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When clinicians diagnose individuals with a mental disorder, they are making a statement about 
deviance, about what falls within and outside the range of normal mental states. Unfortunately, there are 
no clear categories, no bright lines separating normal from abnormal or uncommon. As the distinguished 
American psychologist William lames noted, however, studying "the abnormal is the best way to 
understand the normal." Let's follow this logic. 
Consider the developmental disorder of autism. This disorder, typified by difficulties 
understanding what others believe and feel, ranges from individuals who appear locked out of the world, 
rocking back and forth to their own internal rhythm, to high functioning individuals such as Professor 
Temple Grandin, who not only teaches college-level courses, but has done wonders as a spokesperson for 
autism and for the animal welfare movement. This range already tells us that autism is represented by a 
spectrum, once identified by purely behavioral measures, but joined today by genetic and neurobiological 
markers. The genetic evidence is particularly helpful for explaining the observed variation. For example, 
the MAOA gene, located on the X chromosome, is involved in the regulation of social behavior and has 
different forms that map to differences in brain activity and stress physiology. The different forms 
correspond to the number of copies of the genetic material. This copy number is, in turn, partially 
responsible for the spectrum of autism observed, especially the degree of social dysfunction, including 
stress and aggression. Once we admit to a spectrum, and begin to pinpoint the factors that push 
individuals to stand on one end or the other, we must admit to admitting virtually everyone onto this 
spectrum. All of us, at some point in our life, have lacked sensitivity to the feelings and beliefs of others. 
All of us have been self-absorbed and locked out from the rest of the world. All of us have failed to 
express empathy and compassion to others. All of us have been a bit abnormal in this sense. All of us 
fall, on occasion, within the spectrum of autism as well as other disorders of the mind such as 
psychopathy. 
Like autism, psychopathy is not one neat and tidy disorder, but a spectrum. Diagnostically, 
psychopaths are impulsive, narcissistic, and lacking in social emotions such as empathy, remorse, and 
guilt. These behaviorally defined characteristics are complimented by genetic and neurobiological 
markers, some pointing to risks in the pre-school years, and linked to the same MAOA gene noted above. 
The spectrum that defines psychopaths ranges from hyper-smart, calculating, and powerful politicians to 
low IQ, downtrodden, serial murderers. Everyone of us occasionally shows our psychopathic face: self-
absorbed, impatient, manipulative, and uncaring. What is abnormal, then, is living with these 
characteristics, all the time. Clinically diagnosed psychopaths, like clinically diagnosed individuals with 
autism, have the characteristic traits as stable components of their personality. An honest clinician will 
tell you, however, that stability is difficult to define, and so too are the essential traits. An honest brain 
scientist will also tell you that, despite the observation that psychopaths have hyperactive dopamine brain 
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circuits that may drive sensation seeking, along with smaller frontal lobe circuits that may minimize their 
sensitivity to punishment and the capacity for self-control, these differences are statistical. What 
"statistical" means is that if you were to stack up all of the brains with hyperactive dopamine circuits and 
smaller frontal lobes into one pile, most, but not all would be from psychopaths. You would also find 
psychopaths in the pile of brains showing normal dopamine activity and average-sized frontal lobes. 
These brain differences are interesting, but they are not yet like fingerprints, absolutely and uniquely 
distinctive and diagnostic of a disorder. Such honesty reveals the challenges we face in answering the 
simple question What's normal? 
Lawyers, judges and juries face the same problem as clinicians, often relying upon documents 
such as the DSM to determine when someone has acted outside the range of normal behavior. But for 
legal cases, there are two relevant layers of the normalcy problem. The first concerns whether the 
supposed criminal was sane or insane. An insanity defense requires evidence of a disease or defect of the 
mind. It requires evidence that the individual lacked the capacity to appreciate the criminal nature of the 
act as well as the capacity to conform. This is the part that relies on the DSM, as well as clinicians who 
can testify based on their expertise. The second concerns a more general understanding of what a 
prototypical or normal human would or could do in a given situation. The idea seems straightforward 
enough, but as I mentioned above, is only deceptively straightforward. 
Crimes of passion provide a useful illustration of the challenges we face, especially with respect 
to understanding how harm is ignited in the face of moral norms against it. Highlighting the truism that 
love makes you crazy, the crime of passion defense is invoked for cases where, in the heat of the moment, 
an individual finds and kills his or her spouse in bed with a lover. The defining feature of a crime of 
passion is that it was not planned and most people faced with the same situation would act similarly, 
unable to control their emotions. 
The crime of passion defense seems straightforward. Like autism and psychopathy, however, it 
too relies upon a diagnosis of what a prototypical or average person would do in the same situation. This 
diagnosis requires an understanding of two difficult mental states: planning and self-control. Planning 
involves imagining the future, time traveling to a new world, dreaming up what we might do and how we 
might feel. We plan in the short and long term, filling up our mental sticky notes with to-do lists. Self-
control enters into planning because what we imagine for ourselves —what we desire —is often 
inappropriate or unethical because it harms others or ourselves. As noted in chapters 2 and 3, the capacity 
to keep desire in check relies on moral engagement. Moral engagement requires self-control. Moral 
disengagement requires denial in order to loosen the grip of self-control and enable desire to have its 
way. 
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When Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband John Bobbitt's penis, she fulfilled her desire to harm 
another. She carried out this gruesome act despite the moral and legal sanctions against it. But she did 
not plan this act in advance, and nor did it occur in the heat of the moment, triggered by finding her 
husband in bed with a lover. It followed in the wake of his repeated philandering, attempted rape and 
psychological abuse. As an act, it fell between the cracks of a long-term plan and a reflexive response —
it was hatched on the night of the fatal attack, triggered by seeing a carving knife in the kitchen. Lorena 
either lost self-control for that fatal moment or she was in complete control, aware of what she was about 
to do and justified by her own moral convictions, believing that harming John was just deserts. John was 
most definitely not innocent. The jury delivered a "not guilty" decision, appealing to a crime of passion 
defense. This decision effectively excused Lorena's harmful act as normal and justified given the 
mitigating circumstances. 
When we consider the nature of evil, we must pause to consider our own biases and prejudices 
about what's normal. We must ask about the human potential, about our evolved capacities and our 
ability to behave in novel ways in novel environments. When we say that a person, group or nation is evil, 
we are saying something important about human nature, about our capability as a species. We are saying 
something important about the relationship between nature and nurture. 
Evil eggs and corrosive coops 
How much do career criminals cost? Estimates from the United States suggest that if you can prevent a 
high risk child from entering this career, you save $1.5-2 million in costs of education, mental health, and 
criminal fees. Educational facilities such as the Penikese Island School in Massachusetts, where I have 
had the privilege of working, spend about $100,000 per student per year to keep high-risk teens off the 
streets and out of jail. Based on statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, approximately 
100,000 individuals under the age of 18 years were arrested in 2007 for violent crimes — murder, forcible 
rape, and aggravated assault. If we had nurtured and educated these teenagers before they committed 
such crimes, we would have saved close to $100,000,000,000. Violent crime prevention pays. How does a 
career of violent crime start? Are there early warning signs? How early? How much starts with the egg 
and how much with the coop in which it was raised? 
Early scientific interests in this chicken and egg problem can be traced to the efforts of the Italian 
physician and psychologist Cesare Lombroso. In 1876, he published his magnum opus The Criminal 
Man. This was a serious, scholarly book aimed at understanding "whether there is a force in nature that 
causes crime." Based on measurements of both anatomical and psychological characteristics, Lombroso 
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concluded that criminals were born not made. Their defining features were throwbacks to our 
evolutionary ancestors, dehumanized by biological defects. Modern man was civilized and elegant. 
Criminal man was barbaric, a savage with slanted forehead, jutting jaw, and excessively long arms. 
Criminal man was more ape-like than human-like. Because the cause of these differences was biological, 
Lombroso argued that a life of crime was inevitable. Change through rehabilitation was hopeless. To 
protect society, these natural born criminals had to be taken out of society, either locked up or executed. 
These ideas formed the basis of several eugenics' movements, with the aim of weeding out the 
undesirable, less than human elements of society, be they less intelligent, from a non-Caucasian racial 
group, or from a culture with different religious beliefs. 
Lombroso's theory of criminality was soon rejected as scholars from a variety of different 
disciplines unearthed its racial stereotypes and shoddy methods, including a failure to include the many 
people with slanted foreheads, jutting jaws, and long arms who never committed crimes, and those with 
statuesque anatomy who did. This initiated a general skepticism and even fear of biological explanations, 
causing a swing in the opposite direction. Criminals were not born but made by corrupt societies. 
Humans are not born with biologically encoded scripts for behaving with malice or virtue. Rather, we are 
born with blank slates, waiting for society to inscribe its distinctive signature. So began a pendulous 
swing from nature to nurture. Though the oscillation continues to this day, there is increasing 
appreciation, perhaps especially in the arena of criminology, that both nature and nurture make important 
contributions. This change comes, in part, from a far greater understanding of genetics, combined with 
long term studies of how humans and other animals develop within environments that are either nurturing 
or damaging. 
Consider the MAOA gene that I mentioned in the last section. This gene produces an enzyme that 
goes by the same shorthand of MAOA, or MonoAmine Oxidase A. MAOA is evolutionarily ancient, 
shared with other animals, and has two different forms—low and high— that influence the level of 
serotonin as well as the brain areas involved in social evaluation and emotional regulation. Early 
evidence for the critical role of this gene in social behavior emerged from a study that knocked it out of 
operation. If you knock out the MAOA gene in mice, they quickly become hyper-hyper-aggressive. 
These genetically transformed mice have no capacity to regulate their social behavior. Consequently, all 
interactions are treated as confrontational and handled by aggressive attacks. These results are consistent 
with a large body of work in animals showing that heightened aggression and low levels of serotonin go 
hand in hand. These results are also consistent with work on humans. In, 1993, the Dutch biologist Hans 
Brunner analyzed the genetics of a large, extended family. Some individuals within this family were born 
with a defect that silenced the operation of the MAOA gene; they were like the mice who had this gene 
silenced. Relative to others in the family, these individuals had a pronounced history of violence, 
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including murder, rape, and arson. Oddly, although this work provided one of the cleanest links between 
genes and violence in humans, it slid under the radar of scientific attention, only to be resuscitated and 
enriched about ten years later. 
The behavioral geneticists Avshalom Caspi and Terry Moffitt studied a large population of young 
boys over several years. Though boys and girls have the MAOA gene, its effect on behavior is easier to 
study in boys because they have only one copy whereas girls have two, one for each of their two X 
chromosomes. For each boy, Caspi and Moffitt collected information on the presence and frequency of 
their antisocial behavior and whether they were raised by parents who were caring, mildly abusive, or 
severely abusive. For each boy, they also noted whether they had the low or high expressing form of 
MAOA. 
Caspi and Moffitt's results provided a textbook example of nature's interaction with nurture. If 
the parents were caring, the genes made no difference in their child's personality or behavior. If the 
parents were mildly abusive, the boys with the low activity form were nine times more likely to fight, 
steal, bully, and defiantly break rules. For those boys with severely abusive parents and the low activity 
form of MAOA, 85% developed into violent, delinquent criminals. What these findings tell us is that in 
humans, it makes little difference which form of MAOA you have if you grow up with nurturing parents. 
But if you grow up with abusive parents, your genes make all the difference in the world. Those with the 
low expressing form are more likely than not to develop into delinquents, whereas those with the high 
expressing form are more likely than not to develop immunity. By a double dose of bad luck, one shot 
from the genes and one from the environment, some have a high probability of entering into the pool of 
potential evildoers. 
The German neuroscientist Andreas Meyer-Lindenburg took the genetic work one step further, 
linking the particular form of MAOA up to differences in the brain. Those with relatively poor social 
regulation and the low expressing form of MAOA had significantly smaller brains, specifically in regions 
associated with the control of emotion and social behavior — the amygdala, anterior cingulate, and 
prefrontal cortex. These individuals also had less connectivity between these regions, harking back to the 
importance of promiscuity both between humans and other animals, but also within our own species. Less 
connectivity translates to less control by the frontal areas of the brain over emotion-relevant areas such as 
the amygdala. When individuals with the low expressing form viewed angry or fearful facial expressions, 
the emotionally-relevant brain areas went into hyper-drive, whereas those areas involved in regulating 
emotions hibernated. Thus, in contrast with individuals who have the high expressing form of MAOA, 
those with the low expressing form are overwhelmed by emotionally charged experiences, lacking the 
mental brakes to stay cool. By luck of the draw, the low expressing form of MAOA builds a child that is 
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more likely to get angry and violent in the face of frustration and other emotional challenges, whereas the 
high expressing form builds a child that is walled off, immune to the same challenges. 
MAOA is crucial not only in long term human development, but also in everyday, ephemeral 
social interactions. In a laboratory study, an experimenter offered subjects the opportunity to earn up to 
$10 on a vocabulary quiz. Once they finished the quiz, they learned that an anonymous person in another 
room either took some of their earnings or left it alone. With this information in hand, the quiz-taker 
could either vindictively punish the person by giving them some hot sauce or they could cash out of the 
game and recover the money lost. In other words, they could either vindictively burn their opponent or 
recover their losses at no cost. In reality, there was no partner in the other room. When subjects with the 
low expressing form of MAOA lost most of their earnings, they were far more likely to deliver the hot 
sauce than those with the high expressing form; they were also most likely to deliver the highest amount 
of the sauce. Like long-term parental abuse, even short-term provocation invoked in a laboratory 
environment can cause those with the low expressing form of MAOA to act out and attack. 
As with all genes that have different forms, the number of individuals with the low expressing 
form of MAOA varies by population, including different ethnic and culturally identified groups. 
Caucasian and Hispanic males show some of the lowest frequencies at 34 and 29 % respectively, whereas 
Maori, Pacific Islander, and Chinese males show the highest at 56, 61, and 77% respectively. In a study of 
over 1000 men, individuals with the low expressing form of MAOA were more likely to be in violent 
gangs, and once in gangs, were more likely to use guns and knives than individuals with the high 
expressing form. Variation in the frequency of these two forms is interesting as it provides the signature 
handiwork of natural selection. When the frequency of one form goes up, the most likely explanation is 
that this form benefits the individual carriers. When the frequency goes down, there is a hidden cost. In 
light of this teeter-tottering of frequencies, the Maori are of interest. As celebrated by many New 
Zealanders today, the Maori were a highly adventurous and warring people. Individuals who took risks 
and fiercely defended their resources were heroes. Heroes may have been carriers of the low expressing 
form of MAOA. Heroes often leave more offspring, who were also carriers of the low expressing form. 
In the Maori environment, selection may well have favored this form of the gene. The important point is 
that different environments will favor different frequencies of the two forms of MAOA. This helps 
explain both the cause of individual differences and the challenges we face in confronting cultures of 
violence that are fueled by nature and nurture. 
Many other labs have followed up on Caspi and Moffitt's long term, developmental study. Most 
find the same relationship between the MAOA gene and antisocial behavior. Others add to this account 
by showing how different genes and early appearing physiological differences contribute to a highly 
aggressive and antisocial starting state. In one study, the German psychologist Alexander Strobel put 
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subjects in a brain scanner and invited them to play a bargaining game where they could punish someone 
who acted unfairly to them — personal revenge— or punish someone who acted unfairly to someone 
else — impersonal punishment. For each subject, Strobel also collected information on a gene called 
COMT Met. This gene has three different forms, linked to differences in activity level in the frontal lobe 
of the brain, which are linked to differences in the levels of dopamine, which are linked to differences in 
the experience of reward. Given the different forms of COMT Met, at least part of what we experience as 
the feeling of reward or gratification was determined by our parents, and our parent's parents, and their 
parent's parents, all the way back to our ape-like cousins who evolved this gene. 
When Strobel looked at the brain scans of his subjects, he found that the same circuitry was 
engaged for personal revenge and impersonal punishment, with significant activity in the striatum — a 
reward area —as well as in the insula — an area involved in the feeling of disgust. When we detect an 
injustice, we feel disgusted, a feeling that may motivate our desire for retribution. The striatum finishes 
off the process, rewarding us for our punitive response, and wiping out the negative feeling of disgust. 
Importantly, individuals with the high expressing form of COMT Met, and thus, higher levels of 
dopamine, showed stronger activation in the striatum, and were more likely to punish those who act 
unfairly. Strobel suggests that those with the high expressing form punished more because they 
anticipated a higher level of reward. If this explanation is right, it has profound consequences for how we 
think about individual participation in the policing of norms and the honey hits associated with 
aggression. Some people will have a natural bias to shy away from punishment, not because they fail to 
see the importance of ratting out cheaters, but because they don't anticipate feeling good about it. Others 
will be prone to punish even the most minor infractions because they feel empowered and good about it. 
Those who are empowered to punish because it feels good have forged a stronger association between 
aggression and reward. Unbeknownst to these individuals, they started life with a bias, one that colored 
their willingness to harm others. This bias is joined by many others that I discuss in the next few sections. 
The take home message is that if you are born male, endowed with certain genetic variants such 
as the low activity form of MAOA, and experience physical and psychological abuse by your parents, the 
odds of delinquency are frighteningly high. That's the bad news. The good news is that if you are born 
male, have the high activity variant of the MAOA gene, and experience physical and psychological abuse 
by your parents, you are vaccinated by nature against the harms of your unfortunate nurture. The 
problem, of course, is that you have no say over which endowment you get, nor over the kinds of parents 
you receive. 
One of the reasons I have worked through this case study of genetic constraints and 
environmental sculpting is to provide an antidote to the often polarized views that have dominated much 
of the historical and psychological literature on evil. Many of the earliest, and most famous psychological 
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experiments were related in one way or another to Hannah Arendt's thoughts about Adolf Eichmann and 
the fact that good people are capable of horrific things: the banality of evil. Hiding behind every average 
Joe is a person equipped with an engine of malice. Banality is the veil of evil. Thus, the American 
psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that normal people were capable of shocking innocent others when 
an authority figure told them to do so; of course, there were no shocks, but the subjects believed they 
were real. Similarly, the American psychologists Solomon Asch and Philip Zimbardo showed that 
normal people followed group attitudes and instructions, bleating like mindless sheep, no reflection, no 
critical thinking, no concern about the consequences of their actions. In Zimbardo's study— the famous 
Stanford prison experiments—run of the mill undergraduates playing the role of prison guards turned 
into little dictators, mentally and physically abusing their run of the mill undergraduates playing the role 
of prisoners. Together, these studies seemed to support a blank slate view of the mind, a tablet waiting for 
inscription by the local culture, with no constraints on the written matter. 
A closer look at many of these studies reveals far more variation in how individuals responded, 
suggesting that differences in their genetic make-up and personal experience either facilitated their 
willingness to follow authority and ideology or prevented it. Many subjects in both the Milgram and 
Zimbardo studies refused to follow the orders or rules of the game. Those who refused tended to identify 
more with the victim and less with the authority figure or ideology. This suggests important differences in 
the capacity to experience empathy and compassion for another. Studies by the cognitive neuroscientist 
Esse Viding show that by the pre-school years, some children have a diminished capacity for empathy, 
expressing a deeply callous and unemotional character. These children exhibit severe conduct problems, 
especially violence. These children lack remorse and an awareness of others' distress. They are cold, 
heartless kids. If they have a twin, they are more likely to share this callous-unemotional personality than 
two unrelated children, revealing the trademark of a powerful genetic engine. More boys than girls fall on 
the high end of this callous-unemotional scale — where high translates to colder and more callous. Those 
who score highest on the scale engage in more direct physical bullying than those who score lower. High 
scorers lack the skills to modulate their behavior following direct or anticipated punishment. These 
individuals also show reduced activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that is critically involved in 
regulating emotion, especially the assignment of a positive or negative value on our actions and 
experiences. These individual differences persist into adulthood. These are the kind of individual 
differences that can explain why some followed Milgram and Zimbardo's instructions to perfection, while 
others resisted, exerting self-control. 
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The sweetness of control 
When humans and other animals travel the road to excess, whether for food consumption, violence, 
power, or sex, it is either because they gave in to an in-the-moment impulsive itch or because a history of 
losing self-control turned into an addictive habit. What causes us to lose our sense of moderation, allow 
our mental brakes to slip, and give in to temptation? What causes our preferences to inconsistently and 
irrationally shift over time, allowing seductive offerings to win? If you are the eminent social 
psychologist Roy Baumeister who has contributed fundamental insights into the nature of evil, the answer 
is simple: sugar. Love it. Want it. Need it. 
When we work hard, focusing on a difficult problem or trying to figure out the best decision, 
exhaustion strikes. Part of our exhaustion comes from the fact that we have depleted a critical resource: 
sugar, or more precisely, glucose. When the availability of this resource diminishes, we also lose self-
control. This is why the loss of self-control has a cycle that follows the time of day, with the greatest 
losses occurring late rather than early: diet breakers are more likely to pig out in the evening than early in 
the morning; shoppers are more likely to buy impulsively as the day moves on; impulsive crimes and 
relapses of addiction are evening affairs; judges are more likely to dole out punishment at the end of a day 
in court than when they start a new day. Dozens of experiments show that if you have to exert self-
control in one context it taxes your capacity to exert self-control in another. For example, if you ask 
subjects to avoid laughing while watching a comedy routine, avoid thinking about a white bear, or avoid 
eating chocolates now to have radishes later, these same subjects will squeeze a hand grip for a shorter 
period of time than subjects who never contended with the various self-control tasks. When you deplete 
your personal resources, you lose your grip, opening yourself up to binge eating, unnecessary violence, 
sexual promiscuity, and drug relapses. 
How do we know that glucose is responsible? If you give people a milkshake with real sugar 
before they have to take a hard test involving self-control, they do better than if you give them a 
milkshake with an artificial sweetener. If you first make people take a test that taxes their attention, and 
causes their glucose to drop, they do worse on a subsequent test, including the hand grip squeezing test. In 
an extraordinary series of experiments and observations, the American psychologist Nathan DeWall 
found that subjects who drank lemonade with glucose were less likely to respond aggressively to an insult 
than subjects who drank lemonade with artificial sweetener; individuals with diabetes—who have 
difficulty regulating blood glucose, and thus have less of it —reported higher levels of aggression on a 
questionnaire than non-diabetics; within the United States, those states with higher numbers of diabetics 
showed higher crime rates; and countries with a higher frequency of a genetic disorder that lowers 
glucose levels showed higher killing rates both in and out of war. 
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To accept DeWall's striking results, it is necessary to accept one connection between self-control 
and aggression and a second between glucose and self-control: 
SELF-CONTROL DOWN 8 AGGRESSION UP 
GLUCOSE DOWN 8 SELF-CONTROL DOWN 
That aggression often follows from a loss of control is backed up by considerable evidence, including 
clinical studies that link lack of inhibition in psychopaths to extreme violence. Also of interest is the fact 
that impulsive aggression is more likely to arise when individuals are drunk than sober. Alcohol, as we all 
know, lowers our inhibitions, but also lowers glucose in both the brain and body. Though scientists such 
as Baumeister and DeWall have not yet worked out in detail how glucose is used or replenished in the 
context of self-control, there are far too many studies using different methods and subjects to ignore this 
relationship. Minimally, these studies indicate that we should think about self-control like a resource, 
something that can be used up and replenished, something that can be depleted, tipping the scale toward 
violence. 
One of the interesting implications of DeWall's work is that individual differences in glucose 
availability are coupled with individual differences in self-control. Diabetes shows a high level of 
heritability, meaning that some individuals are more likely to develop this problem than others simply 
based on what genes they receive from their parents. The prevalence of diabetes is on the rise in many 
countries, with some estimates suggesting that by 2025, there will be 325,000,000 diabetics world wide, 
more than double current estimates. The genetic disorder that lowers glucose levels arises because of a 
deficiency in a key enzyme, glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase. This is one of the most common 
enzyme deficiencies in the world, affecting over 400,000,000 people, and in many cases, triggered by the 
consumption of fava beans. As with variation in the frequency of MAOA, so too can variation in this 
glucose-related gene be subject to selection pressures, especially given its link to violence. Once again, 
we see nature and nurture contributing to individual variation and cultural differences in our capacity to 
harm others. 
Together, these observations of glucose-related disorders speak to a disconcerting reality: we are 
born with inherent differences in the availability of key resources guiding self-restraint. Some of us start 
off life better equipped to control our frustrations, wait for future gains, and moderate our temper. These 
early differences can have long lasting and disastrous effects later in life, a point supported by a study that 
began forty years ago with four year-old children presented with a marshmallow. 
The American social psychologist Walter Mischel recruited four year old children to his 
laboratory and sat them down at a table with two objects: a marshmallow and a bell. He then told each 
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child that he was going to leave the room. If they wanted to eat the marshmallow, they only had to ring 
the bell. But, as Mischel informed them, if they waited for his return, he would bring them more 
marshmallows. Mischel took out his stopwatch and recorded how long each child waited before ringing 
the bell. 
Some children rang the bell almost immediately, leaving Mischel no time to leave the room. 
Others waited. This isn't surprising. Some children are impulsive, others are impatient, and this shows up 
early in life. What is surprising is that these early appearing personality types held steadfast, impacting 
later life decisions and actions. The more impatient types were more likely to be involved in juvenile 
delinquency, have poor grades, abuse drugs, get divorced, and lose their jobs. For women who developed 
eating disorders, those who were more patient were more likely to be anorexic, whereas those who were 
more impulsive were more likely to be bulimic. When the American developmental psychologist B.J. 
Casey put these now 40-somethings inside a brain scanner, the patient ones showed stronger activation in 
the prefrontal areas of the brain when viewing happy and fearful faces, revealing stronger self-control 
over their feelings. In contrast, when the impatient ones viewed the same stimuli, not only was there a 
weaker response in the prefrontal region but a stronger response in the ventral striatum when viewing 
happy faces. The striatum, as noted earlier, is involved in the experience of reward. For the impatient 
types, seeing something positive is like eating candy, something that is hard to ignore. The patient types 
regulate this feeling, transforming the heat of the moment into a cool experience. The impatient types are 
overwhelmed by this feeling, giving into temptation. This work adds to the genetic evidence reviewed 
earlier, showcasing both the importance of individual differences in self-control, and the stability of these 
differences as distinctive personality types. 
Individual differences in self-control are also relevant to levels of recidivism in youths who have 
committed a crime, and thus tie us back to the beginning of this chapter and the costs of a career criminal. 
Career criminals are individuals who repeatedly commit crimes. They lack self-control. This is important 
for judges, juries and society as we want to know in advance who is most likely to commit another crime 
if we release them back out onto the streets. The American sociologist Matt DeLisi presented a self-
control survey to approximately 800 juvenile youths, ages 12-17 years, each with a criminal record. 
Those who scored one standard deviation from the mean on this survey, and thus were more impulsive 
than most, were five times more likely to become career criminals. Five times. Self-control on its own 
accounted for about 80% of the variation in recidivism among these delinquents; the remaining 20% was 
accounted for by factors that one might think would be much more important, including mental health, 
education, gender, and socioeconomic background. As DeLisi concludes, these results suggest that 
measures of self-control provide a reliable predictor of the likelihood of repeating a crime. They provide a 
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measure of risk, a factor that both juvenile and adult courts should be using to determine their sentencing, 
especially the individual's future dangerousness. 
Individual differences in glucose metabolism, together with relative differences in brain activity, 
lead to stable differences in self-control. But there's more, both luck of the draw genetic effects and 
clinical distortions. Recall that the low expressing form of the MAOA gene results in lower levels of 
serotonin which, in turn, leverages less control over aggressive impulses. There is another gene — 
SLC6A4 — that also comes in two forms and regulates the level of serotonin. The short form of this gene 
gives you less serotonin, is commonly found in pathological gamblers and psychopaths—two heavily 
male-biased disorders that are associated with impoverished impulse control. Psychopaths also have 
relatively smaller frontal lobes , especially within a region that has a high density of serotonin neurons. 
Psychopathy is joined by a family of impulse control disorders that also implicate dysfunction of the 
serotonin system, including kleptomania (stealing), pyromania (burning), trichotillomania (hair pulling), 
and oniomania (shopping). Like glucose, serotonin plays a lead role in our capacity for self-control. 
When serotonin is sidelined from the performance, any number of impulsivity problems may emerge. 
What I have said thus far is only a partial accounting of the biological ingredients that figure into 
our capacity for self-control. What this partial recipe tell us is that regardless of the situation, some 
individuals are inoculated against the pull of authority and group ideology and others are susceptible. If 
you missed the inoculation clinic in utero, you are more susceptible to temptations and excesses, 
including excessive violence. This is important for our interpretation of the real world and of the famous 
psychological experiments by Milgram, Zimbardo, and others in which seemingly good people carried 
out unambiguously horrid things. Some individuals carry a genetic skeleton that resists the push and pull 
of charismatic leaders and powerful isms. These people will not be pushed into doing bad things. Others, 
faced with the exact same situation, will find their skeleton buckling, tempted to take risks and lash out 
when the going gets tough. 
Invisible risks 
Several years ago, Ira Glass, the brilliant radio show host of This American Life, delved into the topic of 
superheroes. One episode focused on a question that has become part of my repertoire for dinner parties, 
especially those in need of a conversational catalyst: if you could become a superhero with one power, 
which would you take—the ability to fly or to be invisible? Most people have a rapid-fire, confident 
response to this question, while others reflect a bit, often engaging themselves in a public debate over 
their conflicted views. What is interesting about people's answer to this question, independently of 
whether they pick flying or invisibility, is that they rarely talk about using their power to do good in the 
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world! The flyers talk about how cool it would be to vacation anywhere in the world, zip to work or 
school, or have fun soaring like an eagle. The invisibility types talk about sneaking into stores and taking 
clothes or music they like, eavesdropping on conversations, and playing tricks on family members and 
friends. What is even more interesting about these particular answers is how they divide into pure 
hedonism— flying — and pure vice — invisibility. With invisibility you can take risks at no cost, except 
for the cost that soon becomes apparent to many of these newly donned superheroes: even if they don't 
get caught, they still did something bad, morally bad. This ratchets up their guilt. With this realization, 
and a dip into the dark side, comes an about face, with some picking flying instead of invisibility. Rarely 
do people stick with invisibility, but see how they might deploy their power for virtuous purposes. Rarely 
do these superheroes realize that they can be real heroes, using their invisibility to gain covert information 
about terrorist organizations, elicit drug traders, pedophilic priests, or abusive parents — minus the risks. 
In real life, there are risks associated with every decision, some clear from the start and others 
only clear in hindsight. As with self-control, a growing body of evidence shows that there are individual 
differences in risk-taking: some are risk-averse, some risk-prone, and some seemingly risk-blind, unaware 
that they are taking risks at all. Some of these differences are evident early in life. Some of these 
differences are strongly associated with crime later in life. Some of these differences provide insights into 
the invisible risks that individuals and societies confront, risks that can cause great harms. 
Research on clinical populations with antisocial disorders, most notably those with a clinical 
diagnosis of psychopathy, reveals a major cause of their high risk, costly, and violent behavior: a failure 
to experience fear, anxiety, or stress in response to highly evocative images and sounds. In contrast with 
healthy populations, psychopaths are emotionally blasé about the things in the world that can cause harm 
or result in punishment. The problem lies in the fact that psychopaths, both adults and those identified as 
candidates early in childhood, fail to learn about the dangers in life. Their failure to learn is caused by a 
reduction in size and activity of two critical and connected brain areas: a region of the frontal cortex and 
the amygdala. When this system works efficiently, it allows individuals to learn about the sounds, smells, 
and sights that are associated with bad things in the world. When this system works well, individuals 
learn to avoid antisocial, immoral, and illegal acts by developing anxiety and fear over the possibility of 
punishment and personal injury. When this system works poorly, as is the case in psychopaths, 
individuals act as if there are no dangers or risks of punishment — a disposition that enables inappropriate 
actions. But psychopath), covers a broad spectrum, with problems that all of us confront at some point in 
our lives, some of us even repeatedly. This is important as it forces us to look at non-clinical populations 
for the causes of individual differences in risk-taking, especially our reactivity to dangerous events. 
Studies carried out over several decades, in a wide variety of cultures, reveal that children begin 
life with distinctive temperaments. Some are mellow, blasé about events that are startling to many. 
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Others are high strung and reactive, responding with heightened fear to the same startling events. Others 
fall somewhere in between these two poles. What is surprising is the fact those with the flattest response 
to evocative images and sounds are the most likely to become violent delinquents in young adulthood. 
In a remarkable study, Adrian Raine and his colleagues presented 1,795 three year olds with two 
different sounds while recording the sweatiness of their palms; the sweatier the palms, the greater the 
stress and fear. One sound was always associated with a second and highly aversive noise, while the 
second sound was always played alone. When you pair a neutral sound, such as a pure tone, with a nasty 
sound, simply hearing the pure tone will make your skin crawl; the pure tone predicts what is coming, and 
what is coming is not pleasant. When Raine revisited these same individuals twenty years later, those with 
serious criminal records involving drug abuse, dangerous driving violations, or violence, had the driest 
palms at the age of three years. In another study, focusing specifically on violence, Raine measured the 
sweatiness of a different group of three year olds and then looked at their aggressiveness five years later. 
Once again, those with the driest palms at three years were the most aggressive at eight years. In the 
absence of a system that enables individuals to learn about danger, the brain and body act as if they were 
shrouded in an invisibility cloak, blind to the risks of crossing either moral or legal lines. 
Raine's findings fit well with the marshmallow study. In the same way that those who were 
most impatient in the pre-school years were also most likely to exhibit signs of delinquency in early 
adulthood, so too were those who were most blasé about fearful stimuli as children most likely to exhibit 
delinquency in adulthood. Both studies reveal the stability of personality traits. Both studies suggest that 
at the level of groups of individuals, as opposed to specific individuals, the blasé-impatient types 
represent a greater threat to our welfare. The point about groups is important. These studies do not allow 
us to look at an individual's record and conclude that because he could only wait for 3 seconds before 
eating the lone marshmallow, and almost fell asleep when presented with loud banging noises, that he is 
without doubt headed for a life of crime. We also can't conclude that because patience and reactivity to 
fearful stimuli can be measured as early as three years old, that these personality traits are entirely genetic 
and fixed. In fact, other studies carried out by Raine show that if you ramp up the nutrition, exercise, and 
mental stimulation of children between the ages of 3-5 years, you can reduce adult criminal offenses by 
35%. What we can conclude from these findings is that there are significant individual differences that 
affect who is willing to take risks and who isn't. We can conclude that there is a strong biological 
component that constrains the individual's options. We can conclude that those who start early in life 
without an understanding of the dangers in the world, act as if they live in a risk-free world. Molecular 
biologists provide an increasingly precise understanding of how these individual differences start, 
pointing to genes that bias some individuals to take extreme risks, including the risk of violating social 
norms and laws by violently attacking another human being. 
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There are many situations where taking a risk pays off, whether we think of stealth military 
operations, chancy shots in the final seconds of a basketball game, or significant investments in an up and 
coming stock option. Playing it safe pays off. But those who stick their necks out and take a chance, may 
bring home significant gains. It is because of these competing strategies and potential payoffs that 
evolutionary biologists have imagined that selection could maintain both personality types within a 
population — a point noted earlier for the MAOA and glucose-related genes. If selection has worked in 
this way, then there must be genetic variation that allows for both strategies. To date, the strongest 
evidence comes from a family of genes associated with the regulation of dopamine, with the memorable 
acronyms of DAT I, DRD2 and DRD4; each of these genes is associated with different forms, each form 
associated with different levels of dopamine. Recall from chapter 2 that dopamine plays an essential role 
in our experience of reward, including how motivated we are to get it and what we anticipate based on our 
understanding of the situation — have we been rewarded in the past, how often, and how much? The idea 
here is that those who carry genes that output a higher level of dopamine may weight rewards more 
heavily and thus, show risk-blindness; for these individuals, the eye is on the prize, not the path or 
obstacles to this prize. 
Across a number of studies, results show that variation in the expression of these genes is 
associated with high-risk, low self-control behaviors, including pathological gambling, substance abuse, 
sensation seeking, and financial investments. For example, in two separate studies, individuals with 
different variants of the DRD4 gene played a financial investment game involving real money. In one, 
designed by Joan Chiao, subjects decided to invest in either a risky asset with variable returns or a riskless 
asset with consistent returns. In the second study, the Swedish economist Ana Dreber and the American 
anthropologist Corin Apicella allowed subjects to either walk away with an initial starting pot of money, 
or to invest some of it in a risky asset. Those with the DRD4 variant that expresses higher levels of 
dopamine were more likely to pursue the risky investment. What this work reveals is that part of the 
variation we observe among people who make risky investments, drink too much alcohol, and gamble 
with their income, is due to variation in the dopamine family of genes. These are hidden risks that come 
to life thanks to molecular biologist's microscope. What also comes to life is the fact that these same 
genes are relevant to violence, causing some to strike out even though there are significant risks and 
terrible consequences. 
In several studies, using an American health data base of several thousand adolescents, results 
consistently show a relationship between particular variants of the dopamine genes and violence. For 
example, the sociologist Guang Guo examined the relationship between violent delinquency— involving 
use of guns and knives—and variation in DRD2 and DATI among 2,5000 individuals ages 12-23 years. 
DRD2 was of particular interest because medical records and clinical trials reveal that administering 
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haloperidol — a DRD2 dopamine antagonist — helps control aggression in psychotic patients. Guo found 
that levels of violence were about twice as high for one variant of the DRD2 gene than others, and about 
20% higher for a particular variant of the DATI gene. These genetic variants cause differences in 
dopamine, which cause differences in expected and experienced reward, which cause differences in 
perceived risk, which cause differences in the odds of getting in a fight and harming others. These are not 
genes for aggression, violence or evil. There are no such genes. Rather, they are genes that change our 
perception of risk. Because risk is related to all sorts of decisions, these genes can affect the odds that we 
directly harm others. They are part of the story of individual differences, and part of the story of why 
some are more likely to engage in evildoing. 
Everything I have discussed thus far focuses on actions, on how the psychology of desire and 
denial combine to fuel behaviors that lead, directly or indirectly, to excessive harms. I have also explained 
how different biological ingredients predispose us toward different degrees of self-control, and thus, 
differences in our ability to omit particular actions. This sense of omission is a virtue, a sign of resisting 
temptation. But can omissions be a sign of vice, of resisting an action that is called for? Can omissions 
ever reach such a scale that we would consider individuals or societies as evil omitters? 
The sin of sloth. 
What's worse: I) giving a lethal overdose to someone suffering from an incurable disease or allowing this 
person to die by removing life support? 2) pushing someone in front of a runaway truck to stop the truck 
and save the lives of five others or allowing someone to walk in front of the truck instead of warning 
them? 3) pouring a toxic chemical into your competitor's drink in order to make him sick or allowing 
your competitor to drink the toxic chemical that was placed on the table by someone else? Even though 
all of these situations seem quite bad, most people have a gut feeling that the actions are worse than the 
omissions. They also feel that when we omit life support, fail to warn someone of a runaway truck, or 
remain silent about a toxic drink, that we are less responsible for the consequences that unfold. Dozens of 
studies, using hundreds of different examples, and thousands of subjects, support what our gut expresses: 
we are captive to an omission effect. Even when we understand that the consequences are precisely the 
same—the suffering patient dies, the truck kills the person, the toxic chemical makes the competitor sick 
—and so too are the person's goals and intentions—eliminate suffering, save five people, take out the 
competitor—we are seduced to believe that action is worse than omission or that doing harm to another 
is worse than allowing harm to occur. 
The omission effect lays bare a tension between unconscious, spontaneous intuition and 
conscious, reflective thought. On the one hand, there are potentially good reasons why we evolved this 
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intuition. It is a heuristic or rule of thumb that may be right much of the time. When I do something, as 
long as it is not by accident, my intentions and goals are more clear cut than when I fail to do something 
or allow it to happen. If I punch you and your arm bruises, the causality is clear: I caused your arm to 
bruise. I am responsible for this harm. I should be punished. If I stand by as someone is about to punch 
you, but don't deflect the punch when I easily could have, it feels odd to say that I caused your arm to 
bruise. It also seems strange to say that I am responsible and should be punished. By not deflecting the 
punch, I allowed the harm to occur. I could have prevented it from happening, but I am not obliged to. As 
social creatures, we have been designed to pick up on cues that reliably classify people into friends and 
enemies. Friends intentionally help us while enemies intentionally harm us. Actions showcase our 
intentions better than omissions. 
The omission effect also makes sense in terms of personal responsibility. Not only do our guts tell 
us that actors are more responsible for outcomes than omitters, but our guts also tell us that it is hard to 
hold others responsible for their omissions. As I sit and write these words, I am committing heinous acts 
of omission: I am not currently giving money to any charities, am not scheduled to teach in the dozens of 
refugee camps around the world, and am not volunteering for any of the peace keeping armies sponsored 
by the UN. I am also guilty of many other minor crimes of omission, including the failure to consistently 
give my change to homeless individuals, and the failure to spend time in homes for the elderly and 
mentally handicapped. As I sit, I rack up countless harms of omission. It is hopefully the absurdity of this 
comment that shows why there is a fracture in the arm that connects omissions to responsibility. In a large 
scale society, it is impossible for us to hold people responsible for their omissions. There are far too many 
reasons, often good ones, why people don't act. The universe of reasons for acting is smaller. 
If the omission effect arises because it is virtually impossible to hold omitters responsible in a 
large scale society, than what about small scale societies including the hunter-gathers of our past, and the 
tiny hamlets and villages that dot many countries, both developed and developing? When the number of 
people that you know and interact with is small, does the omission effect vanish? In a fish bowl 
community, you should be able to hold all of the other fish responsible for their actions and omissions 
because you know what they are up to. To explore this idea, the psychologist Linda Abarbanell and I ran 
a study with a rural, small scale Mayan population, living in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Every 
individual listened to a reading of a moral dilemma. Each dilemma described an action or an omission 
that resulted in harming one person, but saving the lives of many. Subjects judged the moral 
permissibility of the action or omission. 
Unlike thousands of adults on the internet who judged similar dilemmas, as well as other Mayans 
living in a city, individuals in this small scale Mayan population perceived no moral difference between 
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actions and omissions. The omission effect evaporated, with the moral weight of an action perceived to 
be on a par with an omission. 
The Mayan study is but one example. It suggests some flexibility in our perception of actions and 
omissions, and shows how cultural differences can create individual differences. When our social world is 
relatively small and circumscribed, we can keep tabs on everyone. By keeping tabs, we can hold others 
responsible for their actions and their omissions. As the American psychologists Jon Haidt and Jonathan 
Baron have shown, this psychology can be recreated in the laboratory by creating scenarios in which the 
individuals are either unfamiliar or familiar. When there is a relationship between the individuals —
family, friends, team members—and thus, some degree of familiarity, the omission effect weakens. 
The omission effect is not an obligatory state of the human mind. It is a common tendency, a way 
that our brains lean, especially in unfamiliar contexts. In patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, the 
omission effect is as strong as it is in healthy subjects, except for familiar cases of harm that are directly 
relevant to them, such as the excessive washing behavior that is the trademark of this clinical disorder. 
The fact that certain situations can cause us to lean in different directions has important policy 
implications: even when corporations, institutions, or other organizations grow large, we should always 
segregate these masses into smaller divisions, and make the issues personally relevant. Every member of 
one division should hold all others within its division responsible or accountable. Further, efforts should 
be made to foster familiarity across divisions, enabling not only a level of responsibility but of respect 
and trust. By recreating the psychology of small scale societies, and making potential harms relevant, we 
may help bypass the omission effect, allowing us to hold people responsible for their omissions. This, in 
turn, may reduce the number of individuals who live as passive bystanders. Familiarity and relevance 
may well be the necessary catalysts for converting bystanders into active whistle blowers, defenders, and 
rescuers. 
When bystanders remain passive, watching the world go by, it is often because they believe that 
their actions won't make a difference or think that the costs of heroism are too high. This is, again, an 
issue of responsibility. It raises the question of when we ought to act. The distinguished Australian 
philosopher Peter Singer has spent a lifetime pushing this issue in the context of charitable donations, 
culminating most recently in his book The Lift You Can Save. The key idea, taken from a utilitarian 
perspective where outcomes as opposed to rules or principles motivate our moral actions, is that we ought 
to give a fraction of our incomes to those lacking basic access to food, shelter and health care. Standing 
by as bystanders when there are 1.4 billion people in a state of abject poverty is morally wrong. The logic 
seems perfectly reasonable, especially given the fact that humanitarian organizations have helped reduce 
the number of people living in poverty by .5 billion within the last 20 years. But then we learn of another 
Peter Singer idea: if the three richest men alive today — Carlos Slim Helu, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett 
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— worth a total of 153.5 billion dollars, were to give up one third of their net worth, they could solve 
world hunger. On a personal level, they would barely notice this donation. With this knowledge, why 
should I bother to give a penny? This is one example of apathy regarding our motivation to help others. 
What propels individuals to shift from passive bystanders who can allow harm to occur to active 
contributors? 
Classic studies by the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane reveal the 
ingredients for bystander action. Whether it is helping someone having a seizure, being molested, or in 
danger of suffocation from smoke, we are more likely to help when alone than when in a group. We are 
also more likely to help when we recognize the situation as a crisis and think that there are plausible 
solutions. These are all characteristics of the situation. There are also characteristics of the individual 
bystander, including their level of compassion and empathy toward others, their capacity to identify with 
the victim, and their self-control. For example, people who intervene in cases of child abuse, as opposed 
to the passive bystanders, are more likely to have been abused as children, more likely to perceive a 
solution, more likely to feel responsibility to intervene, and more likely to experience the weight of guilt 
for not intervening. We are back to individuals differences. We are back to the egg and coop, and their 
joint contribution to helping or harming others. We are back to the established genetic differences in 
compassion, risk-taking, and self-control that combine with a history of experience to create some who sit 
and watch and others who actively participate. 
We are more likely to pardon bystanders because we tend to see omissions as less bad than 
actions, and omitters as less responsible for the consequences than actors. This is a dangerous effect. 
Bystanders are part of the equation of evil. As noted by the American genocide scholar and psychologist, 
Ervin Staub, bystanders start out as passive players on the side lines, but are rapidly transformed into 
perpetrators. The transformation starts with the challenge of maintaining passivity while watching other 
humans suffer; to maintain this observer status requires suppressing empathy for the sufferers, while 
recognizing that they are in the minority and you, the bystander, are with the majority. To avoid feeling 
guilty for not feeling empathy, bystanders distance themselves even further from the victims. Distancing 
is an adaptive response as any association with the victims could put a bystander in harm's way. But like 
so many other psychological states discussed in this book, distancing leads to dehumanization. 
Dehumanization leads to moral disengagement and greater justification for the perpetrators. Justification 
lends cheering support for violence. This is the final transforming step, from passive bystander to active 
participant. 
Recall that on my account of evil, evildoers either have a desire to cause harm directly or desire 
something good, recognizing that it will cause harm indirectly. This is true of actions and omissions. For 
example, keeping a secret, even if pressured into spilling the beans, is a good thing because it upholds a 
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promise, and thus, the relationship. But if keeping the secret results in innocent lives lost or ruined, then 
this is a bad thing. Not telling— an omission — indirectly can cause harm. This is the situation that has 
confronted the Catholic Church over the past twenty years. 
During the tenures of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, some 4,000 priests sexually abused 
some 10,000 innocent children. This is unquestionably an underestimate. This is excessive harm. Popes 
John Paul II and Benedict XVI , together with their cardinals and bishops, assumed the role of bystanders. 
They were aware of the rampant cases of child rape among the clergy. They could have acted. Their 
omissions are archetypal examples of the sin of sloth. By omission, they are responsible for excessive 
harm and should be held legally accountable. This process has begun as evidenced by the decision in 
October of 201 Ito indict Bishop Robert Finn for failing to report a priest who took pornographic 
photographs of young girls. Though Finn was only charged with a misdemeanor, this case opens opens a 
legal floodgate. It is an opening that should allow prosecutors, around the globe, to indict bishops, 
cardinals, and the Pope for evil omissions. It should empower the parents and children who have suffered 
to rise up and demand justice for allowing excessive harm to occur. It should cause everyone to express 
outrage over the fact that allowing priests to rape innocent children perpetuates a cycle of pedophiles as 
those who have been abused are likely to abuse others. The leaders of the church have not only commited 
a crime of omission, but have helped perpetuate a culture of harm. 
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