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Advantages
- Scientific support - explanations like brain abnormalities can be proven by scientific studies, thus minimising the effects of extraneous variables and social bias eg. Schiltz et al. (2007) found evidence that paedophilic offenders had significant volume reduction in the right amygdala and related diencephalic structures.
- High external validity - the scientific studies that back many of these explanations have findings that can be reproduced, thus holding more value in reliability eg. Brunner (1993) and Tiihonen (2015) both finding that criminal offenders had abnormally low levels of the MAOA gene, which regulates serotonin and dopamine.
- Real word applications - explanations like inherited criminality and brain abnormalities have led to specialised use of medical and restorative justice treatment eg. Torjesen (2012) found that criminal behaviour in those with the inherited mental disorder ADHD can be reduced by a third with prescribed stimulant or non-stimulant drugs.
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Disadvantages
- Poor generalisability - individual differences explanations like the tripartite personality make generalisation of biological explanations like brain abnormalities a flawed exercise eg. Aichorn (1935) developed the theory of latent delinquency, which states that lack of teaching of societal norms and rules can result in a disparity in the id, ego and superego, leading to criminal/antisocial behaviour.
- Reductionist - Biological explanations fail to consider the relevancy of sociocultural explanations of criminality such as economic hardship or peer pressure eg. Merton's Strain Theory of Deviance argues that criminal behaviour increases when there is a particular strain on class relations/the goal and the means to achieve the goal such as the increase during WW2 when economic opportunities were scarce for the working class.
- No cause and effect reliability - does criminality stem from or cause brain abnormalities such as a reaction from the amygdala? eg. although Sohrabi (2015) found a link between MAOA-L and aggression, there is no evidence to say that aggression does not cause a neurological reaction that displaces and ignores the regulation of serotonin.
- Deterministic - the belief that human behaviour is exclusively explained by genetics is inherently flawed, because an interactionist approach is needed to fully assess the causes of behaviour especially on a large scale eg. Tiihonen et al. (2015 found that MAOA and CDH13 genes were connected to violent behaviour, but offer no explanation for non-violent crimes, begging the question of whether other causes may be interacting with these genes to cause this behaviour.
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