Aggressive By Nature? | Richard Tremblay | EP 171

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Hello everyone, I'm very pleased to talk today with Dr. Richard Tremblay, emeritus professor of pediatrics and psychology at the University of Montreal and emeritus professor of public health at University College Dublin in Ireland.

I've known Richard for a long time, since the mid-80s. I worked with him in Montreal for a number of years along with my supervisor, Robert Peel. I worked on alcoholism and aggression at that time mostly, and I did get to know Richard quite well. He was a pronounced influence on my scientific thinking, especially in relation to subjects like childhood aggression, adult antisocial behavior and criminality, and alcohol and drug abuse.

Richard dominated, I would say, the social science research world in Quebec for 30 years, attracting a massively disproportionate share of research funding because of the quality of his longitudinal studies. Those are long-term studies following people over decades—very clinical studies, very, very difficult to administer and to design and to implement and to fund and to write up and to analyze. It's extremely complicated, complex work, and I think you can make a reasonable case that his work on aggression is certainly among the most profound and unexpected of the last 50 years in Montreal.

He conducted, elsewhere he conducted, a program of both longitudinal and experimental studies on physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development from conception to adulthood, although his main focus is on the development and the prevention of chronic physical aggression. So, that goes in some sense to the heart of criminology. He’s an officer of the Order of Canada, which is roughly equivalent to a Canadian knighthood, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. In 2017, he won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his research on the developmental origins of violent behavior.

I was hoping to talk to Richard today particularly because the issue of aggression, and more specifically male aggression, is extraordinarily popular. Let's say a popular media topic, but the level of general knowledge about scientific research into aggression and the conclusions of that research is not disseminated well at all. People are unreasonably misinformed about what aggression is, how it emerges, how it might be controlled, and how it manifests itself in families, and what the implications of that are for social policy, and all of those things.

So, I'm hoping today with Richard that we can shed some light on all of this, and that's the purpose of the discussion. I'm going to start by talking about some of the topics addressed in the 1999 scientific paper that Richard authored along with a sequence of co-authors called "The Search for the Age of Onset of Physical Aggression."

Rousseau, a philosopher who assumed that people were naturally good but corrupted by the social order, and Bandura, who championed the idea of social learning—a psychologist—revisited Rousseau and Bandura. Richard starts by pointing out that studies of aggression often fail to separate physical aggression from verbal aggression, indirect aggression, microaggressions, let's say, relational aggression, opposition, competition, and other so-called externalizing behaviors.

So, maybe you could start by commenting on that, Richard, because one of the key features of your work is the specificity of your definitions, and we need to know about the reason for that.

"Yes, well, when I started doing research, I was doing research on juvenile delinquency essentially—the general problem of juvenile delinquency. I did my PhD thesis on this and I was brought on to study physical aggression because it appeared to be a narrower type of problem, easier to study than simply juvenile delinquency.

As I worked on that problem of aggression, I realized that people were using the word 'aggression' to mean all sorts of things, and I sort of slowly zoomed in on the physical aggression research thinking that it would be much simpler to study. I did that in part because I was interested in looking at the early signs of problems with physical aggression, and when you start looking at young children, very young children, you become amazed to see how frequently they physically aggress each other. They are much less sophisticated than elementary school children, adolescents, or adults, so the action is really on into physical aggression.

As we measured the physical aggression in early childhood and developmentally over time, it became very obvious that what we were all thinking—that aggression increased with age and sort of peaked in adolescence—was not the case. We showed that physical aggression was at its peak in terms of frequency around age two and age three. We were looking at daycare centers and I finally discovered that the place in the world where you're most at risk of being physically aggressed is in a daycare center when you're between age two and age three. The amount of physical aggression is incredible; of course, they are not well-coordinated and they are not very strong, so the damage is not the same damage as a physical fight when you look at adolescence. But the frequency of physical aggression is clearly there, and to a certain extent, it changed my way of looking at this problem of aggression throughout development from very early childhood until adulthood."

"So, you adopted a narrow focus to begin with and you concentrated on physical aggression. If I remember correctly—and please do correct me—the markers were even more basic markers and measurable markers were kicks, hits, bites, and steals. Is that correct?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Okay, so now one of the problems that scientific researchers in the field of psychology have is that they try to investigate terms that people often use descriptively, like anxiety, but a scientific category needs to be only what it is and nothing else. It has to be it's a particular kind of category. If you say anxiety to someone, you usually surround that with an explanatory framework so that the person can understand what you're talking about. So you don't have to be that precise in your use of the word anxiety, but if you're trying to measure it in a repeatable way, then you have to zero in on something that is essentially as close to one thing as you can manage. It's narrow, and you picked kicks, hits, fights, and steals, and I would say that is observable, but it also, I think, and probably not by accident, gets to the heart of what people are really concerned about when they talk about male criminality and aggression because the biggest socio-cultural and personal impact of criminal behavior—or maybe the most emotionally valid part of it—is the physical violence aspect, and that seems central. Is that fair?"

"Yes, yes it is. Whether it's war or being physically aggressed by a neighbor, it creates more damage and it's a threat to your life."

"Okay, so it's useful to simplify it so that it could be measured and observed, but it was also a move that allowed you to get right to the heart of what was important about antisocial behavior and criminal behavior and so forth."

"And okay, so it's so easy to jump over these things and even in your papers because these ideas are revolutionary in a sense that isn't immediately obvious in the cautious manner in which they're couched because people do assume, for example, that children learn aggression, and that, as you pointed out, aggression is much more common to say among adolescent males or young adult males, but even much to your surprise that isn't what you found. So I would like to ask you two questions about that: like why do you think you were surprised? What had you gone in there expecting? And how does this violate the assumptions that people—including scientists—generally make about aggression?"

"Well, it— you cited Rousseau and Bandura. The research on aggression made me realize that their perspective on 'we are born good and it's your environment that makes you bad' didn't work when you were looking at one of the worst things you call bad, which is physical aggression, because we were following children from essentially birth and the children that we were following—they're now in their 40s and we are still following them. We showed that between birth and adulthood, the time at which you use physical aggression against others most often is between two and three. The reason it's not at one or at six months is because by the time you're two and three you're much more able to address others in terms of you. You can run, you can hit, you can kick. Well, you don't see that at six months, but these behaviors are clearly there at the start. As we followed the children over time up to adulthood, we saw very clearly that the frequency of physical aggression was going on, was dropping. There was less and less frequency of physical aggressions up to adulthood.

So the idea that we learn from our environment to aggress doesn't fit the data at all. It's rather with time we learn not to physically aggress because everybody—even those who were physically aggressing very often—within time, the frequency decreases. There is more damage if you get hit by an adolescent than by a two-year-old, but in terms of frequency, we learn not to use physical aggression as we get older."

"Okay, so what we might say that this constitutes a delayed victory for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes who—"

"Exactly!"

"And from the inventor of the original sin—the idea of the original sin comes from the saint—what's his name? He lived in—"

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"In Rome. This saint describes— he says 'I want to find when I started to commit sins.' He says, 'I went to see the children, very young children, and I can see that I started to sin very early in life. I beat my parents; I hit everybody.' So this idea has been there for a long time, but there has been this big resistance to believe that we are born to live like animals and that with time we learn to live in a civil society."

"Okay, so do you have any sense, Richard, of why that resistance manifested itself? And I would also say it continues to because it seems to me that the default view that people are good—especially children innately—and that they're corrupted by exposure to bad models and by society, I would say that's the default view, and it's certainly the default view on the left end of the political spectrum. So why do you think that that became so dominant if the data—even the observational data—was there thousands of years ago, let's say, and certainly, is there in the scientific literature now?"

"Yes, well, I guess it's a normal reaction of humans to not accept, from an evolutionary perspective, we are animals that have sort of learned to live together in a more sophisticated way than the monkeys and the chimpanzees. But it's very clear that if we take a Darwinian perspective to evolution, it makes a lot of sense. Darwin was also one of those who said at one point, 'I am looking at the way my children behave, and it's clear that my children are using physical aggression within the first year of life.'"

"Yeah, he was a very careful observer."

"He was, and he wrote quite a lot about the behavior of his children, and it inspired him in terms of understanding human development."

"Okay, so back to Hobbes. He's sort of the antithesis of Rousseau, and Hobbes believed that in the state of nature, life would be nasty, brutish, and short, and that it was only socialization that made us civilized. Your data essentially support that viewpoint, except it's more complex because Rousseau wins to some degree because you've tracked out three developmental pathways. So although, on average, young children are more aggressive than older children and adolescents, if you look—your research and others' indicates that if you look at the population of young children, all children are not equally violent, and so maybe you could walk us through that."

"Yes, there are important differences between children. Those who are most aggressive use physical aggression most often early in life are—I don’t have the data in front of me—but it’s not much more than 20–25%, and a lot of children are not using physical aggression. There is the difference between males and females; we get similar developmental trajectories, but essentially most girls do not use physical aggression."

"Okay, so your data—I reviewed this morning—suggested that about 30% of children use very little aggression to begin with, 50% use some, and about 17% are quite aggressive, and they tend to stay that way. They remain relatively high—at least with others, but they decline with time, right? The frequency decreases with time, so right. So those who are likely to be aggressive in adolescence were also likely to be aggressive as children, but all children, including the aggressive children, tend toward less aggression as they mature?"

"Yes, yes, but also, again, we should—it's useful to repeat this—so 30% show very little aggression across the board right from childhood onward; 50% are in the mixed group, using aggression sometimes when they're children, but that declines precipitously as they age, and then there's 17%—they decline as well, but the population of aggressive adolescents is disproportionately drawn from those children who were exceptionally aggressive in their earliest infancy."

"Yes, okay, and they're okay. So then let's focus on the ones that were particularly aggressive, so Rousseau wins a bit because there’s a substantial proportion of children who just don’t use aggression at all as a strategy, so it’s a mixed model. And the people—the aggressive individuals, the biggest risk factor, I think you identified for being in the more aggressive category, the most aggressive category was gender sex. So if you’re a boy, it’s much more probable—and I think the odds were two to one, is that correct?"

"Approximately, yes. I don’t remember exactly, but if you’ve looked at it this morning, you must be closer to—"

"Right, and then you showed, okay, so it was they were more likely to be male, and then there were other important contributors as well. They were more likely, for example, to have mothers who did not complete their high school education. That was the next most important risk factor. What other risk factors for that early aggression did you identify?"

"Well, in most of the studies, we are showing that a lot of the characteristics of the boys who have problems are characteristics related to their mothers having problems—both psychological and social problems. I’ve called that the Hydra problem in the sense that girls who have adjustment problems are likely to have children—and especially boys—who will have important problems. And what do you mean by adjustment problems? If you’re going to characterize what you’ve observed about the mothers who are more likely to have aggressive boys in particular and also to not control it as well as they develop, how would you describe the typical?"

"[ __ ] girls who fail in school, girls who have emotional problems, girls—all everything that we’ve measured—for example, in terms of problems with smoking, with drugs. Almost every problem that you can mention, there is a tendency for girls who have these problems to have children—and especially boys—who will have difficulty. It’s not only difficulties with physical aggression, but their children will have more problems in social adjustment, in succeeding in school.

And so over time, it’s been—it’s become quite clear to me that if we want to help children in terms of their development and high-risk children, the best strategy is to support—to give support to girls early on who have adjustment problems in the school system because they are the best predictors of boys who will have the problems that we are talking about. So there is this intergenerational problem; girls are more involved in helping their children grow up than males, but also it’s related to what’s happening during pregnancy. So if you have a girl who during pregnancy is smoking, taking drugs, using alcohol, it’s quite clear from simply a medical biological perspective that this child’s brain will be affected in a negative way, and that child will have much more difficulty controlling himself.

And that’s quite clear. It’s relatively clear that the boys will suffer from that perspective more than the baby girls, but the baby girls will reproduce the same type of problems that their mother had..."

"So then, hypothetically then, the aggression problem among the boys will occur among the daughters of the girls you’re talking about a generation later?"

"Yes."

"You said it’s transmitted intergenerationally."

"Yes."

"So, the girls that you’re talking about have girls, and they don’t do well either, even though it’s not to manifest in aggression—but maybe their children are also at risk."

"That’s right, and that's the multi-generational aspect."

"Okay, so pregnancy is crucial, and you talked about some of the behaviors that can compromise fetal development. Of those behaviors, is there a rank order of catastrophe? For example, fetal alcohol is extremely toxic during pregnancy, particularly at certain key moments. There’s a period when the hippocampus develops if I remember correctly, and if you drink on that day or that week, then that’s likely to produce long-standing cognitive problems. So there are critical periods: alcohol use during pregnancy, smoking. Are those the major risk factors for pregnancy trouble, or what else? What other factors?"

"Well, there are also some mental health problems in terms of, for example, depression. We haven't measured everything, but most of the emotional behavioral problems that individuals have are likely to affect the next generation. And because mothers are the ones who are getting pregnant, what they do during pregnancy is going to affect the development of their child's brain, and that will affect how well they adjust to their environment."

"After so, do you think that whatever neurological impairment emerges as a consequence of less than optimal pregnancy increases the proclivity for aggression per se or decreases the probability that the child will be able to learn to control it? Is there any data on that?"

"No, it’s a hard distinction to me; no, there’s not clear data on that. I think the approach to getting closer to understanding exactly what’s happening is when we are using a prevention approach, an experiment in terms of prevention. It’s maybe it’s time to introduce this approach. Part of the logi—the studies that I’ve been doing are longitudinal studies where we simply follow thousands of families from pregnancy until the children’s adult life, but a more interesting approach is, but more difficult, is experimental interventions."

"So in those experimental interventions, researchers think up of a way of treating the problem, of preventing the problem, and so we do an experiment. There have been very nice experiments that have been done on helping young women who have behavior problems, emotional problems, and become pregnant. In helping them, supporting them during pregnancy and after birth, so that we can see to what extent we can help their children adjust better to their environment. David Olds in the United States has been doing what I think are the best studies on the experimental studies on helping high-risk girls, and the results he’s been doing—he’s been doing this for at least a quarter of a century.”

"So we have data on the outcome, the long-term outcome for the children, and it’s very clear that giving support to young pregnant women who have behavior and mental health problems is helping their children in the long run to adjust much better to their environment. And interestingly, the latest data that I’ve seen is showing that it’s helping the baby girls more than helping the baby boys. It may take at least two generations to be able to help the boys who would have major problems if their mothers were not being helped."

"So what does the support that’s offered to these mothers that works consist of? What needs to be done? And you also mentioned young women. So is one of the risk factors as well age of mother at birth?"

"Yes, well, yes. Age of mother at birth has traditionally been an indicator that there is a problem with girls. What about marital status? I mean there’s a huge body of literature—and again, correct me if I'm not up to date on this—indicating that on average, children without fathers, stable fathers, do much worse across a whole variety of indices than children with stable fathers. And now you could make a couple of cases for that. You could say that maybe the women that you’re talking about are less likely to attract a stable partner, and so it isn’t actually the presence of the man that’s the determining factor. It’s the fact that instability is more likely in a relationship if the young mother is unstable herself. What do you think about—and you’re not seeing a role for fathers precisely in the developmental trajectory of aggression?"

"So what do you—how do you comprehend the fatherlessness literature and the literature you’re discussing? How do they fit together or not?"

"Well, part of the problem is of mating, and there’s very interesting data coming out from, I think it’s in Sweden—at least one of the Scandinavian countries—where it’s very clear because they have access to the data from the whole population. The data is pretty good, and there’s clearly assortative mating among people who have psychological problems."

"So, you have to define that."

"You’ll have to define that first. Okay, what’s the phenomenon?"

"Assortative mating means that you are mating with a mate that has some of the same characteristics as you have. So if we are talking, say, for mental illness. If girls who have mental illness problems are more likely to have children with men who have mental illness problems. So do you suppose that’s a consequence of access across hierarchies? So anyway, if you’re put into a socioeconomic rung, in part because of your impaired mental ability, let’s say—either cognitively or with regards to mental disorder—that the people that you’re exposed to and likely to initiate a relationship are much more likely to be drawn from that strata?"

"Yes, well—there is assortative mating related to the social class that you are in. So people tend to mate with people from the same social class, but within a social class, there appears to be also assortative mating for having problems, and to a certain extent, it makes sense that if you’re not—if you have mental health problems, you are not attractive to someone who doesn’t have problems. So people who don’t have mental health problems tend to mate with people who don’t have mental health problems, and those who have mental health problems tend to mate with—"

"I mean, this is not—we’re talking about probabilities here."

"Right, right, right. So it becomes very difficult to parse apart the biological influences and the influences of impaired physical health and the sociological and family environment influences."

"What do you see as the beneficial or harmful role of fathers in the upbringing of children in relationship to violence?"

"Well, there is certainly the model in the sense that if the parents—the father or the mother—are using physical aggression with the children and are using physical aggression among themselves, it’s very hard for a child to learn not to use physical aggression. So that there is a moderate—"

"Well, is it modeling of the aggression or is it failure to model the inhibition of aggression, which seems, well, it seems in some sense more likely. Because the thing about aggression, especially at the level that you study, is it’s not that sophisticated in some sense. It’s not that hard to learn to hit; it’s sort of there. What’s hard to learn is to implement this—like if you want someone’s toy, you want to play with their toy, and you’re little, you can hit them and take it, or you can figure out a more sophisticated strategy so that you can both play together. But that’s actually hard, and that in principle would take modeling and proper reinforcement and all of that. And so part of this I think is a model of simplicity versus sophistication."

"Yes, and then we talked about this years ago too, and I’d like to know how your thoughts have stayed the same or changed over time. Do you think that children who are becoming—that children, as they become less aggressive, are inhibiting their aggression, or do you think they’re integrating it into more sophisticated behaviors?"

"Well, I think it’s both. It’s both in the sense that from a cognitive perspective, as we develop, we become cognitively more sophisticated and we understand the consequences of these behaviors. If you hit and you get hit—and with time you learn that you won’t get hit as often if you’re not hitting. So, and there is that control over yourself. And there are the models. So I don’t think it’s one or the other; it’s a number of factors that bring you to understand and to be able to control your behavior and not use aggression and use more sophisticated ways."

"When you see parents who have been successful in bringing their more aggressive children's aggression under control developmentally, have you developed any insight into the nature of the disciplinary strategies they're using? Because I was looking at the outcome studies, the intervention outcome studies today before we talked, and I thought, what happens in families that are functioning well when a child manifests an aggressive behavior? What sort of disciplinary strategies are implemented to encourage that child, let's say, to use his words instead of hitting? Something like that. And again, in my observations of parents who don’t know what they’re doing with their children, they're often left completely adrift when their child manifests aggressive behavior. They seem to have absolutely no idea about how to respond to that in a way that makes it less likely in the future, or sometimes they even covertly reinforce it. So have you—are the micro analyses of disciplinary strategies there yet, or is it still vague and unknown?"

"Well, there are efforts at looking at that, but from my perspective this area is so complex; there are so many factors involved that it’s very hard to dissect in the way that would be satisfying to answer the questions that you are asking. Let’s come back to the experimental interventions. The experimental interventions with pregnant women who appear to be at risk because they have behavior problems or mental health problems—the work that David Olds was doing, the interventions last from early pregnancy until the child’s second year of life. It’s home visitation by nurses, and these interventions with these women have stood the test of time. You look 20 years down the line, and their girls are adapting much better than the control group girls that didn’t get this two years of intervention.

So what we can see from these experiments is that it’s possible to change the life of the children of these girls who had adjustment problems. But getting at exactly what was done within these two years, there is a general push towards let’s do everything we can right to help them, and it’s clear that it works. There is something—it doesn’t tell us the minute details of what happened in the brain of the child, or during pregnancy. It’s telling us these interventions will save us money and will help part of individuals who have problems in the long run."

"And so what do the interventions consist of? So what would a girl who was a pregnant girl who was enrolled in one of these programs expect? What would she receive as a consequence of the intervention?"

"Well, she will receive from the nurse visits at home, and the nurse will consult her into everything that she has to decide in terms of the quality of what she eats during pregnancy, and in the interaction she has with other people, everything that’s difficult for them she can share with the nurse, and the nurse will help solve the problem."

"Well, it sounds like the provision of a grandmother."

"Well, grandmother in some sense. It’s not like a psychotherapy where you follow exactly the way the person is thinking. It’s more of a—these nurses with time learn to deal with these different problems. There is another approach which could be done at the same time as the nurse home visitation program. I think that stopping at age two is too early, and I’ve been pushing for getting another type of intervention at least from age two because we know that age two is the time when the children have physical aggression— the more physical aggression they have. Their problems are at the top at age two, and so the other approach that could be a good complement is daycare—quality daycare.

The experiments that have been done with daycare quality daycare are showing very long-term effects also on the children. I think the best approach that has not been tried yet is to use the nurse home visitation jointly with the daycare quality daycare interventions. The quality daycare interventions have shown that high quality daycare has long-term effects and even intergenerational long-term effects and positive effects."

"Let me ask you a couple of questions about that because that's interesting in and of itself. Yes, do you think that it has— that daycare has particularly positive effects on the kids from mothers whose maternal behavior is impaired? So in Head Start, one of the hypotheses about why Head Start—the wide-scale anti-poverty initiative in the U.S. One of the reasons that it had the successful outcomes it did have, which were included less high school dropout and fewer teen pregnancies and less arrests, if I remember correctly, although no impact on cognitive development, part of the theory about why that worked was that children in particularly bad families, let’s say or particularly impaired families, got out of those families to some degree when they were put in a different maternal, so to speak, maternal setting. So is it removal or is it something that’s being added, and do you see the benefit of daycare across the spectrum of children, or is it specific to the more at-risk kids?"

"Well, the best results, long-term results, come from Jim McMahon's analysis of the data for the second generation. It's clear that high quality— It was the High Scope intervention that was done in Michigan. It shows that the children who were in this high-quality daycare compared to a control group were better off as they became adults, but also their own children, compared to the children of those who did not go to the daycare, were much better off."

"So what are the elements that characterize high quality daycare, and at what ages and for how long?"

"Well, the good quality daycare helps the children learn in terms of interest, social behavior, of interacting, but also in terms of cognitive development. It’s clear. I’ve been thinking recently, looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, that we are going to put a lot of money on helping old people die later. The baby boomers are going to be in the daycare home soon, and there’s going to be a lot of people in the daycare. What happened during the epidemic will sort of push us to put more resources into helping old people in daycare centers—in centers for..."

"Yeah, it's sort of daycare centers for them, right? But we have all these children that need daycare, and quality daycare is equivalent to the school system, and it’s amazing that we are not providing free daycare in the same way that we’re providing free kindergarten and free elementary school and free high school. Children are at their best in terms of learning during the preschool years, and so we should be investing massively into getting all children into high quality daycare that will provide—they will be better prepared to benefit from elementary school and from high school and from university. It’s really amazing that our societies have not provided—are not providing free quality education from essentially birth onwards."

"And there are factors obviously that stand in the way. I mean, I worked in the daycare business for a while when I was very young and developing standards for daycare in Alberta. The younger the children, the higher the ratio of teachers to children necessary, right? So if you have two-year-olds in daycare, you need something approximating one teacher per three two-year-olds. And so it becomes expensive very rapidly. If you want a qualified teacher, you need to spend forty thousand dollars a year, let’s say, to have someone with university education, and divided by three, that’s fifteen thousand, and then you can double that for the infrastructure. So it’s about thirty thousand dollars per child per year at that level for quality daycare, and certainly that’s so much money that many people would not be able to afford that if it was their— you know if they had, especially if they had a couple of kids. And so do you—so that’s part of the reason it doesn’t happen, I presume. And then the question also arises is whether children who are coming from families who are intact and let’s say psychologically healthy to the degree that that’s possible, is there an additional benefit for those children to be placed in daycare or is this something that’s more specifically appropriate for the children who are at risk— for that 17%, let’s say, who are developmentally aggressive and who also have family structure that isn’t optimal?"

"Well, the work by Ekman is showing that it’s the cost-benefit analysis is in favor of doing this for the children who have who need more support. Yeah, well, I really—I think I read recently that it’s 350,000 a year to keep someone in prison. Yeah, it's possible. So it’s extraordinarily expensive in any case, and maybe that figure’s wrong, but your point is that while there’s deferred costs if those early interventions don’t occur and so it’s not a savings. Yeah, so I mean if you put together the home visitation to high-risk pregnant women and that, I mean pregnant women, they go and see doctors. They go when they become pregnant, and it’s easy to identify who needs help and who doesn’t need help. So that’s—"

"So how would you identify them?"

"Well, the characteristics that we’ve identified in terms of schooling, physical and mental health problems."

"Okay, so a competent physician should be able to determine that without— Easy to identify. And so if you give them that nurse home visitation program, then once the baby is born, if the baby has access to daycare, and if the baby has access to daycare until kindergarten, and we did an experiment where we provided support to parents of aggressive children—aggressive kindergarten children—this is another prevention experiment where we randomly allocated support to the parents, home visits to the parents, support to the teacher and social skills training with peers that are highly pro-social. So we created groups where you have the most pro-social kids and you put the least pro-social kids one in a small group, and they become friends with them. The pro-social kids help the less pro-social kids, and we’ve shown that it prevents delinquency; it prevents criminal behavior in adulthood."

"So if you put these different interventions together from essentially the start of pregnancy up to the end of elementary school, you will save a lot of money; you will help a lot of people and prevent a lot of misery in our societies. You grouped pro-social children in kindergarten with antisocial children, so more pro-social children in the group, and I’d like to know two things: how did you formulate the groups? Like how did you encourage the children to initiate friendships within that group, and were you concerned at that point that the pro-social kids would be inclined toward more violence as a consequence of being exposed to the violent kids? Because I remember Joan McCord's work, and they seemed to indicate the longitudinal study in Somerville, Massachusetts, seemed to indicate that grouping antisocial kids together was a very bad idea—that made them—so prisons, for example, are a great place to make people even more violent—which is something that should also be stressed—it's not a wise intervention to group anti-social people together."

"Okay, so you made these groups. How did you encourage the children to make friendships?"

"We did not expect that that would happen. What we did is we put one, I think it’s one or two—I don’t remember exactly—in a group of four or five, and the aim of the grouping was to learn social skills. I mean, it was sort of a class where you learn pro-social skills like: what would constitute something you could teach. And these were four-year-old kids basically?"

"Three or four?"

"No, they were in elementary school."

"Oh, so they’re all—they were—so seven?"

"Yes, okay, okay. So they have a bit more sophistication at that point, and what sort of skills were they taught?"

"Well, it’s—the usual social skill of how you get someone to enter a group, how you help others, what you do when there’s this problem or that problem. So it’s relatively—it’s the social skills work that has been done since the 1960s."

"Okay, so do you think it was the social skills training or the friendships that developed that socialized the kids?"

"Yes, we did not—our aim was not that they would become friends. Our aim was that they would learn the social skills, and if there are good models, then it’s easier to learn rather than having a group of non-pro-social kids trying to learn together. That’s very hard. It’s only afterwards that we discovered that two, three years later, the children who had problems who participated in these groups had more pro-social friends two to three years later. It’s not necessarily—"

"Which is a long impact!"

"Yeah, it’s not necessarily they were friends with the ones within the group. It’s possible, but they probably their behavior changed and they were more acceptable by the pro-social kids than those who continued to aggress."

"I remember when we worked together that one of the things I learned was that the kids were aggressive at age two, and then most of them were socialized by the age of four, and if they weren’t, part of what happened was that it was difficult for the kids who maintained their two-year-old level of aggression at four or something approximating it to make friends, and so then they got further isolated. And that seemed to be because— so that model is something like well your parents are obviously a very important source of socialization. You’ve been indicating that with mothers in particular, but as children age and become more socially sophisticated, their peers become an increasingly important source of socialization, and the reciprocity that is necessary between peers is a very important part of the socialization of pro-social behavior. And so you’re aggressive at four like you were two? None of the sophisticated four-year-olds who play with you because of that, so you’re alienated and isolated, and they continue to develop and you stay where you were and maybe get also angry and bitter and so forth as you’re excluded, and is that still a reasonable way of looking at it?”

"Yeah, that’s exactly what appears to be happening."

"Okay, and so your intervention perhaps stopped that from happening? So comprehensively, you got them back into the play track?"

"Yes."

"Okay, so there’s another implication of your research I’d like to briefly discuss, and then we’ll continue with the main track. There’s a tremendous amount of noise, I would say, in the popular culture at the moment about the structure of human social organizations, critiques of human social organizations. So we tend to exist in hierarchies that are oriented towards a particular task or goal or around a profession, etc., and the criticism is something like hierarchies are tyrannical in their central nature and they’re predicated on power and little else. And yet, if that was true, what I would expect to find as a consequence of your research was that the proportion of children who use aggression as a strategy, even initially when they’re two, would be much higher. Like if power is actually the force that moves you up social hierarchies, then the default mode of interaction should be force. But your research indicates that the ability to use force is there in the beginning, but that it isn’t overwhelmingly widely dispersed. And even more importantly, as children are socialized into these hierarchies, they become much less aggressive rather than more. And so to me that’s a fatal blow to theories that posit that sophisticated hierarchical organizations are likely to be dominated by those people who do nothing but exercise power. And I’d like your opinion about all of that, or at least some of it."

"I guess it depends on how you define power."

"Well, I would say I exert power on you when I’m compelling you to do something you wouldn’t do voluntarily."

"Yeah, but in early childhood, it’s physical aggression, and I think that as we become more sophisticated, what we learn in early childhood is to talk, to interact and convince people by what you say. So it becomes very verbal rather than physical. Well, we learn to dance too. I mean, one of the things you learn if you’re a successful child is how to take turns."

"Yes, yes, and that’s an unbelievably important scaffold for conversation, for example, but certainly for shared games and cooperative activity."

"Yes, yes, and it’s the children that can’t do that and that default to aggression that don’t do well."

"Yes, and I guess there are so many things that go wrong with those who cannot adjust to the group that it’s not one thing; it’s a number of things that prevent them from getting on with others and getting the others to accept them in their group, and so they become rejected, and the rejected are the ones that aggress the others. And to some extent, some have pleasure in being rejected; they provoke others, and they’re happy if the others get mad."

"Well, they'll—look, kids will default to whatever strategy provides them with any attention whatsoever. Yes, and if they can’t do it in a sophisticated way, they’re going to do it in an unsophisticated way."

"Yes, exactly. So, and they can occupy that niche and get whatever attention is left over as a consequence of that. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything that a child finds more intolerable than being absolutely ignored."

"Exactly. I agree."

"Okay, so, how is your work being received broadly? And what I mean, you won this award from the—You won the Stockholm Prize—the 2000—oh, it was Saint Augustine, by the way."

"Yes, it was Saint Augustine."

"So, yeah, I was looking for it. So you won this 2017 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and the Scandinavians have done a tremendous amount of long-term, high-quality work on criminology and aggression and all of that, so you’re obviously receiving a fair bit of attention from your peers. How has your work been received broadly among sociologists and all of the other members of disciplines that have some focus on criminality and aggression?"

"Yes, well, you know, I was surprised when I heard that I was getting the Stockholm Prize. The Stockholm Prize is given by an international—it’s sort of the equivalent of it. It’s meant to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for criminology, and I’m not a criminologist. I was trained as an educational psychologist. I was surprised that they gave me this prize because criminology has been— I mean, it’s closer to sociology; it’s a social science more social than psychology is. So it’s concentrating on group determinants of behavior, economic factors..."

"And social factors rather than intrinsic psychological factors at the level of the individual."

"Yes, yes, exactly. And so the idea that we are—we are born good, and it’s the environment that makes us bad is more the way criminologists would look at life than the fact that we have—we are born to survive in the jungle and the environment makes us adapt and adjust to a less violent environment."

"I was surprised that I was getting the award because my work has been more psychological, and to a certain extent criticizing the perspective that society is not making us bad, but by and large making us better."

"Yes, and I guess that there is clearly in criminology people are recognizing more and more the psychological perspectives of human development, and there is clearly an openness to the type of work that we have been doing both in terms of the experimental work. It’s very hard for people to say, 'Oh, this is only words' when you do an experiment, you have a control group, and you show the long-term effects of these interventions."

"Well, I also think it’s harder to avoid what the data is indicating if the data results have also come as a surprise to the researcher. I mean, you said—and I mean that’s been my experience constantly as a research psychologist is that I find out things that not only did I not expect but I really didn’t like. And, but those are much more compelling. And so you came in at this with a Russoian viewpoint essentially, and but what you saw convinced you that that wasn’t an appropriate perceptual frame, let’s say, and..."

"Yeah, so it’s good to see that the criminologists have been open to this. And what has been the consequence of that, and what do you think the most trenchant remaining criticisms of your approach and your theorizing are? Like where are the weaknesses in what you’re doing as far as you’re concerned?"

"Well, I think the most important weakness is not being able to do experiments that are still— that are much bigger than the experiments that we have done. It’s hard to do these experiments, the randomized controlled trials. I don’t think there’s any more difficult psychological research endeavor than experimental interventions."

"Yeah, I mean, the hurdles are immense. It’s impossible to get subjects, there are ethical concerns of a multitude of sorts, it’s unbelievably expensive, it’s time-consuming, it’s hard, it takes years before you generate data to publish, there’s a high probability that your intervention is going to fail, you need an entire bureaucracy to run it that has to be maintained over years. It’s so difficult, I’m amazed that anyone ever does it."

"Yes, well, over the years, I’ve tried many times to convince—I managed to convince one very rich man to support the work that we were doing, and it’s in his environment that convinced over time—made so much trouble that we had to drop it—not because he didn’t want it, but one morning he said, ‘Richard, I don’t get the support from the people around me, and I can’t go on with this; they are making my life too difficult.’"

"What kind of obstacles did he run into as a consequence of supporting your research?"

"It was mainly the opinion of the people around him. He’s a billionaire; a lot of people want his money, and he was telling me, ‘Let’s go, let’s do it.’ But after a while, I said I’m getting too much negative comments about what you’re doing."

"And what are the objections? Is it focused on the idea that the unpalatable idea that there is a biology of aggression, let’s say, or that it’s early onset and innate in people, or like I’m very curious about this, because I see these sorts of hypothetically ethical objections to scientific endeavor popping up more and more frequently everywhere. And it doesn’t surprise me because the fact that we were ever able to do genuine scientific research at all is a complete bloody miracle. I mean it’s only been around for 300 years and it’s only happened once, so we don’t know the preconditions. But what are the obstacles that he faced and you faced, let’s say, as a consequence of your critics?"

"Well, the consequences are that for me are that I think we have the means to advance knowledge. It’s like medicine, but we don’t have the support from—the research agencies don’t have enough money to support these interventions. So you either get the money from someone who’s very rich who wants to change the world, or you get support from the ministry of education, from the ministry of health. And each time I’ve sort of almost got it and got the support, it was taken away for political reasons."

"And the political reasons are what? What’s the objection?"

"I mean, we should also point out that you were radically successful at acquiring research funds compared to other research scientists, and I mean that also is a testament to your skill as an administrator and a communicator as well as a researcher, because it’s very rare that those three things come together, because they’re all very difficult. So you’ve had success, but what’s driving opposition, and also has that got worse in recent years? What’s been your experience over the last while?"

"Well, over the last year with the pandemic, we appear to be having more success. The Quebec government has been putting in a lot of money in research in terms of helping to see what’s coming, and hopefully we’ll put in—we will be able to put in some experiments. But I guess the biggest handicap is that governments, and I think it’s like that everywhere, are not really ready to experiment. If you think of the education of children, we should constantly be experimenting. Imagine what the faculties of education should have been doing for the last 50 years."

"Yes, and they’ve done virtually none of it."

"No, and that’s my, I guess, my biggest frustration is I can’t believe we don’t have technologies to teach children to read in six months by now. I mean, yes, it’s just appalling."

"I’m curious about the degree to which you’ve run into philosophical opposition because of the anti-Russoian, let’s say, nature or the partial anti-Russoian nature of your research, because it does push against the general consensus of the time."

"Well, it’s from the criminology and social—it’s the social sciences in general. That was the main criticism in the sense that the social sciences are more based on a Russoian approach to understanding who we are than the biological science and the psychology from a biological perspective. But I guess part of that, as you know well, is a personality of the people who go into different fields. We go into a field where we feel at ease with the way the majority are thinking, and it’s very hard to change the way people think, and I guess—well, that’s why we need science and research and experiments, because we’re so hard to teach that we need the data to be hit over the head with it repeatedly before we can alter our presuppositions."

"Yeah, but what you said earlier in our conversation is that it’s relatively rare that you find something that is sort of opposite to what you think and you accept it and you say, ‘Ah, I had not thought things were like that.’ No, you have to train graduate students for like five years before they can do that before they get convinced that that when you’ve actually actually know you’ve discovered something, this is surprising, I’d rather it would go away, but I can’t make it go away despite my wishes. Maybe it’s true."

"Yeah, but it’s so satisfying when you sort of look back, and you say I was going that way, and look, I’m completely the opposite of where I thought I should be going. And people need to understand that that is satisfying. It’s satisfying to say I was wrong. That that’s crazy. The way I was looking at things is the wrong way, and so I think that’s what science provides if you’re doing science not to confirm what you think, but doing science to learn new things and understand things that you did not understand before."

"Well, one of the things that shaped the way I think, I guess there were two things. One was the realization, and that was partly as a consequence of being exposed to Joan McCord’s work in Somerville because that was an early intervention program for antisocial behavior and other at-risk behaviors that made things worse, much to her surprise—her continual personal surprise. I mean, that shaped the entirety of her career because they did a broad-scale intervention with at-risk kids, and yet the outcome showed that the experimental group did worse on almost every outcome measure. And the conclusion was that they sent the kids out of the city to summer camp together, and that seemed to be a fatal error essentially. Grouping them together made them much more prone to aggression, but also all sorts of mental illnesses. And so it was evident whenever you talked to Dr. McCord how shocked she was that that had occurred, and she spent a lot of her time after that telling social scientists, ‘Look, don’t be so sure that your stupid intervention is going to produce the results that you wish it would. The world is a lot more complicated than that.’ And so once you start to understand that your a priori axiom might do a tremendous amount of damage if it is allowed untrammeled access to the broader culture, it tends to make you much more conservative as a research designer and thinker. And that should, you know, it’s very difficult and scary to have one of your axioms violated because you have to do a lot of reconsideration, but it’s also very frightening to know that you could be an agent of catastrophe despite your well-meaning efforts, and that’s actually the most likely outcome when you do a social science intervention, because it’s very hard to make things better, and it’s really easy to make them worse."

"So you also showed that you’ve also delved into the biology of this in a variety of interesting ways. There’s the basic biology, and so maybe we could talk a little bit about the biology of aggressive behavior and its dysregulation. So I’ll start that off. I’ve been very attracted by the behavioral neuroscientists Panksepp and Jeffrey Gray. Jack Panksepp and Jeffrey Gray particularly. And they’ve basically shown that we have modules, neuropsychological models, modules, neurophysiological modules for our basic emotions and motivations: fear and surprise and disgust and play, for that matter; hunger, sex drive, defensive aggression—predatory aggression—which I think is more what you’re studying—is the aggression in the service of an aim, rather than defensive aggression. And so these modules are there right from the beginning; they manifest themselves in individually different ways, and then they’re brought under control or integrated as people develop. What do you see as key to the biological understanding of the kinds of aggression itself, but also of the kinds of differences in aggression that you’re studying?"

"I must admit that I have not been focused on the biological dimensions; except the once I understood about epigenetics, I sort of turned to look at the importance of epigenetics."

"So you were interested in the intergenerational transmission or of aggressive behavior, and is that what led you into—and we should also define epigenetics, let everybody know what that signifies and what you were exploring?"

"Well, I guess it was around 2004. I was part of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research that Fraser Mustard had created, where we were on the committee on human development. And one of our guests was Moishi Schiff from McGill University, a biologist who was working on epigenetics with Michael at McGill University. Moishi, we were—there was a group of geneticists. That group of geneticists was working on human development, and so Moishi came and showed us the mechanism, the epigenetic mechanisms of modern rats that are well licked at birth. Their brains are changed; it has an impact on gene expression, and they live well. If they’re licked, they’re cared for, it’s really important. It’s not a trivial behavior; it’s the focus of maternal love and competence in rats. So, I mean, people often don’t understand how relevant animal research can be, and this is—who studies licking in rats? It’s like, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. This is a key component of social interaction and protection, and it signifies the existence of a relatively benevolent environment.’"

"Exactly, yeah. And so these rats were living longer. So licking had the long-term impact on the lives of these pups. And I remember that was 2004, and most of the geneticists around the table were saying, ‘Ah, this is incredible,’ and they were sort of not really accepting the explanation that that Moishi was was giving, of facilitating gene expression and influencing brain development."

"Yeah, so let’s stop there and take that apartment because this is quite remarkable. So look, one of the things that can happen when you’re exposed to a new environment is that you can acquire new information and you learn. But another thing that can happen is the environment can turn on one set of genes that are relevant to neural development or another set, and so it’s as if in some sense that your genes contain a tremendous amount of not expressed potential. And then you enter an environment, and that set of potentials relevant to that environment turns on. And it’s reminiscent to me of the Platonic theory that all knowledge is remembering, in some sense, is that we have this massive store of potential residing inside our biological apparatus coded at the genetic level, but that’s not necessarily turned on because of the environments that we inhabit or don’t inhabit."

"Okay, so you put rats in a benevolent environment—rat pups in a benevolent environment—and that turns on a certain set of genetic codes that alters, well, things as fundamental as their lifespan. And so what's the epi in epigenetics there? It’s the environmental impact on the genetic structure?"

"Yes, and sometimes that can be transmissible, which is also revolutionary."

"Yes, yes. And it’s been shown with humans. So the—I invited Moishi to work with us, and we’ve been doing epigenetic studies of the children that we are following, and we’ve been showing that the children who are sort of chronic aggressives have—we see differences in epigenetic expression. So we’ve done that with a small sample of boys in our samples, and the results have been confirmed in a larger longitudinal study in Great Britain where they’ve shown that the quality of muttering is impacting gene expression in early childhood and has long-term consequences on behavior during early adulthood."

"Now, in this paper that was published in Nature, it’s an interview with you. It talks about Suomi's research—"

"Research indicating DNA differences in DNA methylation patterns between nurtured monkeys and those separated from their mothers."

"Yes, and Suomi's research indicates that postnatal adversity—the maternal disruption in the maternal bond—affects more than 4,000 genes, what is one-fifth of the genome, and that it tends to cluster in certain chromosomal regions and also that it alters the expression of a gene that Suomi's group had linked to the function of serotonin, which is like—it’s like the conductor of the entire neurological symphony, a very, very crucially important neurotransmitter. And so you also—that you ran a parallel research pathway with Suomi as well, and was that related to the one that you did that?"

"Yes."

"Yeah, yeah. So Suomi was part of the committee of the CIHR committee where Moishi came to give us a talk, and we decided, because Steve Suomi’s work has been—they were separating the babies from their mothers at birth."

"Right, so it’s a very dramatic intervention."

"Yeah, that has been done. It’s Harlow that started this work in the late 1950s—earlier, right? He studied the famous studies with the cloth-covered wire pseudo mothers and the wire mothers."

"Yeah, so it was all about the attachment of the child to the mother. So the brains of these monkeys had been saved, and so Steve Suomi said, ‘Well, let’s look at the epigenetic differences for these monkeys that were separated at birth and those who weren’t separated.’ So it was a wonderful way of showing that separation from your mother at birth has behavioral consequences, but it also has important consequences on gene expression in your brain."

"Right, so it’s even in some sense—it’s even more fundamentally important. And so do you think that the disruption of the mother-child relationship that you see in the families that fail to inhibit the expression of aggression, do you think that that’s akin to maternal deprivation? It’s just a lesser—I mean, you can imagine a continuum of maternal care with absolute separation at one end and perfect bonding at the other. There’s going to be a continuum, and more impaired mothers have a less— the disruption in the behavior is akin to partials to partial separation from the mother?"

"It’s something like that. I mean, psychoanalysts and psychologists have always made much of the necessity of the— Eric Erikson, for example—of the absolute necessity of that initial bond."

"Yeah, and that’s associated with, well, with really basic behaviors: touch, play, like fundamental behaviors. And you see, for example, studies showing that, I remember these studies of mothers breastfeeding, depressed mothers and non-depressed mothers breastfeeding, and the videos were sped up. And you could see the non-depressed mothers and the baby who was breastfeeding in this kind of dance where one would move and then the other would move. And then the mother would move, and there’s this synchrony, and reciprocity already emerging in the course of breastfeeding that was disrupted among the depressed mothers and their children. And so you can trace the development of that reciprocity back way, way to the beginning. And I think, you know, I think it definitely manifests itself in the highly social structuring of such things, such primordial things as feeding. It might also be a reason why it’s the mother’s behavior that’s so crucial in the early stages because she’s so integrally involved in that early reciprocity."

"Yes, and so that’s after birth, but you can imagine that even during pregnancy you have these different effects on what the mother is living affecting the development of the brain of the child in utero."

"Yeah, well, you wonder if, like if the postnatal environment is harsher, let's say, and less welcoming, are the epigenetic transformations producing preparation for existence in a much more Hobbesian world?"

"Yes, well, that’s one hypothesis, that your brain is prepared to survive in a very tough world compared to others who had a more gentle environment during pregnancy."

"Right, so the assumption would be that in some sense the assumption that your biology is making is that perhaps the reason the mother’s behavior is altered in a negative way is because she is genuinely in a negative environment that is a harsher environment—"

"And so aggression perhaps in a harsher environment is associated with a higher probability of survival. But you did indicate—we talked about this just a trifle—you don’t have evidence suggesting though that the more aggressive kids are doing better in their group of rejected children, let’s say. Because I always wonder, is there a parallel hierarchy? There’s obviously a hierarchy in prison, yes. And so what if—if you look at men in prison, what is it that the men who are doing better are doing? Are they the more violent criminals? Are they the more aggressive people? Or is even in prisons—does reciprocity—I mean, obviously if you have a gang, loyalty is still rewarded, and you’re going to be looked on very badly if you don’t maintain the integrity of your gang. There’s a certain risk that’s that—the socialized violent pattern as opposed to the just chaotic violent pattern. Do you think it’s a developmental mechanism gone astray that the epigenetic transformation constitutes? Or is it a parallel form of adaptation?"

"Well, I don’t know. It’s—there are all these very nice things that need to be studied and understood. So for those who are interested in psychology, there’s a lot of interesting research that needs to be done in the future."

"So let’s maybe we can close this off with a bit of discussion about the career of a psychological researcher. It’s not something that people know a lot about. I mean, how would you evaluate your career? Has it been what you wanted it to be, and why? What’s been compelling and interesting about it?"

"Yeah, and who should consider such a thing—such a career?"

"Well, you know, people ask me if I’m still working, if I’m retired, and my answer is I cannot retire. I’ve never worked. I think my whole—when I look at my whole career, I’ve had fun doing what I was doing, and I would never have imagined doing what I did. From year to year, I could not have predicted what was coming. I started my career in prisons, working with prisoners, and over time, I then worked with juvenile delinquents, and then I went to work with preschool children."

"And when you say worked, what did you mean? What were you doing at that time?"

"With—I worked with mentally ill offenders. I was a psychologist who was trying to treat these people—clinical. You were working as a clinical psychologist?"

"Well, yeah, counselor. I was an educational psychologist in a unit of mentally ill offenders, and then I worked with juvenile delinquents, and eventually I went to do my PhD and did my PhD on the treatment of juvenile delinquents. It’s over time; I sort of went further and further in terms of—I started research on kindergarten children and following them over time."

"And what do you think tilted you, Richard? What do you think tilted you in the research direction? I mean, you were practicing as a counselor essentially, and I assume that you found that engaging and meaningful, although I might be wrong; maybe you were looking for something else. But there was something in the research domain that attracted your attention and your interest. What do you think it was?"

"I think the first research I did was at the bachelor level in physical education. I did a bachelor in physical education, and I simply loved doing the research I was doing on the flexibility in yoga. But the pleasure of doing something where you control and you check, and you’re not sure, and you finally get data and you analyze the data—you know, it’s like—I remember there’s a rush in data analysis that’s like pulling the handle on a slot machine. You know, you put all these months of effort into setting up these experiments, and then you do an analysis, and you wait—you know, in 30 seconds you’re going to find out whether this was a complete bloody catastrophic waste of time or whether you’ve actually hit gold. There’s something, you know, I mean, I found statistics pretty dry when I was looking at other people’s data or when I was going through the mechanics of learning it, but once it was being applied to data sets I had generated, I couldn’t get enough of the analytic tools. And there is a real—I mean, I love doing counseling and clinical work, but there was something really engaging and compelling about the research."

"Yeah, and I find that planning the research is interesting. I love writing grant proposals because in writing and proposing, trying to convince others to give you money to do something, you have to review the literature very well, and you sort of understand—you start understanding this idea that you have in your head much better. So the whole process of thinking about a problem, submitting a proposal, doing the collection of data, analyzing the data, and writing up the papers, these are all different things that are extremely interesting to do in themselves. And putting all that together—I mean, 40 years have gone like this because you’re sort of immersed into this work, and there’s something wonderful about having the opportunity to really devote time to specifying and unpacking a complex problem."

"Yeah, it’s something I really loved. I loved doing it collectively too with the people like you that I had the pleasure to work with across time. You know, we could we could focus on a problem that was philosophically compelling. I mean, when we started this discussion with like, well, are human beings innately aggressive or does society make them that way? Well, you know, that’s a major philosophical problem. It’s like, okay, well, and then you sit down with your colleagues and you generate a bunch of ideas about a whole plethora of hypotheses about what might be the case and what not, and that’s fun too because that blows you out of your ideological presuppositions if you have a good group of people, and you generate much more detailed ideas. And so that hypothesis generating part of the process, which is not well specified and almost never talked about methodologically, that’s really exciting."

"So you get people together—they’ve all read. It was one of the things that was so fun about working with you and Bob is that you both had encyclopedic knowledge of literatures that weren’t overlapping and so—and I brought my own knowledge to bear on the subject. The interactions between us and well, many other people that we both worked with expands the whole universe of conceptualization at the hypothesis level, and then you have the ability to find out if you’re actually wrong, which is such a privilege because that’s the problem with philosophy in some senses: you can never be shown to be wrong, whereas science will show you, and then you can do something that’s maybe a bit better as a consequence."

"So, yes."

"Yeah, exactly. It is a ridiculously exciting endeavor despite the obstacles and the difficulty in getting published and so forth. But that’s all built into it too. That, in a way, that’s necessary. So, and you do have the possibility of producing some permanent alteration in human knowledge, you know. I think that it definitely seems to me that the research that you’ve done is of broad philosophical interest; it’s like, well look, first of all, most people aren’t that aggressive right from the beginning, so aggression is certainly not the expression of aggression that we’re primarily selected for, however, there is a subset, and they tend to be pretty stable in that subset, and but those are people who have generally suffered impairments in their primary relationships—fundamental impairments in their primary relationships. So it’s actually a deviation from the human norm, although an important one, rather than something that’s central to the optimal pathway of human development.

And then you have the exquisite pleasure of perhaps addressing that and learning from your attempts to address it in a way that also pulls you in some sense out of the political, right, because it becomes so pragmatic and so practical, although also still philosophically interesting. You can specify it at a level of detail that makes the political irrelevant, and that’s actually when you know you’ve specified it at the right level of detail. It’s like, well no, your ideology isn’t going to provide an answer here; it might provide a hypothesis, but that’s all. And so—and it’s also extremely entertaining to mentor people along that developmental pathway and to watch them learn to think. It’s a very complicated and all-consuming process that research, that of being a research scientist."

"So, is there anything we missed that’s really relevant?"

"Oh yes, there is. I wanted to ask you about sex differences in aggression. So there’s a physical aggression tends to be more common among males. Okay, so you’ve studied boys and girls; we need to talk about the girls. So let’s talk about girls’ aggression."

"Well, girls are used more in direct aggression than physical aggression compared to boys. And I mean, it makes sense, and from a biological perspective, from a physical perspective, girls are less able to win a physical fight than boys. So there is this indirect aggression, and I guess similarly to boys, the girls who are more aggressive compared to the other girls are more hyperactive. So there is aggression and hyperactivity; those are the girls that have in the long run the more problems they aggressive in the sense of in dark indirect aggression."

"Yeah, can you take that apart a bit? What kind of—you have markers for physical aggression: hitting, kicking, biting, stealing. What are the markers for indirect aggression?"

"The markers for—it's talking to some—talking about someone and telling how bad that person is. You know, it's the indirect aggression of more doing things behind the back of others."

"Yeah, so it's subversive reputation destruction?"

"Yeah, essentially that’s—that seems to scale quite well in online environments."

"Yeah, I guess so. So girls who are more in direct aggression prone and are at the same time hyperactive are the ones who will have much more problems in life and are likely to be the mothers who are the ones who will be less successful with their children."

"Right, so it's—there’s no evidence that it's a good strategy? It doesn't seem to be producing a desirable outcome?"

"No, I suspect that and in saying this I realize that we haven't looked at that—the intelligence must play a role in this in the sense that the more intelligent they are probably the more successful they are. But the girls in general who have in childhood are hyperactive and are also tend to aggress others from an indirect way."

"And how early can you see that? Because it requires a certain degree of verbal ability, or do you see young girls dragging one playmate away from another as a form of indirect aggression? Say that would be more behavioral measure. How early can you detect that?"

"Well, we’ve done it from kindergarten. And it’s based on teacher reports. And I guess we’ve done it also in daycare. But the long-term data that we have comes from teacher reports on these behaviors. So we should do a little sideways move there too. You know, there are various ways you can derive data—direct observation; you can get peer reports of children talking about their peers; you can get reports from parents, mothers or fathers or mothers and fathers, and you can get teacher reports. And my memory is that of those—of that category, forget direct observation for a minute—the teacher reports tend to be reasonably accurate because teachers are familiar with a wide range of children's behavior, so they are somewhat better at comparing children, whereas parents have a much narrower exposure. Is that still out?"

"Yes, yes, exactly, and I mean it’s an important finding that kindergarten teachers can identify both boys and girls who will have long-term problems. So we need to rely on what the kindergarten teachers are telling us about the behavior of the children because those behaviors are good predictors of having problems in the long run. And so we need to do interventions early—at the end of kindergarten and in first grade—that are based on these teacher reports. The teachers are really very reliable in terms of identifying early diagnosis, so to speak."

"Yes, yes, yes. Are they girls who are more likely to use indirect aggression? Are they specifically the mothers who are most likely to give rise to aggressive boys, or is it more general? What lack of optimal function? Something like that? Or how specific is it to the proclivity for aggression?"

"Well, we have data up to age 40 in terms of how successful these children became as adults, and the teacher reports of these behaviors, hyperactivity and aggression, are very good predictors of how much money people will have in terms of winning on the job market when they are in their 40s."

"Right, so that’s hierarchical position in the socioeconomic pyramid essentially? And do you remember the effect sizes just out of curiosity? What kind of correlations are you managing to produce between the teacher reports of kindergarten behavior and outcomes at 40?"

"I cannot remember that. Well, the fact that they’re significant at all is dead relevant because that’s a huge gap in time."

"Yes, and I mean, the only thing I can think of that would be that stable perhaps would be the incidence of aggressive behavior because it tends to be really stable, but also general cognitive ability. Because it tends to be extremely stable as well. So hyperactivity, impulsivity, aggression in kindergarten, those who are really not in relatively good control are at high risk of failing in school and failing for the rest of their lives. And this tells us that we can rely on teacher reports, and we should use that to give services to children early on, and our experimental work has shown that if we rely on these assessments and you give support to these high-risk children in early elementary school, it will change their lives. And it’s not being done systematically enough. We sort of wait."

"Wait, wait—interesting. You know, I talked to Bjorn Lomborg a while back, and he’s put together multiple teams of economists to rank order world problems—serious world problems—by the potential return on investment in spending money to solve them. And frequently, what comes up at the top of the lists are interventions in early childhood to increase early childhood health, particularly nutrition, etc. It’s a— there are ROI’s, return on investments, like—250 to one, it’s remarkable. But you’re saying something quite similar, which is, you know, this is this is an intelligent plan, and it would be so nice to see public policy increasingly informed by a combination in some sense of science and economics, right? And—and you could also see that that could produce at least in some cases consensus across ideological barriers. It’s like, well, really, you—if you’re conservative, you really want more criminal adolescents and young males. Probably not, you know. Anything to reduce violent criminality seems to be a plus. If you’re on the left side of the spectrum, you think, well, those are disenfranchised people, mothers and those families, and so devoting resources to the amelioration of that problem seems to be ethically demanded, not just justified."

"Yes."

"And so, hopefully, that’s the purpose of public education, right? Is that we can make this information as broadly known as possible that—and so maybe I’ll sum it up a bit, and you can add anything you want. And so your research has indicated that aggression, especially physical aggression—hitting, kicking, biting, stealing—is not precisely species-typical behavior because most children, young children, don’t engage in that except sporadically. There is a population that does it more regularly and predictably, with greater frequency. They tend to come from disturbed maternal environments. There are interventions that can ameliorate that; they’re cost-effective from a return on investment point of view, and they have broad positive effects. The effects of the sub-optimal maternal environments are—what would you call it? They’re wide-ranging. You see the detrimental effects of a disturbed maternal environment across a wide range of behaviors, including propensity to violence. There’s a multi-generational proclivity, and that’s all accompanied by biological changes that are quite profound, and that also may have multi-generational consequences. And then I’d add to that the gender difference that there are patterns of aggression that characterize males more particularly, although some females, and patterns that characterize females, although also some males. And it also seems to be easier to ameliorate the tendency towards aggression in girls than it does in boys. That seems to be a reasonable coverage of what we’ve talked about. Anything that you want to add to that or that you think people should know that we haven’t talked about that you know about?"

"Yeah, well, I think we’ve covered most of it. There’s nothing that I can think of that