Increased executive functioning, attention, and cortical thickness in white‐collar criminals

Abstract

Very little is known on white collar crime and how it differs to other forms of offending. This study tests the hypothesis that white collar criminals have better executive functioning, enhanced information processing, and structural brain superiorities compared to offender controls. Using a case-control design, executive functioning, orienting, and cortical thickness was assessed in 21 white collar criminals matched with 21 controls on age, gender, ethnicity, and general level of criminal offending. White collar criminals had significantly better executive functioning, increased electrodermal orienting, increased arousal, and increased cortical gray matter thickness in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, somatosensory cortex, and the temporal-parietal junction compared to controls. Results, while initial, constitute the first findings on neurobiological characteristics of white-collar criminals It is hypothesized that white collar criminals have information-processing and brain superiorities that give them an advantage in perpetrating criminal offenses in occupational settings.

Non-invasive brain stimulation of the right inferior frontal gyrus may improve attention in early Alzheimer's disease: A pilot study

“…Our findings are in line with others who also showed association between IFG and process such as attention and executive function in healthy subjects and in different patient groups [3,24,37,45,47,48,51]. Corbetta and Shulman [13] and Corbetta et al [14] reported two distinct frontoparietal networks involved in visual attention, the dorsal and the ventral attention networks, with the right IFG being a component of the right-lateralized ventral attention network that governs reflexive reorienting.…”

Reimagining Sutherland 80 years after white‐collar crime*

“…Chances are greater when participants are playing games of chance where actual prizes are awarded and when odds are short versus long . Such findings are consistent with Raine and his associates’ observations that white‐collar criminals seem particularly driven by the possibility of monetary rewards (, p. 2937). These findings are also in line with the fact that most corporate crime revolves around illegal actions that either yield financial benefit to the firm or create the illusion of profitability through financial manipulations.…”

“…5 Certain characteristics such as psychopathy, self-deception, or emotionality are expected to increase antisocial and offending behavior across the board, but others have unique directional effects for different types of offenders. Raine et al (2012) suggested that high executive functioning and other neurobiological correlates of white-collar crime may confer advantage in navigating the structure and culture of complex organizations and thus increase the likelihood of, say, participation in complex fraud schemes as opposed to stealing from the till. In the corporate context, desire for control-a psychological construct defined as the need to exercise dominance over everyday events-has been found to increase one's willingness to engage in corporate offending (see, e.g., Piquero and her collaborators- Piquero, Exum, & Simpson, 2005;Piquero, Schoepfer, & Langton, 2010), especially when decision makers are under the "illusion of control."…”

Neurocriminology: implications for the punishment, prediction and prevention of criminal behaviour

“…Very little is known on the neurobiology of regulatory crimes, and one study has observed structural and functional prefrontal enhancements, as opposed to impairments, in white collar criminals 82 . the orbitofrontal cortex and middle frontal cortex 83 .…”