Week 12: Is Dexter a Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Guy?

I found the Moffitt (1993) article to be very fascinating. Her arguments for the two different types of antisocial people makes sense to me intuitively. However, intuition is not always a good thing to base scientific theories on. I am craving to know if her theories were ever supported empirically.

Moffitt's new taxonomy for antisocial behavior has HUGE implications for data collection. If Moffitt is correct and there are actually two different types of people who present with antisocial behaviors, who can easily be distinguished by when antisocial behaviors begin and whether or not they ever desist, cross-sectional data collection will never be able to distinguish between the two groups successfully! It is integral that researchers use longitudinal research methods if they want to distinguish adolescence limited from life-course persistent antisocial people. I kind of wish the second article we read this week was a follow-up on this article so we could see how Moffitt's new taxonomy faired when people attempted to back it up with empirical support. Has it been supported yet?

Moffitt said that delinquents have lower than average cognitive abilities. She stated that "this relation is not an artifact of slow-witted delinquents' greater susceptibility to detection by police; undetected delinquents have weak cogntive skills too" (p. 680). I really want to know how she knows this! If these people have not been caught, how do we know that they are engaging in delinquent behavior? Are they just very honest and frank when they self-report? I would like to know more about how she came to this conclusion. She cited a past article she wrote, but I wish she added a sentence into THIS article about how it is possible to find out information like this.

Have any of you ever seen the TV show Dexter? Well, I'm kind of obsessed with it. It's pretty amazing. Anyway, it is about a guy who works for the Miami police doing forensics. He helps the cops catch some pretty awful killers. The twist is that Dexter himself is actually a serial killer. And the other twist is that he only kills other killers. He's kind of like a "Dark Avenger"...like Batman, except much creepier. Anyway, I amuse myself by attempting to diagnose Dexter with different DSM disorders... for a while, I thought he was schizoid, because he used to seem as if he didn't need or want any human interaction and he has very flat affect. However, he has murdered close to 40 people, which leads me to believe he has a few antisocial tendencies. (haha...a few...) Anyway, Dexter would definitely be a life-course-persistent. He started off killing animals when he was young (just as many people who end up antisocial do) and he had urges to kill people since he was in elementary school. However, his delinquency is not stable across situations. He doesn't steal/cheat/pick fights or anything like that. All he does is kill people. Does that mean he isn't a life-course persistent antisocial? Dexter has lately been comparing himself to a drug addict--hinting that killing people is an addiction for him. Can you be addicted to killing people? What kind of diagnost would that warrent? If anyone watches the show, please give me your input!! And if you don't watch the show, go rent the first season right now. Stop what you are doing and go to Blockbuster. Seriously. It's by far one of the best shows on television and so fascinating to pick apart and analyze.

Interesting side note: I had no idea if Terrie Moffitt was a male or female, but for some reason, I assumed male. However, I just googled Moffitt and found that she is in fact, a woman! There is a higher prevalence rate for antisocial male behavior--do you think this is why I assumed Moffitt was a male?