts of contradictory behaviour eg. all men aren’t risk takers, not all women want babies.
Deterministic
Raine: Not deterministic as authors stress that the findings do not support the view that violence is determined by biology alone as other factors may also play a role in predisposing an individual to commit an act of violence e.g social and situational factors.
Causality
Raine:
- Does not establish causality
Daly & Wilson:
- Found statistical relationships (correlations)
- Useful for highlighting patterns or predicting trends, do not show cause and effect. Suggest a link between mae ad risk- taking but don’t prove it as correlation between life expectancy and truancy could be caused by poor parenting eg. don’t make them go to school, giving them a bad diet, modelling unsafe behaviour.
Snapshot
Raine: observes a structural problem within the brain of 41 charged with murder but pleaded NGRI. Snapshot research on an organ which know develops in a situation where they are not actually committing a crime.
Usefulness
Raine:
- Early intervention and prevention may be an effective way of reversing biological deficits that predispose to antisocial and aggressive behaviour. (eg. possible to screen people and identify the brain dysfunction before murderers get a chance to kill anyone. Brain surgery to cure murderous tendencies.)
Brunner:
- Unable to explain criminality in general.
- Extremely rare condition and even if it were responsible for the criminal behaviour, it is not yet possible to generalise very far.
- Unlikely to be ever possible to find a single biological cause of criminal behaviour as crime exists in many forms .
- Biological explanations offer possibility of screening for the future.
Determinism/Free will
Raine: Study does not tell us that criminals had no choice or free will about their crimes. Do not know where the brain differences came from, could have resulted from trauma of crime and imprisonment.
- Danger of biological explanation is that it labels individuals before a crime has been committed and ignores the possibility of free will being able to override any predisposition to criminal behaviour.
Validity
Raine:
- Easy to misinterpret the data as Raine is identifying tiny differences in brain function using very sensitive machines, parts of the brain switching on look very similar to parts of brain switching off.
- Do not know which of the 41 participants were actually guilty. The murderers carried out may not of been violent and they may have been pressurised. Control groups didn’t have criminal records, but they still could have been violent people, hence confounding results.
Daly & Wilson:
- When linked to other research of genetics, serotonin and brain dysfunction the importance of risk taking becomes clear in explaining crimes. This explanation has concurrent validity as crime involves taking risk (prison). This does assume that criminals approach risk in an irrational way, since for many crimes the risk is greater than reward. A different way of explaining risk would be the cognitive research into Thinking Errors.
- Due to vast time lag from ancestors we do not have absolute certainty what the precise selective processes have been.
- Difficult to test as there are no cavemen available to compare against modern subjects.
Ecological Validity
Raine:
- Involved participants using headphones, asking them to press a button when they recognised a sound. Task does not have much to do with crime or violence and hence lacks ecological validity.
Daly & Wilson:
- Evolutionary science is different in modern conditions to those of the past from our ancestors, eg. great monopolisers of women such as Ismail are not in our society anymore, therefore the adaptive process is different to what it is now.
Qualitative data
Raine:
- Lack of qualitative data, therefore hard to interpret results.
Impulsive crimes
Brunner:
- Work refers more to impulsive crimes than non-impulsive or planned criminal acts.
Reliability
Brunner:
- sample of subjects is small and biased to the Mobley family, and hence could be biased to a certain type of criminal subject
- data came from one family and cannot be replicated. men were also suffered mental retardation and other neurological problems which could have reduced reliability of results.
- very rare to find a complete detection for the deletion of a gene for MAO-A
- Range and nature of the crimes committed by the Mobley family was very broad
- results run counter to most findings about serotonin: absence of MAO should lead to higher serotonin levels which should reduce impulsive aggression, where as Brunner suggests higher serotonin = more aggression.
Scientific
Raine:
- Objective, scientific data from PET brain scans identifying brain dysfunction differences.
Brunner:
- Highly controlled procedure of urine samples tested for the presence of the breakdown products of serotonin, hence providing scientific data.
Nature/Nurture
Raine:
- Raines recent work has led his to believe biological predispositions are ‘switched on’ by environmental conditions’, indicating importance of nurture, as if these environmental conditions do not exist then the child is much less likely to turn to crime.
Christiansen:
- Not 100% concordance between MZ who commit crimes (52%) and hence must be other influencing factors than just nature (identical genes of MZ twins as from same egg) which explain criminal behaviour.
- MZ are reared together the share the same environment and experiences, so how can we be sure their behaviour has a genetic cause?
Daly & Wilson:
- Historical and cultural reasons for increased risk taking may be due to males who take dangerous jobs in construction work, policing or the armed forces as well as forces them to travel. Take these jobs because they have to, not because they enjoy risk and danger. Medical advances have made giving birth safer.
Ethics
Labelling effect is major concern of biological explanations as it leads to certain expectations and a self-fulfilling prophecy that someone’s biological make-up will predispose them to crime.
