[Zhihu question] What kind of people are more likely to commit crimes, in criminological terms?
Just one example: low resting heart rate.
Broadly speaking, there are two typical kinds of violent offenders. One is the “hot-blooded” type: they act on impulse and commit crimes on a whim. These offenders usually have problems with the brain’s control mechanisms and struggle to restrain their impulsive behavior. The other type of violent offender is the exact opposite: the “cold-blooded” type. They keep a cool head, plan the details of a crime carefully, select their victims with care, and carry out the crime calmly. Many serial killers belong to this cold-blooded type of violent offender.
Cold-blooded violent offenders tend to score very high on antisocial behavior and psychopathic personality traits. They are what we usually call antisocial or psychopathic individuals.
And these “cold-blooded” violent offenders typically have the physiological characteristic of a low resting heart rate.
Low Resting Heart Rate and Antisocial Behavior
Resting heart rate (resting heart rate) means how many times a person’s heart beats in one minute when they are neither exercising nor asleep—in other words, while resting. Resting heart rate varies significantly from person to person: some people are naturally fast beaters, while others are naturally slow beaters. Quite a few studies have found a correlation between a naturally slow heart rate (low resting heart rate) and antisocial behavior.
Adrian Raine, the father of neurocriminology, conducted a meta-analysis [1] that pooled data on 5868 children from 40 experimental reports. The results showed that children with antisocial tendencies did indeed have lower resting heart rates. In this meta-analysis, resting heart rate explained 5% of the differences in antisocial behavior among the children. Don’t let the 5% fool you into thinking it is some terribly impressive number, but from a medical perspective, it is already evidence of a fairly strong correlation between two measures. It is stronger than the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, the effectiveness of aspirin in reducing the risk of death from heart attacks, and the effectiveness of antihypertensive medication in reducing strokes.
Another criminologist, David Farrington of the University of Cambridge, devoted himself to finding early predictors of violent crime. Of the 48 predictive factors he identified—including socioeconomic status, educational attainment, and personality—only two were associated specifically with violence and not with other risk factors, such as certain mental disorders. Which two? One was poor concentration, and the other was low resting heart rate. In fact, the correlation between low resting heart rate and violent behavior was even stronger than that of “parental criminality”—one of the best social predictors of crime [2].
In short, low resting heart rate is clearly correlated with antisocial tendencies and violent crime. But why? Why are some people with low heart rates more likely to display antisocial behavior?
In The Anatomy of Violence [3], Adrian Raine summarizes three theories.
Fearlessness Theory
The first is the “fearlessness theory” [4]. People with low resting heart rates are not easily made nervous or afraid. The term “resting heart rate” is actually a little misleading. Here, “resting” mainly means as opposed to exercising. In many studies measuring resting heart rate, researchers actually create situations that make participants nervous and anxious—for example, having them meet strangers or subtract seven repeatedly starting from 1,000. The results often show that people who appear fearless in such situations also have lower measured heart rates, while those who become nervous and anxious have higher ones.
That kind of antisocial, “cold-blooded” violent crime requires a certain degree of fearless courage to carry out. Therefore:
Low heart rate → fearlessness → antisocial behavior/cold-blooded violent crime.
Empathy Theory
The second is the “empathy theory.” Experiments have found that children with low heart rates have poorer empathic abilities [5]. Children who lack empathy find it harder to put themselves in other people’s shoes and to imagine what it feels like to be bullied and beaten. As a result, these children are more likely to display antisocial behavior and be more aggressive.
Stimulation-Seeking Theory
The third is the “stimulation-seeking theory.” This view holds that a low heart rate is a sign of a low level of arousal (low arousal represents), or a state of insufficient excitement. Being in this state for a long time is highly unpleasant, so people with low resting heart rates seek stimulation to raise their arousal level and reach an optimal level of arousal [6].
Preschool boys with low heart rates are not only more likely to show stronger antisocial tendencies; they are also more likely to become immersed in violent videos. Naturally, they do this to seek intense stimulation [7]. The lowest point of a person’s resting heart rate over the course of life is during adolescence—and that is also when sensation-seeking and antisocial behavior peak [8].
Therefore, from the perspective of the “stimulation-seeking theory,” the reason an antisocial person cold-bloodedly plans a crime is precisely to experience the “hot blood” of the moment when the crime is carried out.
The neural, psychological, and physiological characteristics associated with criminal behavior are an enormous subject. Adrian Raine’s The Anatomy of Violence alone discusses dozens of neural, psychological, and physiological characteristics of offenders. This answer focuses on just one point, as a small contribution to get the ball rolling. That’s all.
References
- ^Ortiz, J. & Raine, A. (2004). Heart rate level and antisocial behavior in children and adolescents: A meta-analysis. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 43, 154–62.
- ^Farrington, D. P. (1997). The relationship between low resting heart rate and violence. In A. Raine, P. A. Brennan, D. P. Farrington & S. A. Mednick (eds.), Biosocial Bases of Violence, pp. 89–106. New York: Plenum.
- ^Adrian Raine. (2016). The Anatomy of Violence. Chongqing Publishing House.
- ^Raine, A. (1993). The Psychopathology of Crime: Criminal Behavior as a Clinical Disorder. San Diego: Academic Press.
- ^Zahn-Waxler, C., Cole, P., Welsh, J. D. & Fox, N. A. (1995). Psychophysiological correlates of empathy and prosocial behaviors in preschool children with behavior problems. Development and Psychopathology 7, 27–48.
- ^ Eysenck, H. J. (1997). Personality and the biosocial model of antisocial and criminal behavior. In Raine et al., Biosocial Bases of Violence, pp. 21–38.
- ^El-Sheikh, M., Ballard, M. & Cummings, E. M. (1994). Individual differences in preschoolers’ physiological and verbal responses to videotaped angry interactions. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 22, 303–20.
- ^Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review 100, 674–701.
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