The optimistic conformity perspective on crime assumes human beings are creatures of conformity, ready to do right so we can fit in with others. Conformist theories hold that the desire to fit in motivates us to follow social conventions and laws when we can, but we might also break laws when lawbreaking strikes us as the way to get the things that can help us live up to society’s materialistic expectations. Humanistic psychology, a branch that views the individual human being (not some therapist) as the best determinant of his or her own abilities and needs, is one example of a conformist perspective. Humanists focus on our better nature, emphasizing healthy people’s personal growth instead of dwelling heavily on our worst qualities. According to humanistic psychology founder Abraham Maslow, nature gave us an inborn drive to become better people and to pursue our potential as human beings, and whether the many challenges we face along the way help us advance or hold us back is up to us. Aside from the innate drive to fulfill one’s potential, humanistic psychologists believe strongly in free will and therefore hold individuals responsible for their own actions. Maslow said we must meet our most basic physiological needs before we can progress into higher levels of personal growth, working our way up through a hierarchy of needs, Maslow’s stratified pyramid.8
Maslow said we work our way up from the most basic needs and that deficiencies in the lower levels will require too much of our time, attention, and effort for us to progress smoothly into higher levels with more advanced psychological functioning. People stuck in the lower levels fixate on their deficits even after meeting basic needs, choosing to focus on whatever they still don’t have instead of appreciating what they do have so they can flourish as human beings. Selina Kyle’s poverty and homelessness,9 Pamela Isley’s timidity and familial neglect,10 and Oswald Cobblepot’s physical deformity and victimization by bullies11 during their respective childhoods get them each in the habit of focusing on their deficits and later lead them each to seek fulfillment with things and thrills as the adult Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Penguin, habits that continue long after they meet their basic needs. “Mother, father, child, and cat-goddess guardian—everything I never had,” Selina remarks while reflecting on the goods that fill her residence, “and now it’s mine. A home of stolen happiness.”12
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Criminal behavior can emerge among those who have grown frustrated over unmet needs or among those who choose to stay mired in a lower level, simply wanting more and more. Psychopaths hunger for baser needs so thoroughly that Maslow felt they could understand love no better than a person blind from birth comprehends the color red.13 The hierarchy of needs provides a useful construct, a popular model with both uses and limitations. Where might Batman himself fall in this hypothesized hierarchy? In seeking to reach peak efficiency as a crime-fighter, he actively decides against pursuing self-actualization, the fulfillment of his potential as a human being. One criticism of Maslow’s theory is that his definition of self-actualization overemphasizes individual development.14 Rather than spend another twenty years studying under Master Kirigi to attain illumination, Bruce Wayne chooses to forego his personal growth so that he may combat evil right away.15
The more pessimistic nonconformist perspective views humans as undisciplined creatures not inherently motivated to conform, beasts itching to flout social norms and wantonly commit crimes—born to be bad but held back by society. As the Joker argues in The Dark Knight, “all it takes is a little push” to bring out the beast in anyone. For example, Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic approach (see chapter 9) and later neo-Freudian views (“new Freuds” subscribing to modified versions of his position) explain behavior in terms of unconscious motives and drives, viewing human nature as essentially antisocial, biologically driven by the id’s pleasure principle to get what they want when they want it. When the Joker gets an impulse to kill or steal, he acts on it without hesitation.
Both of these larger perspectives, conformist and nonconformist, in attributing our basic inclinations to inborn nature, take the nature side of the long-running nature versus nurture debate: a philosophical exchange over whether we act as we do because of how we’re born (nature) or because of how life treats us (nurture). Humanistic psychologists criticize both sides of the nature versus nurture debate for being too deterministic (saying something other than free will determines everything we do), and yet their view includes some determinism by saying we’re innately motivated to become better people. Existentialist psychology, a more philosophical approach, winds up being less optimistic by shucking that bit of determinism to stress the importance of free will as we each find meaning in our own existence.16
Anti-Batman tales, stories of villains whose backgrounds and characteristics mirror Batman’s, depict the power of nurture in determining whether a person becomes a hero or a villain by rearranging the circumstances of the Dark Knight’s origin. Whereas Bruce Wayne sees a mugger kill his parents and grows up to fight criminals as Batman, other boys who separately see police officers kill their criminal parents grow up to become costumed cop killers, the Wrath17 and Prometheus.18 In an alternate universe, the hoodlum Joe Chill raises Thomas Wayne Jr. to become the supervillain Owlman after a police officer kills Thomas’s mother and brother Bruce.19 In the nurture argument’s corner, the learning perspective assumes all these boys started out with neither innate goodness nor evil, no inherent readiness to conform or rebel. This perspective instead declares that we all learn our actions from how circumstances reinforce or punish our behavior or by witnessing how other people act. The branch of psychology known as behaviorism espouses the learning perspective, arguing that psychology should focus on measureable actions when trying to explain humans and nonhumans alike20—not Freud’s unconscious mind, not other psychologists’ conscious processes, not even an individual’s heredity. John B. Watson, behaviorism’s founder—who posited that classical and instrumental conditioning (explained in chapter 5) could influence everything a person does—once said, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”a Albert Bandura expanded on this to include observational learning, a.k.a. imitational learning, to account for how we acquire actions we see others perform, behaviors we pick up from personally having been reinforced or punished.21 Watson demonstrated how both classical and instrumental conditioning could cause phobias, Bandura showed how easily people imitate aggressive actions modeled by others, and many effective therapeutic techniques have evolved from their methods. Behaviorism and its variants like Bandura’s social behaviorism remain influential to this day, even though other views like cognitive psychology, a modern branch of psychology using the scientific method to explore internal mental processes (memories, attitudes, beliefs, problem-solving, information-processing—our cognitions22), have in some professionals’ minds eclipsed it. Although cognitive behaviorists apply behaviorism’s principles to cognitive processes, the strictest behaviorists scoff at the term cognitive behaviorism as an oxymoron23 that contradicts itself.
Bruce’s parents alert him to the need to help others. Teaching him through both word and deed, they strive to reinforce his better qualities, they discuss the reasons for putting others first, and they model altruistic behavior in both life and death. As Bruce grows, he keeps learning more about how his parents lived their lives. Their lives, not just their murders, have taught him to be heroic—which seems to make a strong case for nurture except that he also inherited their nature in his genes. So which is right—learning perspectives that emphasize nature or biological perspectives and others that stress nature? Both. Few who seriously research these issues will argue 100% for either side. Winning the debate, the interactionist perspective asserts that nature and nurture inte
ract to make us who we are.24 Heredity provides a natural potential that life experience may or may not bring out. If your identical twin develops schizophrenia, you have about a 50–50 chance of developing it yourself, only a little lower if separated at birth.25 With no hereditary influence, your odds would be no higher than anyone else’s, but if heredity controlled it completely, every person with a schizophrenic identical twin would develop schizophrenia, too. Nature plays the greater role in some things and nurture exerts more power over others.
Bad Seeds and Early Misdeeds: Juvenile Delinquency
A socialized offender routinely breaks laws because of having picked up criminal behaviors from his or her environment, the product of learning through conditioning and observation, in contrast to the nonsocialized offender (which psychologist Leonard Berkowitz called the individual offender)26 whose offenses arise from a long series of frustrations over unmet needs. Instead of learning criminal patterns from others, the individual offender comes up with some independently. A nonsocialized juvenile delinquent tends to become much scarier than a socialized one and is more likely to stay that way. Despite spending time as Batman’s sidekick, the juvenile delinquent who becomes the second Robin never outgrows his antisocial inclinations and eventually becomes Batman’s enemy, a deadly antihero and sometimes crime lord.
Conduct disorder refers to a disruptive, repetitive, and persistent pattern of antisocial behavior during childhood or adolescence in which the youth keeps violating the rights of others or major age-appropriate rules and social norms. These behaviors fall into four groups: (1) aggression to people and animals, (2) property destruction, (3) deceitfulness or theft, and (4) serious rule violations (truancy, running away, staying out at night without permission starting before age 13).27 Juvenile socialized offenders who commit antisocial acts as part of group activity usually have age-appropriate friendships, show concern for the welfare of their friends or gang members, and are unlikely to betray friends by informing on them.28 Few youngsters of the group type remain delinquent past adolescence. For all the trouble they may get into, they’re still learning social skills through peer interactions, such as they may be (“I wanna break this window; you got the last house”). Nonsocialized juvenile offenders with conduct disorder exhibit more bullying, physical aggression, and other cruelty toward peers and may be hostile and abusive toward adults as well. Sheer callousness, flat disregard for others’ feelings or well-being, is their most striking feature.29 Rejected and unpopular, they lack close, confiding relationships.30 If they do connect with someone else who shares their antisocial interests, the person will usually be distinctly older or younger, not an immediate peer, and their interactions stay superficial. The earlier their antisocial actions begin, the more likely it is that the problems will persist for life, albeit transformed into “adult” manifestations. Those with childhood onset have symptoms of conduct disorder before age 10 and those with adolescent onset do not, although concealment of the misbehavior may cause caregivers to underreport problems and overestimate age of onset.31 Juvenile delinquents who do not start engaging in antisocial actions until adolescence tend to outgrow that behavior, whereas those who engage in pre-adolescent antisocial actions frequently do not.32
Commissioner Gordon’s son James Jr.—an infant born in Batman: Year One and the cute kid Two-Face threatens to shoot in the movie The Dark Knight—during his childhood kills animals out of curiosity, dresses like a homicidal maniac for Halloween,b and apparently murders one of his sister’s friends.33 A doctor who’s certain the boy’s problems do not indicate autism wants to give him a PCL, the Psychopathy Checklist,34 to the surprise of James Sr., who knows “they give that out at Arkham.”35 Gordon says the test measures psychopathology, which means the study of mental illness, although many people, even professionals, use the term to refer to mental illness itself. He’s technically right, if imprecise, since psychopathy falls within psychopathology. Can good people raise a monster? Family situations where solitary aggressive and childhood-onset conduct disorder appear reveal parents with severe marital disharmony, instability, alcoholism, mental illness, antisocial behaviors, and other problems—frequently but not consistently. Twin and adoption studies provide evidence that both genetic and environmental factors influence the emergence of conduct disorder.36 Differences in brain activity among youths who lack empathy are correlational: Maybe the fact that aggressive adolescents show strong activation in the amygdala (the brain structure linking emotions to the stimuli that evoke them) and ventral striatum (an area that responds to feelings of reward) when watching others get pain inflicted upon them means that their brain differences make them enjoy watching pain, but it may be the other way around. Maybe their enjoyment at seeing pain causes those areas to fire up, so that does not prove the neural circuitry created the psychopathic tendencies.37
Where does evil come from? We don’t exactly know. James Gordon Jr. is a product of more than genes, upbringing, and head injury. He’s a child of Gotham City, the city that killed the Waynes and gives rise to a never-ending line of hoodlums and freaks. At age 17, he enters a drug trial for a medication called Diaxamene, designed to “stimulate peptide production in the part of the brain that controls human emotions. It helps people with severe antisocial neurological function experience empathy.”38 (The drug is fictitious, so do not ask your doctor if Diaxamene might be right for you.) No medication can create empathy in someone who has never felt it.39 None. However, superhero comic book stories are science fiction, even the non-super-powered Batman’s stories in everything from his gadgets to the Joker and Scarecrow’s specialized toxins.c Even within the story, the drug does not work as intended. Prodding Junior to contemplate the differences between himself and others, this newfound perspective simply makes him decide normal people are weak and dysfunctional while men in the drug trial like himself are stronger and more highly evolved. He refigures the medication’s formula to create a drug that can suppress empathy rather than stimulate it. The story does not reveal whether his attempt to taint baby formula with the inverted medicine has succeeded, ending instead with Dick Grayson and Gordon Sr. wondering if James Jr. has infected “thousands of infants with a drug that could help them grow up to be sociopaths.”40 Again, this seems unlikely, but we can’t rule out the possibility. The brain is a tricky thing. Experimental lesioning (inflicting damage) to specific brain parts like the amygdala can change which emotions we feel in reaction to particular stimuli.41 A chemical capable of damaging the amygdala and other neural regions that process how we feel about others could conceivably lower its recipient’s empathy and, among individuals with either inherited or environmentally created psychopathic potential, raise the odds they grow up evil.
Integral to the definition of conduct disorder is that the individual is violating age-appropriate societal norms and rules. The child who grows up in an environment where truancy and violence are the norms, where adults all around him or her actively train and encourage such behavior, whether in a war-torn Third World nation or a Mafia-dominated part of uptown, might not qualify for any mental disorder. Adaptive delinquency, in which the behavior is an attempt to adjust to the manifold disadvantages of poverty and inner-city living,42 not a mental illness, might better describe the thievery committed by orphans Selina Kyle and Jason Todd, both of whom have practical reasons for dodging the foster care system (especially Selina, after an orphanage director tries to drown her)43 even though that means scraping to survive before they become, respectively, Catwoman and Batman’s second Robin.
Evil by Many Names
Commissioner Gordon worries that his son’s a sociopath. James Jr. calls himself a psychopath. Which one has it right? They both do. The words—synonymous according to some writers; not synonymous but overlapping according to others—each suit James Gordon Jr., along with most of Batman’s foes. Psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, dyssocial (dissocial) personality disorder, sadism, adult antisocial behavior … these terms a
nd more amount to psychological professionals’ attempts to pathologize a non-psychological term: evil.
Psychotic does not mean psychopathic, nor does antisocial mean unsociable, no matter how many fictional characters or even real-life experts you’ve heard confuse the terms. Conditions like schizophrenia and senile dementia can turn good people psychotic as easily as bad ones. Psychotic individuals have lost touch with the real world as indicated by gross reality distortions, notably hallucinations and delusions (see chapter 8). The world’s most dangerous people tend to be coldly sane. They may think and feel differently from most people, but they know enough of what’s really going on to use it against others. A psychopath who also happens to be psychotic is still heartless even at times when the hallucinations and delusions go away, as when the schizophrenic Mad Hatter uses a “thinking hat” to help himself think more clearly. Schizophrenic Maxie Zeus, cured of his delusional belief that he is the Greek god Zeus, nevertheless sells the Joker venom mixed with Ecstasy as a recreational drug, dangerous despite his nobler intentions.44 More antisocial than psychopathic, Maxie enjoys greater freedom at Arkham, staying out of the maximum-security area where asylum administrators store more dangerous criminals.45 Antisocial means antithetical to social norms, in opposition to society’s rules and expectations for how civilized people act. Antisocial behavior violates people’s rights in big ways. An antisocial individual may be unsociable or sociable, either one—it’s a separate issue. Some can be quite charming, at least superficially, while they go about manipulating others, like the Joker charming his way into psychiatrist Harleen Quinzel’s heart.46
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