Affect And Cognition In Criminal Decision Making

Research and theorizing on criminal decision making has not kept pace with recent developments in other fields of human decision making. Whereas criminal decision making theory is still largely dominated by cognitive approaches such as rational choice-based models, psychologists, behavioral economists and neuroscientists have found affect (i.e., emotions, moods) and visceral factors such as sexual arousal and drug craving, to play a fundamental role in human decision processes. This book examines alternative approaches to incorporating affect into criminal decision making and testing its influence on such decisions. In so doing it generalizes extant cognitive theories of criminal decision making by incorporating affect into the decision process. In two conceptual and ten empirical chapters it is carefully argued how affect influences criminal decisions alongside rational and cognitive considerations. The empirical studies use a wide variety of methods ranging from interviews and observations to experimental approaches and questionnaires, and treat crimes as diverse as street robbery, pilfering, and sex offences. It will be of interest to criminologists, social psychologists, judgment and decision making researchers, behavioral economists and sociologists alike.

The rational choice perspective developed by Cornish and Clarke in 1986 provides criminologists with a valuable and practical framework for purposes of crime control and prevention. More than twenty-five years later, Cognition and Crime pushes the boundaries of this field of research by bringing together international leading (or emerging) researchers in this area of script analysis into a single volume for the first time. It also presents a series of original contributions on offender decision-making during crime and crime script analysis as well as offering a critical perspective of what could be achieved in the future to further help develop this field of research for prevention purposes. In addition, each empirical chapter treats a specific and important form of crime such as stalking violence, drug dealing, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse, and transnational illegal market of endangered species. Academics and students from various backgrounds, and interested in investigating and preventing crime, will benefit from this book as it applies crime script analysis and discusses new and future developments in regards to this approach and the rational choice perspective. This volume will be of particular relevance for practitioners such as police officers and crime investigators.

The rational choice perspective (RCP) is currently the core theoretical approach underpinning situational crime prevention (SCP). To date, many crimes have been studied through the lens of RCP, which increased our understanding of these phenomena, how they are committed and how they could potentially be prevented through SCP. This book, designed with the hope of moving RCP forward for SCP purposes, takes a challenging but novel step in providing leading experts from different disciplines with the opportunity to express themselves on how we could best achieve this task. This book explores various perspectives, which include the development of frameworks based on the role of situations in crime or forensic sciences for improving crime prevention practices. The need to consider affective states and other offender-related factors to improve our understanding of offender decision-making models is highlighted as a means to better predict which SCP mechanisms may be most useful in discouraging particular types of offenders. Finally, it is also argued that the use of RCP should be more pragmatic and that this perspective should be preserved and adapted based on what we find in our experiments. Taken together, these theoretically distinctive and challenging contributions ultimately guide how crime prevention practices could be best approached in the future.

Although the issue of offender decision-making pervades almost every discussion of crime and law enforcement, only a few comprehensive texts cover and integrate information about the role of decision-making in crime. The Oxford Handbook of Offender Decision Making provide high-quality reviews of the main paradigms in offender decision-making, such as rational choice theory and dual-process theory. It contains up-to-date reviews of empirical research on decision-making in a wide range of decision types including not only criminal initiation and desistance, but also choice of locations, times, targets, victims, methods as well as large variety crimes including homicide, robbery, domestic violence, burglary, street crime, sexual crimes, and cybercrime. Lastly, it provides in-depth treatments of the major methods used to study offender decision-making, including experiments, observation studies, surveys, offender interviews, and simulations. Comprehensive and authoritative, the Handbook will quickly become the primary source of theoretical, methodological, and empirical knowledge about decision-making as it relates to criminal behavior.

Preface -- Editor's introduction -- Rational choice theory, heuristics and biases -- Evolutionary approaches to rational choice -- Multiple interpretations of rationality in offender decision making -- Situational crime prevention and offender decision making -- Biosocial criminology and models of criminal decision making -- Perceptual deterrence -- Game theory -- Dual-process models of criminal decision making -- Personality and offender decision-making: the theoretical, empirical, and practical implications for criminology -- Temporal discounting, present orientation, and criminal deterrence -- The role of moral beliefs, shame, and guilt in criminal decision-making : an overview of theoretical trameworks and empirical results -- Neural mechanisms of criminal decision making in adolescence : the roles of executive functioning and empathy -- Social learner decision-making : matching theory as a unifying framework for recasting a general theory -- Victim selection -- Co-offending and co-offender selection -- Informal guardians and offender decision making -- Police and offender choices : a framework -- Crime location choice : state-of-the-art and avenues for future research -- High stakes: the role of weapons in offender decision-making -- The effect of alcohol and arousal on criminal decision making -- Emotions in offender decision making -- Experimental designs in the study of offender decision-making -- Observational methods of offender decision making -- Understanding offender decision making using surveys, interviews, and life event calendars -- Simulating crime event decision making : agent-based social simulations in criminology -- Modeling offender decision-making with secondary data -- "Deciding" to kill : understanding homicide offenders' decision-making -- Coldblooded and badass : a "hot/cool" approach to understanding carjackers' decisions -- The reasoning sex offender -- Burglary decisions -- Offender decision-making in corporate and white-collar crime -- Organized crime and protection rackets -- Appendix: research methods -- Notes -- Works cited -- Index

Volume 52 is an annual survey of cutting-edge issues by preeminent criminology scholars. Since 1979, Crime and Justice has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology.

The assumption that rewards and punishments influence our choices between different courses of action underlies economic, sociological, psychological, and legal thinking about human action. Hence, the notion of a reasoning criminal-one who employs the same sorts of cognitive strategies when contemplating offending as they and the rest of us use when making other decisions-might seem a small contribution to crime control. This conclusion would be mistaken. This volume develops an alternative approach, termed the "rational choice perspective," to explain criminal behaviour. Instead of emphasizing the differences between criminals and non-criminals, it stresses some of the similarities. In particular, while the contributors do not deny the existence of irrational and pathological components in crimes, they suggest that the rational aspects of offending should be explored. An international group of researchers in criminology, psychology, and economics provide a comprehensive review of original research on the criminal offender as a reasoning decision maker. While recognizing the crucial influence of situational factors, the rational choice perspective provides a framework within which to incorporate and locate existing theories about crime. In doing so it also provides both a new agenda for research and sheds a fresh light on deterrent and prevention policies.

The assumption that rewards and punishments influence our choices between different courses of action underlies economic, sociological, psychological, and legal thinking about human action. Hence, the notion of a reasoning criminal--one who employs the same sorts of cognitive strategies when contemplating offending as they and the rest of us use when making other decisions--might seem a small contribution to crime control. This conclusion would be mistaken. This volume develops an alternative approach, termed the "rational choice perspective," to explain criminal behavior. Instead of emphasizing the differences between criminals and non-criminals, it stresses some of the similarities. In particular, while the contributors do not deny the existence of irrational and pathological components in crimes, they suggest that the rational aspects of offending should be explored. An international group of researchers in criminology, psychology, and economics provide a comprehensive review of original research on the criminal offender as a reasoning decision maker. While recognizing the crucial influence of situational factors, the rational choice perspective provides a framework within which to incorporate and locate existing theories about crime. In doing so it also provides both a new agenda for research and sheds a fresh light on deterrent and prevention policies.