Health Economics & Outcome Research: Open Access

Anti-social behaviour is any aggressive, intimidating or destructive act that destroys another individual's life. Crime is against the public law that has been laid for everyone's safety, but there have always been people who try to breech these laws. As criminal behaviour is problematic to an individual as well as to society, it is discouraged by setting punishments as a consequence of the breech. Genes are the basis of heredity and regulate traits like skin colour, eye colour, stature etc. What is less clear is whether genetics has an influence on a personality trait or whether it is nature rather than nurture that determines the result. Is this because the individuals were born with the predisposition to behave in an anti-social or criminal manner or has the environment they have been brought up in been the main cause. The early attempts to understand the correlation between genes and criminal behavior was made by Goring in 1913. He conducted family studies on known criminals and came to a conclusion that production of criminals is influenced by genes. These findings promoted other researchers to search for genes responsible for criminality. Many attempts were made to find genes for anti-social behaviour but as far as we are aware, no single gene has been identified that expresses anti-social behaviour.