Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea
Sep 1, 2026 · 19 min · 9 segments
Guest: Kathryn Paige Harden, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of ‘Original Sin: The Genetics of Wrongdoing, the Problem of Blame and the Future of Forgiveness’
Kathryn Paige HardenGuest
Jonathan McCreaHost
And I'm very much firmly in the camp that we really are just following our environment and following the genes that we have.
And I would say that your perspective that it's nature and nurture, but a lot of the things that people didn't control shape who they are is exactly what we also see evidence for in the science.
So this book is me really trying to grapple with, well, what does the science say and what are the implications of that?
Before we talk about the science, as a clinical psychologist, When you found behavior that was morally reprehensible in one of your clients, was that almost always linked to a poor childhood upbringing, a bad experience at home, some sort of trauma or loss? Do you ever really get people who do kind of disturbing things that haven't been subjected to some horrible thing as a child?
So the most common family upbringing that you see in people who commit acts of violence is that they were victims of violence themselves too, or some sort of deprivation, some sort of environmental stress.
If you're looking at, say, incarcerated populations in the United States, the trauma history and the maltreatment history in that population is extraordinarily high.
You do see cases, they're rarer, but they are there, where people don't seem to have anything in their background that you can point to and you can say, that's why they ended up this way.
And at the same time, you see that even people who commit violence and they do have a maltreatment history or an abuse trauma history, they might have siblings who experienced that same environment, but they also didn't grow up to be violent or to be aggressive or to behave in ways that we would call evil.
It seems to be that some people, we can really point to the environmental explanations.
Some people, it doesn't seem like there's much of an environmental explanation there, and there's something really maybe abnormal about their genetics.
It's this nature-nurture combination where they experience an insult, and then also they have genes that make them respond to that insult in a particular way.
And I'm very much firmly in the camp that we really are just following our environment and following the genes that we have.
And I would say that your perspective that it's nature and nurture, but a lot of the things that people didn't control shape who they are is exactly what we also see evidence for in the science.
So this book is me really trying to grapple with, well, what does the science say and what are the implications of that?
Before we talk about the science, as a clinical psychologist, When you found behavior that was morally reprehensible in one of your clients, was that almost always linked to a poor childhood upbringing, a bad experience at home, some sort of trauma or loss? Do you ever really get people who do kind of disturbing things that haven't been subjected to some horrible thing as a child?
So the most common family upbringing that you see in people who commit acts of violence is that they were victims of violence themselves too, or some sort of deprivation, some sort of environmental stress.
If you're looking at, say, incarcerated populations in the United States, the trauma history and the maltreatment history in that population is extraordinarily high.
You do see cases, they're rarer, but they are there, where people don't seem to have anything in their background that you can point to and you can say, that's why they ended up this way.
And at the same time, you see that even people who commit violence and they do have a maltreatment history or an abuse trauma history, they might have siblings who experienced that same environment, but they also didn't grow up to be violent or to be aggressive or to behave in ways that we would call evil.
It seems to be that some people, we can really point to the environmental explanations.
Some people, it doesn't seem like there's much of an environmental explanation there, and there's something really maybe abnormal about their genetics.
It's this nature-nurture combination where they experience an insult, and then also they have genes that make them respond to that insult in a particular way.
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