Biosocial Theory

Biosocial Theory is an interdisciplinary framework that seeks to understand human behavior and social phenomena through the interplay of biological and social factors. It posits that both genetic predispositions and environmental contexts are crucial in shaping individual behavior, identity, and social interactions. This theory recognizes that biological influences, such as genetics and neurobiology, can affect social experiences, while societal elements like culture, norms, and experiences can also impact biological processes.

Biosocial Theory is often applied in various fields, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology, to better understand complex issues such as aggression, mental health, and socialization. By integrating insights from both biological and social sciences, the theory aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior that respects the diversity of human experiences. It challenges the notion of nature versus nurture as opposing forces, instead highlighting their dynamic and interconnected relationship. This perspective encourages a holistic view of individuals, taking into account the multifaceted influences that contribute to human behavior and social outcomes.

Published in: 2021

By: Bill Kte’pi, MA

Subject Terms

Biosocial Theory

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Biosocial theory is a framework, applicable in many disciplines, for seeking an explanation for human behaviors or behavioral traits in a combination of biological and environmental factors. This framework can explain both deviant behavior, such as criminal behavior, violent aggression, or incest, and “normal” or healthy behavior, such as the role of biology in family dynamics and emotional expression. The biological factors can range from genes and sex to nutrition and exposure to toxins.

Overview

Biosocial theory is a theoretical framework found in psychology, neurology, cognitive science, and the social sciences, in which specific behaviors or social or cultural phenomena are explained with reference to both biological and environmental factors. Although modern biosocial theory did not originate in criminology, it has become particularly associated with efforts to explain criminal or “deviant” behavior, or criminological phenomena such as the crime rate peak in the early 1990s and its subsequent persistent decline.

Many biosocial theories of criminology have trickled into the popular consciousness, from the Cinderella effect theory that stepchildren suffer more abuse than biological children to the “warrior gene” correlated to a stronger inclination to violent crime. Biosocial theory has also offered explanations for other human behaviors such as altruism or the formation of families, and a framework for understanding the biological bases of emotions. Biosocial theory is related to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology but is not always tasked with considering the evolutionary development of the phenomena it seeks to explain.

One of the early contributors to biosocial theory was James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934), one of the early experimental psychologists, whose work in developmental psychology not only developed the better-known work of Jean Piaget and Jacques Lacan but drew heavily on the evolutionary science of his day. As early as 1896 he described a mechanism, now called the Baldwin effect, by which learned behavior influences an organism’s evolution, as well as social mechanisms by which that behavior could pass from one organism to its offspring, including the offspring’s conscious imitation and various social stimuli encouraging the behavior that Baldwin grouped together as “social confirmation.”

The importance of the Baldwin effect was not fully understood at the time because the debate over Lamarckism had not yet been resolved. Briefly, Lamarckism was a school of thought arguing that acquired characteristics could be passed on to offspring. Predating and generally incompatible with evolution by natural selection, Lamarckism nevertheless wasn’t fully discredited until the dawn of classical genetics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Baldwin’s mechanism was proposed in contradiction to Lamarck’s and rediscovered once Lamarckism fell out of favor. Some of Baldwin’s most interesting work, revived and reexamined decades later, suggested a biosocial origin for consciousness and theory of mind, or the ability to realize that other beings experience mental states.

In an 1880 paper, early in the rise of biosocial theory in sociology (before its spread elsewhere), John and Janice Baldwin outline the criteria for what they felt was a balanced biosocial theory, rejecting sociobiology’s reliance on evolutionary explanations and ethology’s privileging of adaptationism. The Baldwins’ view of biosocial theory is one that relies on both biology and environment, especially the interaction between the two, and which understands biological explanations as including more than evolutionary or genetic ones. Nutrition, for example, plays an important role in biosocial theory, as in a broader sense does a consideration of all consumption and exposure: toxicity (especially exposure to toxins in childhood), pollution, and so on.

Further Insights

Many of the earliest criminologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed in a biological basis for a “criminal nature,” though their work is long since discredited, having more in common with phrenology and scientific racism than modern biosocial theory. The most well-known example is Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), an Italian criminologist who took anatomical measurements of prisoners in an effort to prove that certain characteristics such as body hair or long fingers predisposed men toward crime.

In part because of this kind of work, biological frameworks for criminology fell out of favor until discoveries in genetics in the 1950s. Edmund O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology invigorated biosocial theory across many fields. Modern biosocial criminology tends to focus on specific criminal phenomena or the roles of specific biological traits, such as genes or genetically-linked psychological traits, in criminal behavior. For example, Ellis’s 1991 paper “Synthesized (Biosocial) Theory of Rape” is one of many studies of biosocial theories of rape, which in this case attempts to synthesize diverse theories of the 1970s and 1980s in order to build a case for a theory that references a male sex drive that has evolved to be stronger than the female sex drive, a drive to control, the role of male-typical sex hormones, and culturally specific learned behaviors surrounding sexual assault.

While Ellis is no longer the dominant view in theories of rape, the work is a good illustration of the balance between biological factors (hormones, evolution, biological differences between the sexes), environmental factors (learned behavior), and factors like “the drive to control” that themselves might be explained either biologically or culturally.

One of the criticisms biosocial theory has faced is that it, at least in many hands, proposes a biological determinism. This is particularly controversial in biosocial criminology. First, it raises questions about the criminal justice system: If a criminal act is more likely because of the actor’s biology, is it just to punish rather than rehabilitate them, when we are generally inclined to rehabilitate rather than punish those who commit crimes because of severe mental illness? Second, it risks evoking the same essentialism that scientific racism did and gender essentialism still does—that is, reducing an individual to a set of characteristics determined by their biological traits (Walsh & Wright, 2015).

The biological work of early criminologists was closely associated with scientific racism, and Blythe Bowman points out the danger biosocial criminology poses of a new form of eugenics (Bowman, 2006). If certain biological or genetic traits are identified that are associated—in combination with environmental and cultural factors—with the development of behaviors that are criminal or which pose a danger to the public, will this information lead to public support for stigmatizing people with those traits, profiling or monitoring them (in the way that sex offenders are registered on the theory that they pose a danger of recidivism), or even punishing them preemptively? Ethical and ideological questions surrounding genetic engineering or trait-selective abortion to prevent the birth of individuals with these traits are inevitable, as criminology focuses on the genotype of criminal offenders.

In essence, the eugenics fear is a rephrasing of the biological determinism criticism, which in the Baldwins’ view is more fairly leveled at sociobiology, with its emphasis on genes and evolutionary fitness, than at biosocial theory. As the Baldwins pointed out, biosocial theory is grounded not only in biological mechanisms for its explanations, but also in environmental ones. Biological or genetic traits may be identified that are associated with criminal behavior, but in biosocial theory they are not wholly culpable for that behavior. In some cases, such as with mental illnesses with a biological basis, the identification of those bases suggests a treatment, which is both more humane than punitive measures and more effective in crime prevention. In other cases, the biological component of a criminal behavior is only one small part of a picture which still requires the environmental, cultural component, and it is that component which can be addressed.

Biosocial theory is not limited to genotype, furthermore. Some of the important work in the criminology of juvenile offenders has focused on nutrition and early childhood health (including specific issues like fetal alcohol syndrome and exposure to lead paint), while the biosocial theory of arousal theory posits that environmental factors impact mood and brain activity (Ellis, 1996).

Biosocial theory has also offered explanations of parenting and family dynamics (Gillies, Edwards & Horsley, 2016), differences in male and female sexuality, incest (Hendrix & Schneider, 1999), and aging (Katz & Gish, 2015). For example, in the latter case, Katz and Gish examine the ways anti-aging culture impacts the sociological meaning of age, while cosmetic rejuvenation changes the model of “functional age” (Katz & Gish, 2015).

Issues

To explore in depth one area of study for biosocial theory, incest has long been an important subject in anthropology. All human cultures, current and historical, include some form of the incest taboo: a prohibition against sex or marriage between specific close relatives (almost always including sibling relationships and parent-child relationships, often extending one or two degrees further). Furthermore, even cultures without written laws or legal codes have well-established laws about marriage, whether they are formal and enforced by a specific authority or simply universally understood within that culture and enforced by taboo, belief, and social pressure.

The variations in this taboo—the fact that some cultures specifically violate it for certain classes of society (such as sibling marriages among the ruling class of pharaonic Egypt) or that cousin marriages are completely taboo in some cultures, encouraged in others, and permitted but stigmatized or associated with specific subcultures or classes in still others—are as interesting as the existence of the taboo itself, because it is represents such a neat encapsulation of the biosocial theory, at least for many theorists. The universality of the incest taboo seems to imply a biological origin of the taboo; the variation of that taboo beyond its core principles seems to demonstrate cultural and environmental influences on its expression.

The earliest serious theoretical work on the incest taboo was contributed by Edvard Westermarck in 1891, who conceived the idea of an incest avoidance mechanism as an innate (biological) attribute that prevents the genetic damage that would occur from in-breeding; this was in contrast with Freud, who argued that close family members feel an unconscious but unavoidable sexual attraction for each other, and that incest taboos are created and reinforced societally.

While Westermarck’s initial work has been criticized, many theorists have taken up the general idea of a biological basis of an incest avoidance mechanism, in part because of a serious flaw in Freud’s reasoning: the hundreds of thousands of years of in-breeding that would have occurred in early human history before societies were sufficiently organized to develop or enforce such a taboo. A biological incest avoidance mechanism, on the other hand, has an elegant evolutionary explanation: Individuals who possess it are less likely to have offspring with close genetic relatives, which means they are less likely to have offspring who suffer from the effects from in-breeding, while family lines without the mechanism decline over time because they are less healthy.

The incest avoidance mechanism, assuming such a mechanism is heritable, is as clear an evolutionary advantage as there is. It is also one that research suggests is necessary. An incest taboo is not necessary if there is no attraction between family members, but even apart from substantial research showing that many people are attracted to people who closely resemble them (a phenomenon called assortative mating, which would especially include family members, absent a filtering mechanism), a growing body of research called genetic sexual attraction theory suggests the prevalence of sexual attraction between close relatives who meet for the first time as adults.

Researchers on genetic sexual attraction point out that this phenomenon complicates the incest avoidance mechanism. Clearly, the mechanism does not confer the ability to instinctively identify one’s close relatives on sight without conscious information, but if it does not operate even when that information is held, does it truly exist?

One theory is that incest avoidance depends on imprinting in childhood, but imprinting is generally conceived of as a one-way process in which children imprint on their parents, and it isn’t clear how this process would affect a parent’s feelings about the child. One of the points of support for the imprinting theory is Gregory Leavitt’s 1990 review of incest avoidance evidence, which found no evidence for a natural selection basis (Leavitt, 1990). Jim Moore, however, claimed in a subsequent criticism of Leavitt that there were methodological problems in Leavitt’s review, principally that he had not distinguished between incest (relations between close family members) and in-breeding (procreation between closely related individuals, who need not have been raised together) (Moore, 1992).

Leavitt’s response to Moore’s criticism raised important points about biosocial theory as a whole. Some of Moore’s criticism rested on observations about the sociobiology of nonhuman primates. In Leavitt’s view, and that of several biologists he cites in support, “human sociobiology is inferior to the sociobiology of nonhuman animals” (Leavitt, 1992). While by the 1990s there had been significant advances in demonstrating the biological bases of animal behavior, Leavitt’s argument is that human behavior has been more resistant to such explanations, especially explanations that depend primarily on genetic mechanisms with little reference to human culture.

Terms & Concepts

Biological Determinism: The idea that behavior is innate in biological traits; when used as a criticism, it is an accusation that cultural forces are overlooked, as is an individual’s agency.

Cinderella Effect: A criminological theory that stepchildren are more likely to be abused by stepparents than biological children are by their biological parents.

Evolutionary Psychology: A theoretical framework for the field of psychology, applying the adaptationist program of evolution to human psychological traits, arguing that at least some of them are products of natural or sexual selection.

Scientific Racism: A pseudoscience, especially associated with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that borrowed the ideas and language of new discoveries in biology and evolution to attempt to demonstrate the innate superiority of some groups of people over others.

Sociobiology: A multidisciplinary approach to explaining behaviors in species with reference to the evolutionary development of the structures giving rise to those behaviors.

Warrior Gene: Monoamine oxidase A, an enzyme encoded by the MAOA gene and associated with depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, panic disorder, antisocial behavior, and aggression.

Bibliography

Beaver, Kevin B., & Anthony Walsh. (Eds.). (2011). The Ashgate research companion to biosocial theories of crime. New York, NY: Routledge.

Bowman, B. (2006). Biosocial criminology: The threat of another eugenics? Conference Papers—American Society of Criminology, 1–2. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=26954474&site=ehost-live

Ellis, Lee. (1996). Arousal theory and the religiosity-criminality relationship. In P. Cordella and Larry Seigel (Eds.), Contemporary Criminological Theory (pp. 65-84). Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Gillies, V., Edwards, R., & Horsley, N. (2016). Brave new brains: Sociology, family and the politics of knowledge. Sociological Review, 64(2), 219–237. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=115377412&site=ehost-live

Hendrix, L., & Schneider, M. A. (1999). Assumptions on sex and society in the biosocial theory of incest. Cross-Cultural Research, 33(2), 193. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=1826259&site=ehost-live

Katz, S., & Gish, J. (2015). Aging in the biosocial order: repairing time and cosmetic rejuvenation in a medical spa clinic. Sociological Quarterly, 56(1), 40–61. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=100320751&site=ehost-live

Leavitt, G. (1990). Sociobiological explanations of incest avoidance: A critical review of evidential claims. American Anthropologist, 92(4), 971. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=9103184019&site=ehost-live

Leavitt, G. (1992). Sociobiology and incest avoidance: A critical look at a critical review critique. American Anthropologist, 94(4), 932. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=9306015209&site=ehost-live

Moore, J. (1992). Sociobiology and incest avoidance: A critical look at a critical review. American Anthropologist, 94(4), 929. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=9306015208&site=ehost-live

Walsh, A., & Wright, J. P. (2015). Biosocial criminology and its discontents: a critical realist philosophical analysis. Criminal Justice Studies, 28(1), 124–140. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=101832339&site=ehost-live

Biosocial Theory

On this Page

Subject Terms

Biosocial Theory

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Issues

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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