I started doing time when I was 11 years old, and I have been doing practically nothing else since then. What time I haven't been in jail have spent either getting out or getting in again. What you have done and are doing to me, you are also doing to others. What I have done to you, many others also do to you.
Thus we do each other as we are done by. I have done as I was taught to do, I am no different from any other. You taught me how to live my life, and I have lived as you have taught me. If you will continue teaching others as you taught me, then you as well as they must pay the price, and the price is very expensive.
You lose your all, even life. Carl Panzuram, 1928. Hi, I am Elle, and this is Quid Pro Quo, your friendly neighborhood forensic psych podcast. The Quid Pro Quo podcast deals with crime, psychology, and related themes.
Listener discretion is advised. Is what we do determined by the way we are born, or by the way we are raised. The nature nurture question is one of the most enduring debates in psychology. Apart from teachers, there is probably no group of people more interested in the nature nurture question from a practical standpoint than those who study and try to prevent crime.
Fighting crime is by its nature incredibly reactive. We can make guesses about what someone is going to do and take steps to avoid it, but outside of Philip K. Dick's stories like Minority Report, where dedicated police psychics detect crimes before they happen. We can't know the details of a criminal's behavior until the crime is already over.
We desperately need any advantage we can gain in determining who is going to commit crimes and then stopping them from doing so. Sadly, the more we research criminal behavior, the more we see that accurately predicting an individual crime is about as simple as accurately predicting the exact spot where a specific bird will be in one month from now. But if we can determine what factors make someone more likely to commit a crime, we may be able to promote things that will dissuade them from doing so instead. Historically, most societies have been pretty solidly in favor of the idea that who and what you are and as a result how you go about your days is largely determined by your physical makeup at birth or in other words, your nature.
Kings ruled generation after generation, just as their serfs toiled and those who sought to change their place in society were seen to be breaking the laws of nature, not of man. Many cultures have this concept of an inherited self, establishing bloodlines expected to stay true in their devotion to religion, war and probably the most commonly of all, servitude. As the world expanded, travel increased and as cultures interacted, it became difficult to assume the nature of a person from their background. Up until very recently, someone from a few days walk away might be able to hoodwink you about who they are just as easily as someone from across the world.
As a result, people have been trying to work out shortcuts to determine who a person really is for a very long time and there are innumerable theories about what people are born to be and the physical markers that indicate that. The Victorian craze for phrenology is a fantastic example of the lengths people will go to catalog the supposed physical expression of in born traits. Phrenologists felt that the shape of the skull reflected the strengths and deficits in the brain encased inside of it. A phrenologist's study of someone's head shape could be as much of a character witnessed as a former employer's recommendation for a new job or a witness's testimony in a trial.
Some chaotic changes in mental status rarely result in upward social mobility, so in classical, highly stratified societies where who you are is determined by the circumstances of your birth, drastic personality change can be easily dismissed. Typically, someone is accused of having an unknown flaw that was there all along or being under the influence of some kind of supernatural power or even paradoxically suffering from the effects of fighting their nature. As long as people have been making assumptions about another person's inborn nature and treating them accordingly, there have been people in the background asking if maybe there's more to the equation. Not loudly mind you.
Highly stratified societies don't tend to cotton to that kind of scrutiny. So what happens when the lines between classes do start to blur? The concept of social mobility requires that we look beyond how a person is born to predict what they can make of themselves and when you're actually looking to discover who a person is, rather than just assuming you already know, it doesn't take long to figure out that people are absurdly complicated. As soon as you think you have human nature nailed down, you find there is an exception to every rule.
Once these preconceived ideas go out the window, you have to face the possibility that other people have valid influences and motivations, just like you. When physical science, stereotyping, and superstition no longer offered simple answers to people's admittedly not terribly in-depth behavioral questions, modern psychology grew to try to fill the vacuum. In the 19th and 20th century, nurture usurped the throne. The global ascendancy of the city and the printed word offered not only the possibility for upward mobility, but also the ability for leisure, intellectual study, and research on an unprecedented scale.
Big existential questions are a lot easier to ponder when you're not too busy simply surviving. We had access to data and could easily see how changing a person's circumstance could change how they interact. The colonial obsession with bringing culture to so-called savage people is I think very reflective of that attitude. Phineas Gages' Bit of Trouble with an Iron Rod in 1848, which I covered in episode 5, was a major turning point in our understanding of where our personalities physically reside and how they could be altered.
Critically, our attitude towards children changed as well. Many societies had previously viewed children as sort of small, empty versions of their adult selves, kind of like balloons which would expand as they were filled with experience, but would always stay the same as central shape. The idea that children are actively shaped by their upbringing was surprisingly revolutionary, and the time was right for someone like Sigmund Freud to barge in and bulldoze the landscape of our understanding of how we become who we are. Suddenly, the framework of who we are is created not by our heritage, but by the continuing interaction of a child with a parent and other influential figures.
The pendulum swung all the way to the other side, and with Freud's edible theory, the concept of helicopter parenting and unending mommy guilt was born. Well, not to say that there wasn't mommy guilt before, but at least before the blame was primarily focused on the circumstances of the child's birth, rather than every single moment, which followed, but I digress. Likewise, as I discussed in episode 1, our approach to crime was changing. With widespread press and tight population density, crimes became a matter of public knowledge and the public clamored for better policing.
High-profile cases like Jack the Ripper and Poe's Beautiful Cigar Girl highlighted the need for crime prevention tactics, thorough investigations, and just resolutions. The increased application of scientific principles to policing forced investigative techniques to evolve in kind. Active policing required not just dealing with criminals, but understanding their creation, patterns, and motivations. Massive advances in medicine, neuroscience, research methods, and especially advances in genealogy and imaging in the last quarter of the 20th century have renewed interest in medical theories of behavior.
Research on the heritability of measurable markers for behavior such as addiction, depression, schizophrenia, autism, and sociopathy tell an undeniable story about the physical contribution to mental health, but as you will soon learn, they do not tell the whole story. So where does that leave us? In my opinion, it leaves us with diathesis stress theory and coping mechanisms. These are by no means the only theories out there, or necessarily the right ones, but it's what makes the most sense to me, so that's what I'm going to talk about, because it's my podcast and I'll cry if I want to.
Diathesis stress theory is an annoyingly hard to pronounce term, which basically boils down to the idea that pathological behavior is caused by the interaction of nature and nurture. Of course, there's more to it, or there wouldn't be another several minutes left of this podcast, but in essence, that's all it really is. The diathesis part means a constitutional susceptibility or predisposition. This is basically referring to the things you are susceptible to because of your baseline physical state.
The primary things which determine diathesis would be the things which occur before you are born, such as your genetics or an illness your mother had, or her access to nutrition, or exposure to environmental toxins while you were in utero. We determine the amount these affect you by looking at people who share the same starting points. Classically, studying families and especially siblings and twins have told us a great deal about what we start with when we are born, and now we have even more tools at our disposal to make these determinations, such as functional neuroimaging, and the ability to pinpoint genetic markers. If we look at a group with the same or similar physical traits and see that people who share a particular physical trait tend to share the same psychological trait, it's a good hint that these traits may be connected in some way.
The most classic way to study this is by comparing identical twins to their non-identical siblings. You may not think that we would have so much data available on these things, but countries with public healthcare tend to have excellent records available for epidemiological research. We owe a lot of our understanding of genetic factors of mental illness to Scandinavian twins. Say we're looking at a disorder which we suspect has a high heritability, like schizophrenia.
If one sibling has it, what are the chances their other siblings have it? They are brought up in roughly the same environment, so that singularity may be due to some other factor, like upbringing, nutrition, or location. So then we ask, do those chances of them having the same disorder go up if we look at only identical twins? What if we compare them to fraternal twins?
What if we compare them to twins which have been separated by adoption? Are people who are the most similar in body, also the most similar in mind? Identical twins, whether they grew up together or apart, have a measurably higher chance of both twins having certain psychological issues. Schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and bipolar depression are the most commonly discussed ones.
There are genetic markers well associated with tendencies towards alcohol avoidance and alcohol over indulgence. Intelligence measures are also highly consistent. In short, if you tell us your family's mental health history, there are absolutely a number of things which we can have a good chance of predicting for your future. And even if you're not looking at heritability, you might be looking at something like prenatal exposure to disease or toxins, which may shape the mind of a developing fetus in predictable ways.
There's still a fair amount of research being done, looking into the role of prenatal influenza or revela exposure on the later development of schizophrenia. But here's the thing though. Siblings and twins and people unified physically by some parallel aspect of their birth are still not the same. If who we are was made entirely by our physical makeup, we would be able to predict with 100% certainty if one twin has a problem by looking at the other twin.
But none of these things show up 100%. People often exhibit psychological disorders which their parents and ancestors do not have, and for which there is no clear prenatal explanation. So there almost has to be something else that worked here. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as serial killers from good homes.
Karl Panzrom, who I quoted earlier, may be one of the coldest killers I've stumbled over since the Iceman Killer, Richard Kuklinski. But he had a brother in law enforcement. Famous gangster Al Capone had one brother who followed his life of crime, but their other brother James was a policeman who at one time even worked on prohibition enforcement. This is where the stress part of the Diathesis stress model comes in.
As we've all presumably figured out by now, life can be pretty stressful, and the average person will undergo continual challenges to their well-being. Physical injury, loss, emotional distress, these are all common life experiences. We have varying levels of ability to cope, and for the most part, we overcome these stresses by depending on our individual strengths. We may have bumps along the way, but we work through them.
But some people simply do not recover. Two siblings or friends from similar backgrounds may experience the same stressful event, like a car accident or a mugging, and one recovers without issue while the other spirals into mental illness. We see time and time again that a seemingly healthy person will experience a stress you would expect them to recover from, and it will be as if a switch has flipped. PTSD is probably the most well-known result of a sudden stress, but by no means the only one we can expect to see.
So then, what's the critical difference? Practitioners who believe in the Diathesis stress model believe this may very well be the interaction of a pre-existing tendency or diathesis with an insurmountable stressor. Imagine a chair with a knot in the wood of one leg. Sit on it normally a million times, and it works fine.
It may give decades of service, but trip on the edge of a carpet one day and fall into the chair and the leg suddenly collapses. This damage comes seemingly out of nowhere, but in reality that fault line was waiting all along. I'm expressing this through the lens of mental illness, but you could just as easily flip the concept and apply it to something positive, like sportsability. Imagine twins who are born with the same physical advantages, like for example a tendency toward efficient lactic acid processing in their muscles which makes endurance sports easier.
One twin catches the competition bug on a random playdate and becomes a star on the swim team while the other prefers to sit on the beach and read. Both have the same inborn ability, but only one ever clicks with it. Those of you who spend a lot of time studying true crime will have noticed the traumatic childhood experiences, especially head injuries and sexual abuse, might as well be the free center square of serial killer bingo. Karl Panzrom was a career criminal who grew up in the pre-World War I American Midwest.
The scope of his crime career is notable in and of itself. Not many people manage to earn a death penalty conviction in a state which has abolished the death penalty. But what particularly sets him apart for our purposes is a shockingly articulate, if terrifying memoir he entrusted to a young guard and the letters they exchanged afterward. As you probably picked up from that opening quote, Karl Panzrom blames his exceedingly violent treatment of others on his own treatment, first in a reform school at 12 years old, and in his subsequent jailings and dealings with other criminals.
Of that first reform school he says, oh yes, I had learned a hell of a lot from my expert instructors, furnished to me free of charge by society in general and the state of Minnesota in particular. From the treatment I received while there and the lessons I learned from it, I had fully decided when I left there just how I would live my life. I made up my mind that I would rob, burn, destroy, and kill everywhere I went and everybody I could as long as I lived. That's the way I was reformed in the Minnesota State Training School.
That's the reasons why. This is as good an argument as any for why he became precisely who he was and none of his other siblings followed his life course, but I don't entirely agree with his assertion that the way he was treated was the only thing that shaped his action. He did start his crime spree at a particularly young age and it's not like he was the only one in his environment being subjected to the same treatment. I have spent my life studying murderous people and still his attitude is notably vicious.
It's one thing to hear of a man's crimes in the abstract. It's something else entirely to hear someone speak of robbery, fraud, rape, and murder spoken as dispassionately as a laundry list. There are countless children in the true crime literature who are said to have been born bad and we might attribute this to their inborn nature, but children are notoriously good at falling down and cracking themselves on the noggin. How many of you made it all the way to primary school without a solid whack to the head?
I know I still have a pretty gnarly headscar for mine. Thankfully I've made it this far without murdering anyone, but maybe I just didn't have that particular knot in my wood. There is a key third factor which I think is missing from most discussions of diathesis stress, and that is how coping mechanisms factor in. Our lives are not determined only by our physical makeup when we are born and the big stresses we hit along the way.
We each have advantages and disadvantages which make us more or less likely to succumb to serious mental issues. Health, education, supportive family, community, or friends, life skills we've picked up on our way, these all have the power to form a shielding layer of emotional bubble wrap around the places where we are most easily broken. Likewise, smaller disadvantages may amplify the effect of bigger stresses. This may be one of the reasons socio-economic class is such a strong predicting factor in some mental illness.
All other things being equal, the number of stresses in the life of someone with a hard childhood make it considerably more likely that they experience that triggering moment and that they will lack further balancing factors which protect them. The TLDR lesson here is that there are too many factors in the average person's life to point to a particular thing and say, well, there's your problem, as easily as someone might with a seized engine. One final pan's room quote, the mere fact that I have done these things is quite sufficient for the average person. Very few people ever consider it worthwhile to wonder why I am, what I am, and do what I do.
All that they think it is necessary to do is to catch me, try to convict me, and send me to prison for a few years, make life miserable for me while in prison, and then turn me loose again. That is the system that is in practice today in this country. The consequences are such that anyone and everyone can see, crime, and lots of it. Those who are sincere in their desire to put down crime are to be pity for all of their efforts which accomplish so little in the desired direction.
They are the ones who are deceived by their own ignorance and by the trickery and greed of others who profit the most by crime. If you want to weigh in on the Nature Nurture Debate or if you have other questions about true crime and forensics psych, seek me out at Quid Pro QuoCast on Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, Instagram, Gmail, Appet.com, and wherever fine internets are sold. I am currently the most active on Twitter. On a couple of more administrative notes, many thanks to my newest Patreon supporter, Mary Virginia.
I'd also like to thank my newest 5-star iTunes reviewers, Paul of the Varmans podcast, K-L-M-A-Y 1973, who is my first UK review that I know of, Chamaka S. Quire, and my Facebook reviewers, Noelle and Kimberly. Hopefully, you've been following along with me on the recently wrapped 2 Pods a Day campaign, but if you have not, you should definitely check out the site. There are 60 titles waiting for you to discover and 60 more coming in the fall.
We hope to give visibility to some of the great indie podcasts that you probably haven't heard of. 2 Pods a Day encourages you to listen more, listen independent. Find more shows like mine by following at 2 Pods a Day on Twitter and Facebook, or just search the hashtag 2Pods a Day. June's Murder of the Month book pic is Panzram, a journal of murder, which was the source of several quotes in this episode, and frankly, one of the more fascinating, if uncomfortable true crime books I've ever read.
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