Faktencheck: Wie Kriminalität wirklich entsteht

How does crime actually arise? My name is Ilias Gutwis. I am a philosopher of science, author of several books and one of the best-known academic ghostwriters in Germany. In the media, one often hears that crime is caused by poverty or a bad family background, for example. But is that really true? First of all, correlation is

of course not causation. These two things must be distinguished from one another. In relation to this field of research, how exactly do you differentiate between them? Because parents create a certain environment in upbringing, e.g., neglect, divorce, a specific social climate in the parental home, and at the same time they also pass on

their personality structures to their children. So, how do you differentiate this, for example, if the parents have antisocial personality disorder, create a certain environment, and pass on this antisocial personality disorder, which is partly hereditary? What is the key factor now? And a large proportion of the studies on this topic that are discussed on social media are

confounded. Confounded means that these two facets are not distinguished, and therefore no corresponding statements can be made about what is actually important. And there is a very simple and clever solution to this methodological challenge. One compares siblings, for example, but not exclusively, monozygotic twins. They are, in fact, largely genetically identical. Ideally, these siblings would

grow up in different family homes, for example, an adopted child in a home with adoptive parents, who are also more likely than average to be educated and intelligent, and a sibling in the original family with the biological parents. Then, the adoptive parents, the adopted child, the biological siblings in the original family, and the biological