Beyond the Archives: Jason Frowley Exploring Psychology & Criminology
For our second edition of Beyond the Archives, we reached out to Dr
from Crime & Psychology to chat about his work and goals here on Substack. Jason was one of the first friends we made here on Substack, and we are so delighted to chat with him and read him.
Jason writes about crime, psychology and related topics.
Dr. Frowley has an extensive archive of publications related to crime and psychology, covering all sorts of interesting cases and phenomena. His style and sense of humor and academic rigor make his work truly valuable. We highly recommend you subscribe if you are interested in these topics.
CC: What sparked your interest in your field of study? Was there anything specific?
JF: A fine question, which deserves at least two different answers! One of them is a bit fanciful, the other more prosaic.
Here’s the first: As long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest not only in crime itself so much as the big questions it drags along. There are questions of good and evil, for instance, and you can’t get bigger than that. Once I became old enough to think about it properly, I felt reluctantly attracted to what’s sometimes called a Manichaen view: that the universe is a vast battleground for the forces of light and dark. By that reckoning, every action that you and I perform assumes weight, or significance. It helps one side or the other gain an advantage. I’m not for a minute saying that I truly believe this – I’m far too much of a scientific realist – but it certainly provides interesting shades to one’s thinking. At any rate, the criminal, from this perspective, becomes a vital player in the cosmic drama. It’s facile to conceive of the criminal as simply adding to the sum total of evil in the universe. Matters may be more complex than that. Someone might break the law in pursuit of a positive goal, for instance – to protect their family, say, feed their children, or eliminate worse evil-doers. Which side are they on? You never know what worse behaviour your bad behaviour has saved you from. As you can see, I consider it the professional academic’s responsibility to add complexity where everything seemed altogether too simple.
Here's the alternative answer: I went to university to study Moral Philosophy. I was excited by the thought that one could reason one’s way into and out of all kinds of intriguing moral labyrinths. Psychology, as it happened, was not even my second subject but my third. Fortunately or otherwise, I discovered that I was much better at Psychology than I was at Moral Philosophy. It felt almost like a scientific way of dealing with similar concerns. Philosophy was a little abstract and I wanted a subject with practical application. My Master’s thesis was about the Cognitive Interview, which is a method for generating information from eyewitnesses. I’ve written a Substack post about it here. So there I was, an undergraduate studying a topic partially related to big issues of good and evil, but which also had real world, practical application. I had no hesitation in signing up for a PhD in eyewitness behaviour.
CC: Why Substack? What do you hope to achieve here? How do you balance storytelling with academic rigor when publishing?
Outside my regular university work, I’ve taught a lot of night classes and summer schools and such like. The students were members of the general public who simply wanted to know a bit more about my subject. It was some of the most satisfying work I’ve ever done. I enjoyed sharing material that I cared about people who simply wanted to know more; not necessarily motivated by passing-the-next-assignment or landing a job. I thought I might be able to recapture a little of that spirit here, not to mention - when no one is watching - go off on the occasional tangent when I find something new and interesting.
How do I balance rigour with storytelling? Do I manage to? –you tell me! If so, it’s because my first love in life is literature. Words come first for me. My experiences teaching evening class don’t do any harm either, I hope. I don’t know whether any of my readers has noticed, but I try to alternate topics: one week we’ll have a piece of rigorous hard-core psychology (something on eyewitnesses, say, or juror behaviour) and then material that you might not expect but might find fun (we’ve recently had pieces on the Joker and a famous Rembrandt painting). That’s one way of balancing things, I suppose.
CC: Briefly tell us what you study and, in your opinion, what is the most pressing issue or the most intriguing unanswered question in your field. Why do you think it matters today?
Maybe I’ll disappoint you with this answer. I have to admit I am no longer what they call ‘research active’. I wish I were but the teaching schedule has become so intense in recent years it now dominates my working life. The last subject I researched was cognitive heuristics, and in particular a fault in human reasoning known as Promiscuous Teleology (PT). That’s an off-putting phrase that really just means the way in which we tend to attribute purpose to inanimate objects (We might say ‘bees fly around in order to pollinate flowers’, for instance, but of course they don’t). PT links to a phenomenon with the ugly name ‘agenticity’: treating objects as if they had conscious intentions. A child running into a room, bashing his head on a table, may smack the table bad-temperedly in response, as if the table intended to hurt him. We’re supposed to grow out of it as we get older, but I’ve discovered that we tend to revert to it when under stress or pressure. That’s why so many otherwise mild-mannered academics can sometimes be found flinging their badly-behaved printers out of the office window.
When bad things happen, we find ourselves under pressure and want to blame someone or something for our misfortune - some unseen force which intended to do it. The unseen force, back in the Early Modern period, used to be Satan and his minions, the witches. Hence the European witch-craze. The object of our wrath may have changed recently (not too many people in the West still believe in witchcraft) but the pattern of thinking has not. We conceive of criminals as the Other, scapegoats, evil forces that deserve to be punished. Of course, the belief that, even if evil exists, it is out there, in the external world, is a tremendously reassuring one. Wherever there are monsters, there are heroes, too. Who could they be but you and me?
There’s a great deal of Psychology to be done in this field. Unfortunately, I may no longer be the chap to do it, but I gift it to any fellow professional who wants to take it up. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to touch on it here and there in the Crime & Psychology Substack.
CC: What’s the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned in your research?
If I were the kind of person to join societies and worry about getting ostracised, I might not mention this phenomenon, because it’s deeply unfashionable. But I’m not so I will:
Earlier centuries saw a great deal of research into the link between crime and physical appearance. As long ago as Ancient Greece, physiognomists believed that a person’s outsides revealed their insides. Their face was, so to speak, a witness for the prosecution or the defence. Centuries later, the phrenologists claimed they could identify the type of crime convicts had committed, just on the basis of their skull’s physical shape. There are remarkable stories of Frans-Joseph Gall ‘diagnosing’ criminals with nothing more than a hand on the top of the head. The kings and queens of Europe were amazed and banned him from Austria.
Somewhere around the middle of the last century, phrenology reappeared in the guise of Constitutional Psychology. Certain positivist models from the 1980s and 1990s made contact with its departed spirit. It’s not uncommon to dismiss even modern neuroimaging studies of violent offenders as ‘sophisticated phrenology’, or ‘bumpology’. As I say, this is a very unfashionable topic – and you probably wouldn’t get funding to do the research these days – but remember no one ever showed that, say Constitutional Psychology was actually wrong (I’m not saying otherwise, but how do we know?)
People used to believe in the so-called ‘doctrine of signatures’, which held that every object in the universe was marked in such a way as to reveal its purpose. By their shape, you could tell that walnuts were good for the brain (can you hear the sound of Promiscuous Teleology again?) Certainly, wasps and similar insects are marked in such a way as to indicate danger. Snakes and spiders look kinda creepy. Historians have sometimes speculated about the ‘witch-detecting gene’, evolved to help us tell which people in our environment are a threat to us. Is there anything to it? Doubtful, although the compelling nature of our interest in crime and criminals, plus the sheer evolutionary importance of knowing which people are for us and which are against us, gives me a niggling doubt…
CC: Are there any historical cases or theories that you believe deserve more attention? Why?
At the risk of repetition, Constitutional Psychology could use another look. But who wants repetition? A number of cases spring to mind but the one that has really intrigued me of late is this (and I offer it with the caveat that there may be nothing to it - but you have to admit it’s curious). The psychologist who was linked to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic at the exact time Charles Manson and his Family were regular visitors was also the last person to see Jack Ruby (Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer) in what passed for a sane and lucid state. His name – little known outside shadowy corners of the internet – also pops up during the same period in connection with the CIA’s experiments into mind-control, and hypnosis. You’d think both he and his experiments would be much better known, yet both remain so obscure that most Psychology graduates have not even heard of them. In fact, they’d probably make you a foil hat if you mentioned them. Nevertheless, the psychologist really did exist and the experiments really did happen. Someone should make a documentary. If they want to pay me consultancy fees, well, I’ve always fancied the role of Executive Producer, if only to find out what an Executive Producer actually does.
CC: What books, films, or documentaries would you recommend for someone looking to understand your field better?
My first thought is what I would not recommend. The list is practically endless, but it might begin with Criminal Minds and go on to feature Mindhunter, Cracker, and the Wire in the Blood books. Like everyone else, psychologists spend the whole day staring at a screen in an office. They’re never to be found writhing around on their living-room carpets in picturesque empathy as they try to work their way ‘into the minds’ of murderers.
Most textbooks I can think of are a little technical and not necessarily aimed at the general reader. Perhaps the best slim introduction to the area might be David Canter’s book in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series. It is quite engaging and written with the non-specialist in mind. For a historical view, I enthusiastically recommend a rather old book by Christopher Hibbert called “The Roots of Evil”, basically a history of criminology up to the middle years of the last century. It’s a compelling read, not just because the subject-matter is intrinsically fascinating but because Hibbert was a proper writer.
Would you like some true-crime recommendations? Here are three: Storming Heaven – LSD & The American Dream by Jay Stevens is one of my very favourite books. It deals with exactly what you expect: the (literally mind-boggling) story of crime, science, and Sixties counter-culture. Chaos by Tom O’Neill is equally Californian, but that’s the only link. It tells about serial murder, conspiracy theory, and psychology gone very, very bad. Finally, Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial and Death is almost as cheery as its title. Nevertheless, it’s one of those rare books that can change a person’s way of thinking. It did mine. None of these are your typical true-crime recommendations, but that’s what makes them interesting.
CC: If the public could grasp just one key idea about crime and justice, what would it be and why?
I like this question! It’s like the one they always ask on my favourite podcast, Triggernometry: ‘What the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?’
This may be a recondite point but it has all kinds of ramifications. The more strongly we believe that crime has causes, the less we can believe in the deterrent effect of punishment. Science is all about establishing causal relations, which means the psychology of crime is – at least in part - about establishing the causes of crime. But this fact entails a big problem. If crime does have causes, it’s impossible to see how anyone could be deterred from committing it. (I’m taking an extreme point of view here, to illustrate the conundrum.) If you let go of a stone, it will inescapably fall towards the centre of the Earth. I use the word ‘inescapably’ because the stone could not possibly decide otherwise. It has no alternative but to fall. The stone’s behaviour is governed by a fixed law of the universe. By the same token, if a criminal’s behaviour is governed by a physical or psychological law, he or she has no alternative but to commit a crime. The criminal can’t be deterred from the crime any more than the stone can be deterred from falling.
Certain countries have the death penalty for such crimes as murder. The motivation is deterrence. The simple fact that it’s difficult to establish whether or not such deterrence actually works is pretty good evidence that it is not half so effective as we might like to think.
CC: We think our readers would find your work valuable. Could you recommend 2-3 of your posts?
Crime & Personality:
Monsters in Fiction:
The Psychology Lesson of Dr. Tulp:
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