Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring biocultural factors.
[3] Criminal justice researchers Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes argue that many sociological studies that do not control for genetic inheritance of risk factors have misleading or unreliable results.
Another is that neuroimaging studies give strong evidence that both brain structure and function are involved in criminal behaviors.
Under such circumstances, it may have been evolutionarily useful to take very high risks and use violent aggression in order to try to increase status and reproductive success rather than become genetically extinct.
This may explain why males have higher crime rates than females and why low status and being unmarried is associated with criminality.
Furthermore, competition over females is argued to have been particularly intensive in late adolescence and young adulthood, which is theorized to explain why crime rates are particularly high during this period.
[5] The "evolutionary neuroandrogenic theory" focuses on the hormone testosterone as a factor influencing aggression and criminality and being beneficial during certain forms of competition.
Some studies support a link between adult criminality and testosterone, although the relationship is modest if examined separately for each sex.
[5] Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate argues that in non-state societies without a police it was very important to have a credible deterrence against aggression.
Pinker argues that the development of the state and the police have dramatically reduced the level of violence compared to the ancestral environment.
It has been argued that this is due to collectivism and associated characteristics such as out-group avoidance limiting the spread of infectious diseases.
The Cinderella effect is the alleged higher rate of stepchildren being abused by stepparents as compared to genetic parents, observed in some, but not all, studies.
On the other hand, evolutionary novel factors that may be rational to consider from a deterrent perspective, such as how difficult it is for the modern police to detect the crime, do not seem to affect people's perceptions of appropriate punishments.
In some cases in the ancestral environment there may have been benefits from future interactions with the offender which some forms of punishment may have prevented as compared to responses such as reparations or rehabilitation.
Research suggests that individuals may modify what they think are appropriate forms of response to offenders based on factors that once in the past small-group environment may have indicated that they could personally benefit from continued interactions with the offender such as kinship, in-group or out-group membership, possession of resources, sexual attractiveness, expressed remorse, intentionality, and prior history of cooperation and exploitation.