The Anatomy of Violence (31 page)

The increase in white matter, then, might “cause” pathological lying. But could it be the other way around? You’ll likely recall from your childhood the late-nineteenth-century Italian children’s story about
Pinocchio, the puppet whose nose grew every time he told a lie. Could it be that the act of pathological lying causes the physical increase in white matter in the prefrontal cortex?

This
“Pinocchio’s nose” hypothesis
¹¹⁴
is not as ridiculous as it may sound. It’s the concept of brain
plasticity. The more time that musicians spend in practicing the piano, the greater the development of their white matter, especially in childhood.
¹¹⁵
Practicing lying in childhood might particularly enhance prefrontal white matter. But even in adults, extensive practice has been found to correlate with brain structure. London
taxi drivers have to undergo three years of extensive training to learn their way around 25,000 convoluted city streets.
MRI studies have shown that these taxi drivers have a greater volume of the
hippocampus compared with matched controls,
¹¹⁶
and also compared with London bus drivers, who do not undergo such extensive training.
¹¹⁷
Just as working in the gym can build up your muscles, mental effort can flex your brain.

In the case of pathological liars, it’s as if a criminal lifestyle makes for a criminal brain. It’s a different story from the one
Lombroso was telling in Italy in the nineteenth century—the idea that brain impairment causes crime.
¹¹⁸
But we cannot yet discount the alternative environmental explanation that lying causes brain change.

We’ve seen that common forms of deviance like lying can have a physiological basis. Let’s continue our look into less extreme, nonviolent forms of antisocial behavior. What about white-collar criminals who do not get their hands quite as dirty on the streets as blue-collar criminals? Criminologists view white-collar criminals very differently from other offenders. It is accepted that poverty, bad
neighborhoods, educational failure, and unemployment are all risk factors for
blue-collar crime. But what explains the criminal behavior of bankers, business executives, and politicians? In these cases, the finger is often pointed
not at the individual, but at the institution itself for creating a corporate subculture conducive to cultivating crooks who fiddle the books.
¹¹⁹
To traditional criminologists, white-collar criminals are people just like me and you whose better judgment gets swayed by a tempting opportunity at work.
¹²⁰

But is the
Ponzi-schemer
Bernie Madoff essentially an innocent victim of bad judgment in a corrupt corporate setting? Or do offenders like him differ from the rest of us, just as we differ from the “blue-collar” street criminals we’ve been discussing?

Bernie Madoff made off with a lot of investors’ money—an estimated $64.8 billion—bilking thousands of their life savings. He was a seasoned investment advisor, and the con was relatively simple. He got new investors to invest in securities by offering good returns. The good returns were possible because he continuously pulled in new investors, using their money to pay the good returns. He kept this going until someone noticed that there was only one accountant to supposedly vouch for an enormous financial empire. If you are an ex-accountant like me you’ll know that’s an impossible task.

White-collar crime runs the gamut from extreme examples like this to more common occurrences such as pilfering supplies from work, and other swindles—essentially, any crime that takes place in the work context. Perhaps surprisingly, there has been no biological or psychological theory developed for white-collar crime. There are no “individual difference” theories for this behavior even at the social level—theories that try to explain how such criminals differ from the rest of us.
Edwin Sutherland, a renowned criminologist who initially developed the concept of white-collar crime in 1939, viewed these malpractices by the upper crust as a process whereby normal people get indoctrinated by their bosses and co-workers into how to get ahead in business.
¹²¹
He felt social and personal factors were of little use in explaining such offending—it was instead essentially a process of learning to seize the opportunity to get ahead.

In essence, this attitude is not too far removed from the normal nature of American business in aggressively competing against rival firms to maximize profit. If you have to push the envelope on business practices, so what? It’s not like robbery—you’re not hurting or threatening any one individual. And the beauty of it is that you never have to confront the victim, so you don’t have to feel too guilty about what you do. It is crime made easy for the person with the smarts to get ahead.

Having read up to this point in the book, you’ll understand my perspective on crime in general.
White-collar criminals cannot be that spotless, even if their collars are. A macro-social approach that convicts the organization has to be at best a partial explanation because not everyone exposed to a work environment with questionable business ethics commits offenses.

At the
University of Pennsylvania, I was fortunate to rub shoulders with
William Laufer, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School. Bill brought me up to speed on this neglected area of crime. We had assessed self-reported criminal offending in our community volunteers, and a bunch of them had owned up to white-collar crimes. They had done such things as cheating or conning a business or government agency for financial benefit, using computers illegally to gain money, stealing from work, or telling lies to obtain sickness benefits. It’s not as if Bill and I had a nice group of Bernie Madoffs to work with. Clearly, this is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, but all of these offenses met the criteria of white-collar crime.
¹²²
And for Bill and me it was an initial entry into virgin territory.

We matched twenty-one white-collar criminals with twenty-one individuals who admitted to criminal offending, but who had not perpetrated white-collar crimes. This was important, as our white-collar criminals had also committed offenses outside of the work context, and we needed to control for such offending. This is true of white-collar crime in general.
¹²³
So both groups had the same level of criminal offending. We also matched the groups on age, gender, and ethnicity; the only difference between them was the perpetration of white-collar crime. Working with
Yaling Yang, we then compared the two groups on our neurobiological measures, and obtained some interesting group differences.
¹²⁴

First—perhaps appropriately for the nature of the white-collar criminal—these offenders had better “
executive functioning” as assessed by the
Wisconsin card-sorting task. This neurocognitive task measures concentration, planning, organization, flexibility in shifting strategies to achieve a goal, working memory, and the ability to inhibit impulsive responding.
¹²⁵
Our white-collar offenders did appear to have skills that would normally make for quite a successful business executive.

Second, they gave larger
skin-conductance responses to both neutral auditory stimuli and “speech-like” stimuli. They not only gave bigger responses to the initial presentation of these stimuli—indicating
greater
attention—but they kept on responding to repeated presentations of these stimuli. They were able to sustain their attention. This greater orienting, or
“What is it?” response reflects better
functioning of the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex, the medial temporal cortex, and the temporal-
parietal junction,
¹²⁶
areas that we have seen previously to be dysfunctional in offenders.
¹²⁷

Third—and perhaps most interestingly of all—the
brains of the white-collar criminals were physically different from those of the controls. They showed
greater
cortical thickness in several regions of interest. They show greater thickness of gray matter in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (BA 11), which is the lower part of the prefrontal cortex. They also showed increased thickness in a band of cortex that stretches across the lateral, outer surface of the right hemisphere of the brain. This includes part of the right prefrontal cortex (the
inferior frontal gyrus—BA 44), the right motor cortex (
precentral gyrus—BA 6), the right somatosensory cortex (postcentral gyrus—BAs 1, 2, 3), the right
posterior superior temporal gyrus that forms part of the temporal-parietal junction (BAs 22, 41, 42), and the inferior parietal region of the right temporal-parietal junction (BAs 39, 40, 43).

What can we make of these structural brain superiorities in the white-collar criminals? They are interesting for several reasons. First, the inferior frontal gyrus is involved in executive functions. This includes the ability to coordinate thoughts and actions in relation to internally generated goals, to respond to changes in task demands, the ability to inhibit a wrong response, to switch from one task to another, and to decide between conflicting reasoning.
¹²⁸
This is especially true of the right hemisphere, where we found the biggest group differences.
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Taken together with findings of better executive functioning, increased cortical thickness of this area is consistent with increased cognitive flexibility and regulatory control
in white-collar criminals.

Second, the ventromedial region has been associated with good
decision-making, sensitivity to the future consequences of one’s actions, and the generation of skin-conductance responses.
¹³⁰
This structural advantage is again broadly consistent with the better executive functioning, skin-conductance orienting, arousal, and attention observed in white-collar criminals. But of even greater interest, this ventromedial region is involved in the monitoring of the
reward value of stimuli, and also learning and remembering what things in life are rewarding.
¹³¹
Intriguingly, we see the anterior, front region of this ventromedial
area enhanced in white-
collar criminals. Functional imaging studies have shown that this anterior area is specifically associated with abstract
rewarding stimuli, particularly money.
¹³²
In contrast, less abstract and more fundamental rewards such as taste are processed in the more posterior region of the ventromedial area, a region that did not differ between the two groups.
¹³³
So, increased thickness specifically in this anterior region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex suggests that white-collar criminals are particularly driven by abstract monetary rewards like money, as opposed to less abstract rewards.

Third, the premotor area of the precentral gyrus is involved in your ability to monitor your performance, to make decisions, to plan, to program your actions, and to inhibit motor actions depending on the situation.
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It is also involved in the ability to understand the intentions of others’ actions
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and in social perception.
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So this structural enhancement is again broadly consistent with adept executive functioning and
social cognition in white-collar criminals.

Fourth, enhancement of the
somatosensory cortex would be broadly consistent with better somatic marker functioning.
Somatic markers are predicated on good functioning of both the somatosensory cortex, where these bodily markers are stored,
¹³⁷
and the ventral prefrontal cortex, where the somatic markers are processed.
¹³⁸
We’ve already seen that this latter area was enhanced in white-collar criminals. Unlike conventional criminals, who have somatic-marker deficits and poor decision-making skills, white-collar criminals may be characterized by relatively
better
decision-making skills.

Fifth, the right
temporal-parietal junction is important for social cognition and
orienting.
¹³⁹
Social cognition involves the ability to process social information and to understand others’ perspectives.
¹⁴⁰
The temporal-parietal junction is also involved in orienting—directing attention to external events—and facilitating responses to these events.
¹⁴¹
Because
Brodmann areas 41 and 42 also make up the primary auditory cortex, increased cortical thickness of these areas may help account for the better orienting to auditory stimuli we found in white-collar criminals. This supports the hypothesis that they have better social perspective-taking and the ability to read others, which in turn may place them at an advantage in an occupational context to perpetrate white-collar crimes.

Let’s put this all together to grasp the underlying neurobiology of what on the surface was barely considered a crime at all. White-collar
criminals have relatively better
executive functions and at times are more capable of making good
decisions. They are more attentive to what’s going on around them and to what people say, as well as being better able to maintain their
attention over time. They have a good social sense and know how to read others. They value rewards, particularly abstract rewards like money, and are both motivated and driven by them. They know when to act and when not to act, depending on the social circumstance. They can carefully calculate both the costs and benefits of acting or not acting, depending on the situation. There may indeed be a neurobiological, brain bias to white-collar
crime.

In
chapter 3
we documented a
software failure in the functioning of the brains of violent offenders. Now in this chapter—beginning with
Herbert Weinstein—we have seen signs of a fundamental hardware failure in the brains of offenders that could underlie their functional brain impairments, a hard-drive failure that can trip the circuit on violence. This hard-drive defect lies in the
frontal cortex and affects behavioral inhibition. It also lies in the amygdala at the level of emotion.