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]
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]