General Overview

Recent innovations in neuroimaging, gene sequencing, and gene editing technologies provide unprecedented insights into the biological foundations of human consciousness and social behavior and provide a deeper understanding of how the physical, social, and cultural environment shape these foundations.  Many claim these insights have the power to revolutionize the accuracy, precision, and explanatory power of the social sciences, while others profoundly disagree.  While the growing body of empirical evidence increasingly supports these proponents’ claims, the critics and skeptics nonetheless make many valid points that proponents have not addressed adequately.  My current research focuses on developing a novel solution to these theoretical and methodological debates.  

One specific criticism that is often leveled against transdisciplinary research is the claim that integrating the life and social sciences is impossible by definition because biologists, psychologists, and sociologists engage in ‘fundamentally different types of science.’   My book with K. Ryan Proctor presents a definition of science broad enough to include genetics, neuroscience, psychology, and other social sciences under a single framework to address this claim.  We outline a five-step heuristic for integrating biological and social science research based on this definition.  Specifically, the heuristic explains how to:

  1. identify the basic parts of any scientific theory; 

  2. translate discursive theories into mechanistic models that are more amicable to theoretical integration and empirical testing;

  3. define a theoretical model’s biological, psychological and social dimensions;

  4. use mathematics to model the dynamics of each level of analysis and

  5. methodologically integrate the dynamics occurring within and between levels of analysis coherently. 

Critics also frequently claim that current biologically-informed social science theory fails to explain how genetic, neurological, psychological, and sociological processes act in toto to generate a behavioral outcome.  My book with K. Ryan Proctor addresses this criticism by explicitly detailing how these intra and inter-level processes unfold over time.  Specific sections identify the basic parts and organized activities characterizing the genetic, neurological, psychological, and social levels of analysis and illustrate how each set of coordinated processes feeds up and down to influence other processes. 

Current Primary Research Program

I am currently using the above heuristic to integrate three major micro-level criminological theories of deviant behavior: general strain theory, social learning theory, and social control theory. I focus my attention on these three specific theories for two reasons.  First, empirical evidence in support of each argument is decidedly mixed.  I maintain that neuroscience and behavioral genetics are uniquely qualified to explain why this is and identify how to eliminate this problem.  Second, and in spite of a long-recognized need and numerous previous attempts, criminologists have yet to integrate these three theories into a cohesive framework.  The main reason for this is due to what are widely perceived to be incompatible assumptions about human nature.  My research shows how modern behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and psychology research eliminate this obstacle by creating a single standardized set of assumptions. 

Current Secondary Research Program 

My second area of research focuses on applying the above transdisciplinary framework to improving contemporary research on cognitive warfare and cognitive security. Currently, cognitive warfare and cognitive security are poorly conceptualized. Both terms lack a consistent definition and clear, coherent specification of indicators. Because of this, it is impossible to identify, describe, and explain the underlying causal mechanisms. Moreover, basic and applied research relevant to cognitive warfare and cognitive security is highly fragmented within and between different scientific fields. Consequently, it is impossible to develop holistic mechanistic explanations for the causes and consequences of cognitive warfare and security-related phenomena. Without these explanations, it is also impossible to create high-impact interventions.

To address these limitations, my research is developing a framework that can identify, define, and map discipline-specific concepts, theories, and methods related to cognitive warfare and security to their corresponding concepts, theories, and methods in other fields. I plan to explicate the compositional and causal relationships between the field-specific mechanistic models underlying each concept and standardize operational definitions for each concept within and across fields.