February 11 Prompt

The article "Criminal Minds" raises several interesting arguments both for and against assigning people a number associated with their likelihood of becoming a criminal. The idea that a person’s likelihood to commit a crime is linked with their basic biology is a bit unsettling. It is very easy for us in Western culture to blame a person’s poor mental health on things that they can actively control, namely their environment. I do like that the article suggests that poor biology can be remedied with a more positive and healthier environment, but the article also articulates that a few of the study participants environment did not affect their violent tendencies later in life. The studies done were not experimental, and therefore we cannot say that bad biology or a smaller than normal amygdala causes criminality. I would love to know my own personal score, but I do not think we should be assigning people these scores publicly. One may argue that society should be warned of a potential criminal, but I believe that the experimenter expectancy effect may carry over into real world situations if we did. This phenomenon explains how an experimenter’s bias on a participant can change the behavior of that participant in a lab. This is usually due to the experimenter treating the participant differently according to their bias. In a real-world situation, I can see parents formulating a bias on their kid's number, and possibly even treating them differently. Society would be much less compassionate than even parents, and if they expect a kid to become a criminal then they will likely treat that kid like a criminal. One could argue that knowing a child may be at risk can improve your chances at helping that child. While this may be true in some cases, I believe the negative outcomes of assigning people numbers far outweigh the positives.