The Welfare Trait

The Welfare Trait is a non-fiction science book written by King's College London Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality, Adam Perkins. It is based on five years of his research on long-term welfare recipients. His research suggests that long-term welfare recipients tend to have an over-representation of individuals with "aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies - what he calls the 'employment resistant personality profile.'" Dr. Perkin's also found that these traits tend to also be more common in the children of welfare recipients compared to the general population which could suggest genetic transmission.

Background

Central premise

In an article published by the Epoch Times, Dr. Perkins stated that welfare recipient adults tended to have larger families and that the children shared the unemployable traits with their parents. "Viewed as a whole, this data suggests that willingness to violate norms concerning work and social responsibility is increasing, generation by generation. It’s as if the welfare state is gradually warping the personality profile of the population so that more people in each generation are resistant to employment... If the welfare state increases the number of children born into disadvantaged families, it will increase the proportion of individuals in the population who possess personality characteristics that make them resistant to employment" because "more children are being born to welfare claimants than to employed citizens...This raises the alarming possibility that the welfare state has become a production line for dysfunctional, employment-resistant personality characteristics."

Controversy

Numerous academics were critical of Dr. Perkins, his research, and the publication of the results of his research in The Welfare Trait. For example, "a senior editor of Nature, one of the leading academic journals, refused to consider it for review because she regards scientific research into the personalities of the long-term unemployed as ‘unethical’, and a sociology professor whom the publishers had asked to peer-review the book refused to do so on the grounds that any book linking benefit dependency to personality must be nonsense because personality is a ‘capitalist construct’." The conservative magazine The Spectator described actions by academics and media limiting exposure of the book as "left-wing McCarthyism." "You won’t have heard about it or seen it reviewed in any UK newspaper anywhere because his research has been judged to be off limits by the self-appointed guardians of the academic establishment and their outriders in the media."