A child in Adrian Raine's lab at the U. of Pennsylvania, wearing a cap with electrodes to measure brain activity.

Lionel Shriver‘s deeply disturbing and bestselling 2003 novel We Need To Talk About Kevin has now been made into an “unrelentingly bleak film” starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Riley as the beleaguered parents of a sadistic, murderous son, Kevin. Thousands of bookclubs debated whether Kevin was bad from birth or somehow warped by a lack of motherly love. Shriver herself refuses to provide an answer to the question. Personally, I’m firmly in the bad-from-birth camp. What makes the novel so upsetting is that, sometimes, there’s no one to point a finger at. There’s no causal effect, no “if…then.” You can’t say that Hitler’s mom was responsible for Hitler becoming Hitler, can you? Some people are just born bad.

Research by the psychologist and criminologist Adrian Raine suggests that genetic and biological factors far outweigh environmental ones when it comes to determining criminal, anti-social, and psychopathic behavior. Indeed, Raine has developed techniques that might allow people to identify dangerous traits in childhood. In this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education Raine asks the question:

So if I could tell you, as a parent, that your child has a 75-percent chance of becoming a criminal, wouldn’t you want to know and maybe have the chance to do something about it?

Some of the warning signs are shockingly simple to discover.

Raine and several colleagues have shown that children…who show slower heart rates and reduced skin responses when annoyed by loud tones or challenging questions tend to have criminal records when they get older. In 1996 the researchers showed that 15-year-olds with this pattern tended to have criminal records by age 29. In 2010, the age was pushed back further: 3-year-olds who had those physical responses were rated by teachers as more aggressive than other children five years later.

The theory is that people who do not properly experience fear or feel pain do not develop an aversion to bad behavior. Punishment and negative feedback, on a very basic level, seems necessary for humans to become socially adaptive.

The neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio has gone so far as to identify the brain structures responsible: the amygdala and the prefontal cortex. Damage to either part of the brain can lead to a lack or distinction between “good” and “bad” decisions, a failure to differentiate between “happy” and “angry” expressions, and a state known as “acquired sociopathy.” Studying murderers with PET scans Dr. Raine determined that prefontal cortex damage is much more indicative of violent behavior than such environmental factors as abuse or poverty. Additionally, Raine has discovered that the condition called cavum septum pellucidum (a brain development problem experienced by 15% of people) is far more common in criminal minds. This brain development issue occurs in the womb. Says Raine:

I think there’s no longer any question, scientifically, that there’s an association between the brain and criminal behavior. We’re beyond the point of debating that….Of course, all of this brings up tremendously difficult ethical questions…But I don’t think I’d be doing my job unless I said that we need to start talking about them.

A scene from the movie version of We Need To Talk About Kevin. Warning, includes incessant crying: