Study: Good at Business, Good at White-Collar Crime

Are white-collar criminals born, not made? Maybe.

A new study has found that white-collar criminals may have different brain characteristics than non-criminals. According to an article in The Independent psychological tests on these offenders show that:

they were better at making decisions in the kind of "higher executive" brain functions associated with being good at business, researchers said.

The study found that, in effect, white-collar criminals had more grey matter than a comparable group of non-criminals, suggesting that there may be a biological basis for this kind of criminal behaviour, according to Adrian Raine, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania.  

"They have better executive functions. They have better executive skills, such as planning, regulation and control. So in a sense these people have all the advantages we really want in successful people," Dr. Raine said.

"This study is agnostic in terms of the cause of these differences. All it is saying is that there are some differences."