Groupthink in Criminology

John Paul Wright and Matt De Lisi write,

Unfortunately, criminology has had a long history of suppressing evidence for expressly political reasons. For most of its history, the discipline has overtly censored research, for instance, on biological, genetic, and neurological factors that scientists have shown to be associated with antisocial traits and behavioral problems. Even today, despite lots of hard scientific evidence—such as that 50 percent of the variance in antisocial behavior is attributable to genetic factors, or neuroimaging studies that show systemic structural and functional brain differences between offenders and non-offenders—those who pursue this line of research get branded as racists or even eugenicists. We have personally experienced hostile receptions when presenting our work in these areas at professional conferences and have been excoriated in the anonymous-review process when attempting to publish our papers. The disciplinary animus toward the study of biological factors extends to other individual factors, including intelligence and personality, and to a range of traits, such as callous and unemotional behavior, psychopathy, and self-control.

Read the whole article. Before you cheer for criminal justice reform, you might want to make sure that it isn’t all based on normative sociology.

16 thoughts on “Groupthink in Criminology

  1. “…you might want to make sure that it isn’t all based on normative sociology.”

    And in which academic field is this not true? Teaching, medicine, journalism, economics, social work, psychology, art, literature, etc. etc., and even now physics. Stanford is teaching physics as a form of normative sociology: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/14/making-physics-inclusive/

    A sense of moral judgment and a distinction “right and wrong, good and bad” are cultural universals. Aside from practitioners of the Bahá’í faith which denies the existence of evil, people without this sense may often be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. This presents a grave threat to our lordly social engineers and wielders of social power: an unindoctrinated morality outside the control of the Ivy League caste might lead the lowly to reject such harnesses of service as their lordships deem propitious.

    Therefore, inculcating subservience is the central mission of colleges and universities in the United State: moral judgment must be expropriated from the individual and conformity to the demands of the Democratic Party implanted in its place. Every department in every academic field of study is pressured to contribute to this central mission.

    Thus untutored solipsism is the only hope for both individual and human advancement.

    Most revolutions substitute one authority for another, but not the “populist” revolution fermenting today. Individuals simply may choose to think for themselves. Nothing is required.

    Stirner says ” The divine is God’s concern; the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the good, true, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is – unique, as I am unique.”

  2. Instead of “groupthink”, I prefer your proposed conceptual categories for the health and rigor of any field or academic discipline. As such, this is dogma and “willful blindness” (or maybe “motivated denial” in an effort to enforce the social consensus of orthodox dogma).

    Instances such as these indicate that calling for rigor as a norm is unlikely to have much impact, and that the current system of publication review is prone to a clique-ish Social Failure Mode, which requires serious structural and institutional reforms to remedy. Like betting, and pre-registration of the kind of evidence which would be sufficient to flip one’s beliefs.

  3. One of the jobs of a welfare worker is to instill a sense of entitlement in welfare recipients to counter the shame and stigma that traditionally went with dependence. Wouldn’t a sense of entitlement be a key building block in creating a psychopath?

    • Is this even true? Link to anything that says one of the jobs of the welfare worker is to “instill a sense of entitlement” would be appreciated. It must be printed on job descriptions all over the US.

      • Well, I’m relying on my (not always reliable) memory, but years ago there was a news report on efforts to get stiff-necked and proud hillbillies to accept welfare. The efforts were eventually successful. The welfare workers stated that they did it by explaining to the people that they were owed relief.

      • The National Association of Social Workers has a code of ethics to which most states and schools of social work require practitioners to submit as a condition of practice. See: https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English

        The very first principle states:

        “1. Social Workers’ Ethical Responsibilities to Clients
        1.01 Commitment to Clients
        Social workers’ primary responsibility is to promote the well-being of clients. In general, clients’ interests are primary. However, social workers’ responsibility to the larger society or specific legal obligations may on limited occasions supersede the loyalty owed clients, and clients should be so advised. (Examples include when a social worker is required by law to report that a client has abused a child or has threatened to harm self or others.)”

        “Client’s interests are primary” translates directly to “clients are entitled.”

        The rest of the code is thoroughly politicized as well with requirements such as “Social work administrators should advocate within and outside their agencies for adequate resources to meet clients’ needs.”

        No mention of relative social priorities or tradeoffs.. No. The NASW advocates that welfare clients are entitled to whatever resources they need. Period.

        • Then back to my original question: could psychopathy be an unintended consequence of entitlement?

          • I doubt it: whatever of psychopathy that isn’t genetic probably develops in childhood. Adult onset psychopathy seems unlikely (or would require pretty traumatic events to incur I expect).

            Sociopaths may of course disproportionately benefit from welfare etc. as extreme laziness or aversion to work are sometimes symptoms of sociopathy.

  4. How is the source of antisocial behavior (nature vs. nurture) relevant to the question of deterring crime? It would be interesting to learn of any research supporting the idea that a genetic basis for antisocial behavior, as opposed to an environmental one, indicates a less elastic response to expected punishment. I suspect there is none.

    In any case, what’s the relevance of any of this to criminal justice reform? Is there an implicit assumption that an environmental cause for antisocial behavior would imply greater prospects for rehabilitation, so that a genetic cause implies poorer prospects for rehabilitation? I suspect there is no support for this view either.

    This is an uncharacteristically muddled post.

    • Read the whole article. The authors’ argument is that liberal criminologists reject any causes for crime other than racism, oppression, etc. and believe that deterrence is therefore ineffective and unjust.

    • 1. An environmental cause for anti-social behavior implies that the right environmental change can keep anti-social behavior from happening, maybe even bring the incidence down to zero.

      2. If you know what those environmental causes are, changing them is more humane than punishment after crimes are committed.

      3. If those changes are something you want anyway, e.g. some sort of uber-Great Society, you see yourself as doing the most good by pursuing that. Trying to stop crime now can even be a bad thing. From the article:

      “Criminologists who work collaboratively with the police have done important work in understanding how best to respond to crime and how to prevent it. Their research, which often includes complex spatial analyses of crime patterns and which targets specific, high-rate offenders for arrest and prosecution, has been rigorously evaluated and confirmed. Yet liberal-minded criminologists dismiss these scholars as “administrative criminologists”—meaning that they help the state impose unfair social and economic arrangements.”

  5. “*Normative* Sociology, the study of what the causes of problems **ought to be,** greatly fascinates all of us.” – Robert Nozick (“Anarchy, State, and Utopia; p. 247 with enlargements on p. 248”)

    Right, Arnold?

  6. Yawn. If nobody else, Dr. Dalrymple wrote about this in the same City Journal – when was it? 15 years ago? Ah, here it is, 20 years ago last month, and the dun’s still in the mire.

  7. Both the book ‘The Innocent Man” and the film based on it are not based on normative sociology. They’re based on things like DNA and basic standards of evidence. The Innocence Project in general deals with facts.

    The neuroscientists could set sights on the justice system pretty much any time they wanted to. Agency itself ( or at least free will ) as a concept is very much at risk.

    Robert Sapolsky’s HUMBIO course online at the Stanford website ( and on Youtube ) is an eye opener.

Comments are closed.