Smarter People Commit Less Crime over at the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter.
The graphs below show the main findings. As you can see, the IQ-crime relationship was close to linear: The higher the IQ, the lower the odds of offending. This held across every one of a range of crime categories. And it also held across all IQ subscales, suggesting that general intelligence is the main driver of the IQ-crime association.
I expected this, but I did not expect it to be this strong. The Scandinavian countries provide especially clean data for studies like this, because of the required year of military service. Nearly everyone in a cohort year is tested. They are 90% Finnish, and 90% of the rest is from immediately neighboring countries, especially Sweden, so there are no racial complications in the data. It is nearly monocultural.
Stewart-Williams points out the intriguing breakdown of the pattern at the extremes but does not discuss it. For his purpose in a short article, I think he is right to avoid that distraction. Yet it did get me thinking. The lowest decile would include those in the care of someone else, usually parents who are watching over more of their hours. Yet their overall crime rate is still quite high. At the upper reaches...well, we can make up stories. Are they more resentful that their achievements are not as high as they believe they should be? Do they have more contempt for the authorities and believe they can get away with things?
Clicking on their links, I think they brush away the obvious question a little too casually:
ReplyDelete"One question I’m always asked when discussing these findings is this: Are smarter people really more law-abiding, or are they just better at covering their tracks? It’s a reasonable question, and some evidence suggests that higher-IQ criminals are indeed better at evading arrest than their less intellectually gifted colleagues. But that doesn’t explain the pattern in full. The main reason higher IQ individuals less often show up in crime statistics is that they less often commit crimes in the first place."
Yeah, that's the question I have too. Smarter people would be less likely to get caught; how much is that explanatory of the finding?
ReplyDeleteThe first of the internal links on differential detection was open that the data was inconclusive to that point (and claimed to be the first to study that precise question), but may be read as mildly supporting the idea that differential dtection does not explain everything. The second study was much stronger in indicating that it does not explain the IQ/crime association. It was intriguing that there may be some IQ connection with the types of crimes that people commit, and those choices have different rates of arrest to begin with.
ReplyDelete"Smarter people commit better crimes." :-)
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't worry much about deviations from the trend at the very high and very low ends--the statistics there are worse.
ReplyDeleteAnd Grim's suggestion is an interesting alternative--smarter people arrange that their nefarious deeds aren't illegal. I'm not asserting that politicians are very smart (cunning sometimes), but some of the schemes for getting money to them are transparent bribery but not illegal.
How about: smarter people are more likely to realize that they will probably be caught, and hence more likely to refrain from criminal activity; less intelligent people are more likely to think they can get away with their crimes.
ReplyDelete