Chapter 16: Criminality & Delinquency

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive.

Today, we are getting into a really critical foundational area of applied psychology.

We're talking about the study of criminality delinquency.

Right.

And we're trying to distill insights from, I mean, decades of psychological research to really move past just anecdotes and find the actual patterns that explain why some people just persistently break social and legal codes.

And it's such a vast and honestly, a pretty paradoxical field.

It's immense.

When you say antisocial behavior, you're covering a huge spectrum.

I mean, you've got disruptive kids in a classroom on one end and then all the way up to, you know, persistent violent offenders, murderers, robbers on the other.

So the range is massive.

And what's really fascinating, and this kind of frames our whole mission today, is that even with all this research and we're talking longitudinal studies, personality tests, genetic work, criminologists still don't have one single unified theory that explains it all.

Which of course makes for a great deep dive.

So our mission is to try and unpack this field.

We're going to go through the sources pretty systematically.

First, we have to talk about the huge limitations in this kind of research.

Then we'll look at the social and environmental factors and the individual factors, personality, even physical traits.

And then finally, we'll dive into the big theories that try to explain it all from social learning to conditioning and even genetics.

But you have to start with the methodology, right?

Because if the way we collect the data is flawed,

then, well, everything that is questionable.

Exactly.

The standard research method seems really simple on the surface, but it hides this massive flaw.

You basically compare a group of convicted offenders, usually prisoners, with a control group from the non convicted general population.

And you can see the problem immediately.

Criminality isn't this clean black and white thing.

Not at all.

We know tons of people who commit crimes, maybe even serious ones, never get caught.

So they end up in the normal control group.

And on the flip side, the so called normal population isn't some pure angelic group.

It's got a huge range of moral integrity.

So your control group is inherently impure from the start.

It means if you're only using conviction records to define criminal, you're really only studying the people who were unlucky or frankly,

just not good enough to get away with it.

You're studying failure, not necessarily the root cause of the behavior itself.

And this brings us right to a huge limitation we have to talk about, especially when we get to personality later.

It's the incarceration effect.

This is so important.

If you use psychological tests, say a personality inventory, to compare prisoners with non -prisoners,

how do you know the differences you find are because of some underlying criminal tendency?

And not just because of the intense traumatic experience of being locked up.

Exactly.

Life in prison is defined by deprivation, isolation, stress.

Those things could easily skew the results of any personality test, making it impossible to figure out what's a cause and what's an effect.

So with those massive caveats in mind, let's look at the behavior itself.

There's this ongoing debate in the field, right?

The specificity versus the generality of crime.

Yeah.

Should researchers be trying to understand these really finely tuned categories?

Like what makes a car thief different from a fraudster?

It sounds compelling from a legal perspective.

It does.

But the sources point out this huge practical problem,

the career criminal.

Okay.

The person who's been in and out of the system for decades, they're often convicted of a whole mix of things.

Theft, assault, drug offenses, you name it.

How do you classify that person?

You can't just bidge and hold them.

If you try, you lose the whole point of their behavior, which is just generalized rule breaking.

So the career criminal argues for the idea of a general tendency toward criminality.

The idea that if you commit one type of offense, you're pretty likely to commit others.

Right.

And there's actually some great data to back this up, even for crimes that seem totally unrelated.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

There's a brilliant piece of research cited from a Dr.

T.

Willett, who studied motoring offenders.

Okay.

So like speeding DUIs, that kind of thing.

Exactly.

Things we tend to see as different from real crime, like theft, we separate them morally.

We do.

But Willett's data on over 600 of these motoring offenders, it showed this massive overlap.

About a third of them either already had criminal records for non motoring offenses, like property crimes, or they were known to the police as suspects in serious crimes.

Wow.

So that's way higher than you'd expect by chance.

Vastly higher.

It suggests the key thing isn't the specific crime.

It's the general tendency to break rules, whether they're traffic rules or laws against theft.

It points to an underlying disposition.

So the focus should be on that propensity to break rules, not so much the specific type of rule being broken.

That's the takeaway.

So if this generality exists across different types of crime, does it also exist across a person's lifespan?

I mean, is a badly behaved kid really a good predictor of an adult criminal?

The evidence here is extremely robust.

It points to a very strong predictive link.

The kid who shows persistent, serious antisocial behavior in school is much, much more likely to end up in juvenile court and later on become a persistent adult criminal.

But we absolutely have to stress the caveat here for everyone listening.

This is a trend.

It's not destiny.

Oh, absolutely.

That nuance is critical.

Not all badly behaved kids become criminals.

And just as important, not all adult criminals were badly behaved kids.

We're talking about probabilities, not certainty.

Right.

The predictive power is impressive, but it's not perfect.

But to show you how strong it can be, the sources bring up this famous old report from Sir Cyril Burt.

He looked at a group of boys in London who years earlier had been flagged by their teachers as being highly likely to become habitual offenders.

So just based on teacher observations.

Exactly.

And when he followed up on them years later, the finding was just staggering.

83 % of those kids had actually drifted into a life of persistent crime.

83%.

That's a huge number.

To predict that based on behavior ratings years before any legal trouble, it's pretty significant.

It is.

It means the underlying traits that lead to adult crime are often visible and identifiable really early on before things like the incarceration effect can cloud the picture.

And just a quick note on terminology before we move on.

The sources use delinquent for younger offenders and criminal for older ones, but there's a lot of overlap.

We'll just stick to the terms the studies use.

That's good.

Okay.

Let's pivot now to the external factors, the social and environmental stuff.

And we have to start with a historical moment of, I guess, skepticism.

Barbara Wooten's big review in the mid fifties.

Yeah.

Wooten's review was a huge deal because she was really trying to cut through all the noise.

She looked at 12 well -known ideas about what causes crime.

You know, broken homes, poverty, the usual suspects.

Right.

But she only included studies she thought were methodologically sound.

And her conclusion was, well, deeply skeptical.

She basically said we can only make these vague generalizations.

So even with the best science of the time, the picture was still really fuzzy.

What were those vague generalizations she could make?

Well, she confirmed a few trends.

Offenders tended to come from larger families, often had other family members in trouble, were usually poor workers, and came from lower social classes.

They often had bad reputations at school, were likely to be truant.

And a lot of them came from what they called broken homes, where the parents weren't living together.

But the skepticism came from the fact that the evidence was often conflicting, right?

Exactly.

The data on things like the extent of poverty or whether the mother working was a factor, it was all inconsistent.

So she basically challenged the field to be much more rigorous in how it defined and measured these things.

And she also introduced a really critical challenge about social class and the justice system itself.

This is a vital point.

She suggested that the link between social class and prison might just reflect judicial prejudice, not reality.

So it's not that lower class people are more criminal, but that they're treated more harshly by the system.

Precisely.

If petty theft gets you a mandatory prison sentence, but say a DUI or financial fraud gets you a fine, then your prison population is going to look a way regardless of who is actually breaking the law more.

That sets the perfect context for the more rigorous studies that came later.

So let's turn to one of them, the Cambridge study and delinquent development.

Right.

This was a major longitudinal study.

They followed over 400 working class boys from the time they were eight or nine years old.

And by tracking them over time, they could confirm that generality we talked about earlier.

They could.

Bad conduct ratings from teachers at ages eight to nine were a strong predictor of ending up in juvenile court before age 14.

But the real innovation was how they quantified social stress.

They created a combined measure, an index of social handicap.

Yes.

And that was groundbreaking.

It wasn't just about poverty.

The index included things like inadequate family income, poor housing, large family size, physical neglect of the child, even neglect of the house itself.

So a whole bunch of factors combined.

Right.

And then they classified the boys as having absent, moderate or severe social handicap.

And when you look at that data, the connection between that social stress and bad behavior becomes really clear.

It's crystal clear for boys where social handicap was absent, only 11 % were rated as badly behaved.

Okay.

Low baseline.

Now contrast that with the boys experiencing severe social handicap.

48 % of them were badly behaved, almost half.

It shows that adverse conditions, especially when they pile up, are profoundly important.

And what about the whole broken homes idea that Wooden mentioned?

Well, the Cambridge study defined a broken home as the permanent absence of a natural parent.

And they found that coming from a broken home was associated with a more than doubly raised incidence of badly behaved boys.

But again, there's that interpretation challenge.

Is it the broken home itself?

Or is it all the other adverse stuff that goes along with it?

The instability, the conflict, the financial stress that might have led to the breakup in the first place.

And it gets even more complicated when you look at criminality within the family.

It does.

They found that if the father had a criminal conviction, the boy was much more likely to have a poor conduct rating.

And in those same families, the mothers and older brothers were also more likely to have convictions.

So rule breaking behavior seems to cluster in families.

But the big question is why?

Is it social learning?

Or is there something else?

Well, the source material forces us to consider the possibility of an inherited disposition.

We can't rule out that the parents own traits, which might lead to instability and crime, and the child's behavior might share a common genetic route.

That leads us perfectly to one of the most famous attempts to quantify all this, the work by Sheldon and Eleanor Gluck.

The Gluck study is a classic because of its rigor.

They took nearly 500 institutionalized delinquents and matched them meticulously with non -delinquent boys.

And the matching was key.

It was.

They were matched on age, intelligence, race, and socioeconomic status.

So any differences they found couldn't just be explained away by poverty or IQ.

Then they compared them on 400 different factors.

And from all that data, they built their famous social prediction table, which boiled it down to the five most predictive family factors.

Let's walk through them, because the numbers are just dramatic.

They really are.

This data tells you so much about the quality of the upbringing.

Okay, so factor one was discipline from the father.

Right.

If the discipline was rated as firm but kindly, the delinquency score was incredibly low, just 9 .3 percent.

But if it was lax, it jumped to almost 60 percent.

And what about overstrict?

This is the really interesting part.

Overstrict or erratic discipline had a score of 72 .5 percent.

The takeaway isn't just that being harsh is bad.

It's that inconsistency is even worse.

It creates chaos.

That makes sense.

Okay, factor two, supervision by the mother.

And this one shows a terrifyingly high correlation.

Suitable supervision, a low 9 .9 percent delinquency score.

Unsuitable supervision, which meant leaving the child without guidance.

That shot up to 83 .2 percent.

83 percent.

Wow.

Almost 9 out of 10 delinquents reported that.

It's a massive correlation.

Next are factors three and four, which are about affection from the father and the mother.

This is where you see the impact of rejection.

Yeah.

If the father's affection was rated warm, the score was about 34 percent.

But if it was indifferent or hostile, and hostile meant outright parental rejection, the score more than doubled to almost 76 percent.

And the mother's affection was even more striking.

It was a mother's warm affection, a 43 percent score.

But indifferent or hostile maternal affection, that led to a delinquency score of 86 .2 percent.

Good grief.

It suggests that when that basic warmth and security from a parent is missing, it's just incredibly damaging.

And finally, factor five was the cohesiveness of the family.

They rated this based on things like cooperation, shared interests, family pride.

Where cohesiveness was marked, the score was about 21 percent.

But where cohesiveness was none, meaning everyone was just out for themselves, the delinquency score reached an almost perfect 96 .9 percent.

97 percent.

It's almost unbelievable that one variable is so powerful.

It's terrifyingly powerful.

And what the Gluck's work really did was answer Wooten's challenge.

It showed that it's not just about simple labels like poor, it's about how a family functions, the quality of the discipline, the warmth, the support.

Exactly.

But it still leaves us with that big question.

Why do some kids thrive, despite being in these terrible environments,

while others from seemingly good homes go off the rails?

And to answer that, we have to look at the individual.

We have to look at personality and constitution.

OK, so let's pivot to the individual.

We know the early research in the 40s and 50s was, well, pretty disappointing.

They couldn't find a consistent criminal personality.

Right.

And those early studies linking crime to low IQ were pretty much debunked once the tests got better and less dependent on academic achievement.

The IQ differences mostly disappeared.

So what changed?

Well, more valid dimensional tests were developed, and the conversation really started to center on this traditional psychiatric concept of the psychopath.

How do the sources define that concept?

It's a word that gets thrown around a lot.

The traditional definition is a person who seems constitutionally unable to acquire normal social values.

They lack emotional adjustment.

They're irresponsible, aggressive.

They show no gild or insight.

And this is critical.

They can't seem to profit from experience.

Punishment just doesn't change their behavior.

It sounds like a profound failure of emotional learning.

So how did psychology move from that clinical idea to something you could actually measure?

That's where large standardized tests came in.

Most famously, the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.

Hathaway and Manekese did these huge perspective studies.

Perspective, meaning they looked forward in time.

Exactly.

They tested large groups of 14 -year -olds with the MMPI and then followed them for years, tracking their official delinquency records.

And this is crucial because it rules out that incarceration effect we talked about.

The personality was measured before any official crime happened.

What did they find?

Which personality scales predicted future trouble?

They grouped the scales into three types.

First were the delinquency excitatory scales.

High scores on psychopathic deviant, schizophrenia, and hypomania all predicted a greater than average rate of later delinquency.

And what about the opposite, traits that seemed to protect against it?

Those were the delinquency inhibitory scales.

High scores on social introversion, depression, and a scale measuring feminine interests actually predicted low rates of future misconduct.

That's fascinating.

So there were clear patterns.

Very clear.

And other researchers like Peterson and Quay used a different method factor analysis to find underlying dimensions in delinquent behavior.

Factor analysis, that's the statistical technique that finds clusters of related traits.

Right.

And they consistently found three, sometimes four, main factors.

The first was the psychopathic unsocialized factor.

This was a tough, amoral, impulsive, rebellious type.

It sounds like the classic psychopath.

It does.

The second was the neurotic disturbed factor.

These delinquents were also impulsive, but their behavior came with a lot of internal conflict remorse, tension, guilt, depression.

They had a conscience, but they couldn't control their impulses.

A very different profile.

And the third was maybe the most interesting sociologically,

the subcultural socialized factor.

These were kids from delinquent families or neighborhoods who were actually well -adjusted to their deviant peer group.

They weren't fighting internal battles.

They were just following a different set of rules.

So this points to there being different pathways to the same outcome.

Exactly.

These dimensions exist in everyone, but the scores were just consistently higher in the institutionalized groups.

Okay.

Moving from psychological traits to something more physical, we have to talk about the, well, the controversial idea of body build.

W .H.

Sheldon's somatotypes.

Right.

This can feel a bit dated, but it was important research at the time.

Sheldon proposed three basic body types.

The endomorph, who is kind of thick -set and soft, the mesomorph, who is athletic and muscular, and the ectomorph, who is lean and linear.

But people are usually a mix, right?

Yes, and that's key.

He rated people on a seven -point scale for each type, so he could be a mix.

Now, he visually compared the distribution of 4 ,000 college students with 200 delinquent boys.

And without needing to see the complex diagrams, what was the visual takeaway?

The college students were spread out pretty evenly, but the delinquent boys showed this dramatic sharp departure.

There was a huge cluster of them who were endomorphic mesomorphs.

So muscular and athletic, but with a tendency towards being thick -set.

Yes.

They trended very strongly toward mesomorphy, the active athletic component, and very strongly away from ectomorphy, the lean, fragile type.

Now, the skeptic in me has to ask,

isn't that just measuring the kind of physique that makes you a more effective street criminal?

That is the essential critique, and it's a valid one.

But the finding was actually replicated by other researchers.

The Gluex also found their delinquents were more mesomorphic, and Sheldon's own most striking data point was a small group of 16 boys he called primary criminals, the truly dedicated offenders.

Every single one of them was an endomorphic mesomorph.

So there's a strong correlation, even if the reason for it is debatable.

A very strong correlation.

This all seems to be building towards a theory that can tie these things together.

The personality, the impulsivity, this active physique.

And that brings us to Eysenck's model of personality.

Right.

Eysenck's model is crucial because it tries to link personality to biology.

He proposed three major independent factors, extraversion, E, neuroticism, N, and a third one he called psychoticism, P.

And psychoticism, or P, is the one that sounds most directly related to this.

What does a high P score mean?

A high P score is someone who is solitary, troublesome, cruel, lacks feeling, is a sensation seeker, hostile, and disregards danger.

It exists on a continuum in the normal population, but at the high end it looks a lot like psychopathy.

So Eysenck's prediction was that criminals would score higher on all three E, N, and P.

What did the evidence actually show?

Well, the data was very strong for neuroticism.

Criminals and delinquents consistently score higher on measures of emotional instability and anxiety.

No surprise there.

But the results for extraversion, E, were much weaker, sometimes even contradictory.

Which is weird.

You'd think criminals would be extroverted, impulsive, sensation -seeking.

You would.

But this is where the incarceration effect probably comes back in.

The standard E scale measures both impulsiveness and sociability.

Being in prison crushes your sociability, which can artificially lower your E score.

So it's a measurement issue.

It seems to be.

When researchers split the E scale into its components, they found that the impulsiveness part does reliably separate prisoness from controls.

It's just the sociability part that doesn't.

That's a brilliant insight.

And what about the psychoticism factor?

The evidence there is quite strong.

Male and female prisoners score significantly higher on P scales than non -prisoners.

The P factor really seems to capture that core lack of empathy that is so predictive of serious antisocial behavior.

And to really lock this in and rule out the prison effect, the sources mention a study on school children, long before any of them got in trouble.

Yes, Feldman and Ossoff.

They looked at girls aged 11 to 16 and used self -reports of antisocial behavior and also their school punishment records.

They grouped the girls based on whether they scored above average on 0, 1, 2, or all three of iSYNC's dimensions.

And the result was a clear pattern.

A perfect stepwise progression.

The girls who are high on all three E, N, and P show markedly more misbehavior than those high on two, who are worse than those high on one, and so on.

It's powerful evidence that this personality profile is a cause of the behavior, not a result of getting caught.

So it all seems to converge.

The MMPI psychopathic deviate scale, quaze psychopathic factor, the mesomorphic body type, and iSYNC's high P, E, N profile.

They all seem to be describing the same basic person.

Exactly.

A person who is impulsive, emotionally volatile, sensation seeking, and low on empathy.

Now that we've kind of identified the who, we have to ask the critical question of how.

How do these traits actually translate into criminal behavior?

And for that, we have to turn to the major theories of causation.

Let's start with a foundational sociological theory.

Differential association.

Right.

This theory from Sutherland and Cressy is all about learning.

It argues that criminal behavior is learned through interaction with other people, usually in small, intimate groups.

So it's not something you just invent on your own.

You learn the techniques, but also the mindset.

Precisely.

You learn the techniques, how to pick a lock, for example.

But more importantly, you learn the motives, the rationalizations, the attitudes.

You learn that stealing from a big corporation is okay because they're exploitative, or that fighting is necessary to maintain respect.

You become criminal because you have more contact with those criminal patterns than with anti -criminal patterns.

That's the core principle.

And what's clever about the theory is that it helps explain why not everyone from a tough neighborhood becomes a criminal.

Because personality plays a role in who you associate with.

Exactly.

An outgoing, sociable, active kid is just more likely to form those intimate group connections where criminal patterns are learned than a reserved, introverted kid in the exact same environment.

But what's the big psychological limitation of this theory?

The main critique is that it's just not precise enough.

It tells you what is learned and where, but it doesn't really explain the detailed psychological process of how that learning happens, or, more importantly, why punishment so often fails to stop it.

Which brings us to the competing theory,

conditioning and socialization failure.

Yes.

This comes from the work of O.

Hobart Mower.

He made this key distinction between the teaching process, which is just learning conscious habits, and the training process, which is the deep emotional learning, the conditioning that builds your conscience.

And he saw the criminal as an extreme failure of that training process.

He did.

The mechanism for building that conscience is what's called passive avoidance conditioning, or PAC.

Okay, break that down for us.

How does PAC build an internal break on behavior?

It's about associating the fear or pain of punishment with the very first internal stirrings of a forbidden act.

So when a child even thinks about doing something wrong, or makes the first tiny muscle movement,

those internal feelings become conditioned stimuli.

Because they always come right before the punishment, they eventually start to trigger a conditioned response of anxiety or fear all by themselves.

And that anxiety is, for all intents and purposes, the conscience.

That's it.

Eventually, just thinking about the act produces enough anxiety to stop the behavior in its tracks long before any plushment actually happens.

And Gordon Trasler applied this directly to delinquency in parenting.

Right.

He argued that the reason a long prison sentence doesn't deter a poorly socialized adult is because they never built up that strong conditioned anxiety response in childhood.

The internal deterrent is just too weak.

And this connects directly back to the Glicks findings about parenting, doesn't it?

It connects perfectly.

Trasler pointed out two main ways parents condition kids.

One is physical punishment, which only works if it's severe and consistent enough.

But the second, more powerful method, is the withdrawal of parental approval.

But that only works if the child values that approval in the first place.

Exactly.

It's only a profound threat if the parent -child relationship is consistently warm and secure.

If it's indifferent or hostile, like the Glicks found was so predictive of delinquency, then threatening to withdraw approval means nothing.

The child has nothing to lose.

So the conditioning process fails.

It fails completely.

And Trasler adds that for humans, it's not just about the action.

Parents have to explain the principle behind the punishment.

That's what allows the contemplation of the act to trigger the anxiety, which is how you build a conscience that works in new situations.

Okay, so now we bring Isync back in, because he uses this conditioning theory to tie everything together.

Personality, learning, and inheritance.

Yes.

Isync's grand theory is that conscience is just a set of these conditioned autonomic responses.

And the link to inheritance is his finding that extroverts are physiologically harder to condition than introverts.

Their nervous systems are less responsive.

Right.

So they need more intense, more frequent, more consistent training to build that strong anxiety response, that conscience.

They're biologically predisposed to have a weaker conscience.

Then neuroticism acts as a drive, an amplifier, which just reinforces those tendencies.

And this model can also perfectly integrate the social factors we talked about.

It can.

The social environment doesn't cause the low conditionability, but it determines whether that trait leads to crime.

You can look at the data showing that as social handicap gets worse, parental discipline becomes much more erratic and lacks.

So you have a child who is already biologically hard to condition, being raised with the least effective conditioning methods.

It's a perfect storm.

It's the ultimate interactionist view.

You have an inherited predisposition, high E, N, and P, that only develops into criminality in an environment that fails to socialize them properly.

And the evidence for inheritance itself from twin studies is pretty strong.

It is.

Identical twins show much higher concordance rates for criminality than fraternal twins.

We might not know exactly what's inherited, but Isynx theory gives us the best guess.

It's traits like low conditionability and high psychoticism.

Even with these powerful theories, there are still some big unanswered questions.

Oh, absolutely.

The role of cultural relativity is still huge.

A person's subculture can define what is and isn't acceptable behavior, completely separate from the law.

And then there's what the source material calls the great unasked question in criminology, sex differences.

Right.

Female criminality is about eight times lower than male criminality.

Yet for decades, almost all the research was done on men.

So what's the reason for that huge difference?

Is it socialization or biology?

That's the fundamental question.

There's evidence for both, but there's a strong case for

the fact that males consistently score much higher on the psychoticism factor, the strongest correlate of severe antisocial behavior, suggests a biological component.

And the MMPI study found that feminine interests acted as an inhibitory factor.

Exactly.

Which suggests that traits associated with femininity, however you define them, might act as a natural break on this kind of behavior.

But we honestly need so much research focused on women to know for sure.

This has been an incredibly dense, but really critical deep dive.

Let's try to synthesize the key takeaways for everyone listening.

I'd say first we've confirmed that underlying the messy category of criminality is a general tendency for rule breaking that starts early.

Socially, the Gluck's work showed the huge predictive power of how a family actually functions, discipline, affection,

and cohesiveness.

And on the individual level, we found this really consistent personality profile.

High impulsivity, high neuroticism, and especially high psychoticism.

And then theoretically, we saw this clash between differential association learning from your friends and the conditioning theories, which see crime as a failure to build an internal conscience, a failure that's linked to both inherited traits and poor training.

And this knowledge isn't just academic.

It does give some cause for optimism, that if we understand these mechanisms, we can develop better ways to prevent or modify antisocial behavior.

Exactly.

But I think I want to leave the listener with one final critical thought.

It's an observation from W .H.

Sheldon.

He said that many individuals we label as criminal feel they're playing according to rule within their own subculture.

Meaning that from their perspective, their behavior is totally rational and normal.

It's just conforming to a different set of rules.

Precisely.

Which makes the problem not always one of individual pathology, but one of a fundamental conflict between social groups.

And that's a really important distinction.

It means we're not always trying to correct a disorder.

Sometimes we're just addressing a conflict between competing rule sets where the law has failed to win out.

It's a much more complex picture.

It is.

A compelling and necessary place to end.

Thank you for guiding us through such a challenging field.

My pleasure.

That was the Deep Dive.

We'll see you next time.