The Welfare Trait
2015 book by Adam Perkins / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality is a 2015 book by Adam Perkins, Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at King's College London.[1]
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Perkins claims that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies are over-represented among long-term welfare recipients. He calls this an "employment–resistant personality profile" and finds that it is heritable.[2]
The book was controversial.[3] It initially attracted little attention, with the journal Nature refusing to review it.[2] In 2016, a talk by Perkins was cancelled for fear of disruption.[4] Perkins later wrote "I was no-platformed by student 'radicals' for telling the truth about welfare".[5] That year, Perkins secretly gave a presentation on the book at the London Conference on Intelligence.[6]
The Adam Smith Institute commended the book's "praiseworthy boldness",[7] however the argument was criticised in The Guardian.[8]
A 2017 review in the British Journal of Psychiatry wrote "it is true that there is good-quality evidence for the transmission of dysfunctional personality traits by epigenetic means across generations".[9]
In 2018, a correction to one of Perkins' papers underlying the book identified seven errors.[10]