{"id":32769,"date":"2016-12-17T18:47:50","date_gmt":"2016-12-18T02:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/the-disturbingly-accurate-brain-science-that-identifies-potential-criminals-while-theyre-still-toddlers"},"modified":"2017-06-04T08:57:27","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T15:57:27","slug":"the-disturbingly-accurate-brain-science-that-identifies-potential-criminals-while-theyre-still-toddlers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/the-disturbingly-accurate-brain-science-that-identifies-potential-criminals-while-theyre-still-toddlers","title":{"rendered":"The disturbingly accurate brain science that identifies potential criminals while they\u2019re still toddlers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Scientists are able to use brain tests on three-year-olds to determine which children are more likely to grow up to become criminals. It sounds like Minority Report <\/em>come to life: An uncomfortable idea presenting myriad ethical concerns. But, though unnerving, the research is nuanced and could potentially be put to good use.<\/p>\n

In the study, published in Nature Human Behavior<\/a> this week, researchers led by neuroscientists at Duke University showed that those with the lowest 20% brain health results aged three went on to commit more than 80% of crimes as adults. The research used data from a New Zealand longitudinal study of more than 1,000 people from birth in the early 1970s until they reached 38 years old. This distribution, of 20% of a population accounting for 80% of an effect, is strong but not unusual. In fact, it follows the \u201cPareto principle.\u201d The authors write in their paper:<\/p>\n

In Pareto\u2019s day, the problem definition was that 20% of families owned 80% of land in Italy. The so-called Pareto principle is alive and useful today: for example, in software engineering, 20% of the code is said to contain 80% of the errors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists are able to use brain tests on three-year-olds to determine which children are more likely to grow up to become criminals. It sounds like Minority Report come to life: An uncomfortable idea presenting myriad ethical concerns. But, though unnerving, the research is nuanced and could potentially be put to good use. In the study, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,1495,47,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-health","category-neuroscience","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32769"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59437,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32769\/revisions\/59437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}