Catherine Page Harden

I work at a university in Texas, which means my university mailing address is just the address of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas.

And so I sometimes get mail from people I don't know.

One day I received a letter from a man who is in prison in one of Texas's oldest and largest prisons.

And he said that he committed a crime as a teenager.

He kidnapped a woman and sexually assaulted her, left her naked on the side of a road.

And I believe he was 15 or 16 at the time he committed this crime.

So he wrote me and he said, I have 10 questions for you.

And one of them was, what makes a child go bad, nature or nurture?

And I was just really stunned by the letter.

Why should it matter if it's nature or nurture?

Why do we look for answers for why we do the things we do?

And when we look to science, are we also sort of looking for absolution in those explanations?

Yeah, so the technical term of what we're looking at is called externalizing spectrum behaviors, which is a mouthful.

And it's basically the idea that sometimes people have problems that are internal, like depression and anxiety, and sometimes people have life problems that are more external.

So they come into conflict with social norms, moral norms, legal norms.

And externalizing behaviors can range from the very minor.

So you smoke cigarettes even though you know that it's bad for you.

You drink alcohol to the point that it's a problem in your life.

To various serious harms like you aggress against another person.

So what we were looking at is could we identify specific DNA sequences, differences in the DNA letters between people.