Do criminal offenders specialize in crime types?

A common misconception exists that criminal offenders specialize in types of crime, such as serial murders, domestic violence, and sex offenses. This article explores the research on specialization in general criminal offenders, domestic violence offenders, and sex offenders. This review finds that although there are a few specialists, the majority of criminal offenders are generalists who exhibit wide versatility in offending. The implications for legal and mental health policies are discussed.     

Do internet stings directed at pedophiles capture offenders or create offenders? And allied questions

We consider a tangle of related questions, the first two empirical, the final question theoretical: (1) Do Internet sting operations catch people who are now engaging in or have previously engaged in illicit sexual activity with minors—or suspected of such? (2) Are persons caught in illicit sexual activity with minors likely to be caught by Internet stings—do they appear susceptible to being caught that way? (3) Are the offenses of those caught in Internet stings directed at illicit sexual activity with minors (i.e., where no minor is involved) genuine or manufactured? Along the way we make several ethnographic observations profiling the sort of people caught by these Internet stings, and bring in some relevant demographic data.     

How does crime pay? The differentiation of criminal specialisms by fundamental incentive

Most attempts to determine offence specialisms have not benefited from any formal psychological framework of behavioural differentiation. Bandura's framework (Social foundations of thought and action, 1986) of the fundamental incentives to human action offers an interesting perspective on what might underlie differential patterns of offending. The framework draws attention to the distinction between Material, Power/Status, and Sensory incentives, leading to the hypotheses that crimes which share any one of these incentives will be more likely to be committed by the same person, as revealed through high inter‐correlations, but be less highly correlated with crimes with different fundamental incentives. To test these hypotheses the correlations between 42 offending behaviours as self‐reported by 185 convicted young offenders were examined. A Multidimensional Scaling analysis of the inter‐correlations revealed three distinct styles of offending that could be related to Bandura's Material (Cronbach's α = 0.94), Power/Status (α = 0.90) and Sensory (α = 0.76) incentives. The identification of this psychological basis for the differentiation of criminal styles provides a model for considering offenders' patterns of specialisation which is of value both in clarifying the aetiology of different types of crime and in considering which crimes may be behaviourally equivalent when trying to link them to a common offender or infer offender characteristics from crime scene information. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do different facets of impulsivity predict different types of aggression?

This study examined the relations between impulsivity-related traits (as assessed by the UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale) and aggressive behaviors. Results indicated that UPPS-P Lack of Premeditation and Sensation Seeking were important in predicting general violence. In contrast, UPPS-P Urgency was most useful in predicting intimate partner violence. To further explore relations between intimate partner violence and Urgency, a measure of autonomic response to pleasant and aversive stimuli and facets of Neuroticism from the NEO PI-R were used as control variables. Autonomic responsivity was correlated with intimate partner violence at the zero-order level, and predicted significant variance in intimate partner violence in regression equations. However, UPPS-P Urgency was able to account for unique variance in intimate partner violence, above and beyond measures of Neuroticism and arousal. Implications regarding the use of a multifaceted conceptualization of impulsivity in the prediction of different types of violent behavior are discussed.     

Remorse in psychotic violent offenders: An overvalued idea?

Expressing remorse – or not – appears to influence criminal justice outcomes, but preliminary exploration of both judicial and psychological concepts suggests they lack clarity. We asked the following questions: does psychosis impair capacity for, or expression of, remorse for a homicide or other serious harm to others? Is failure to express remorse for an offence associated with recidivism? We conducted systematic reviews of empirical literature on remorse for serious violence while psychotic, and on relationships between remorse and reoffending regardless of mental state. No articles on remorse for homicide or other serious violence while psychotic were identified. There is weak evidence that lack of remorse is associated with reoffending generally, but nothing specific to psychosis. The literature is strong enough to support a case for research into valid measurement of remorse for offending, associations of such measures with recidivism, and whether a change in remorse can be effected – or matters. It is not strong enough to support reliance on perceptions of the presence or absence of remorse as a basis for judicial decisions.     

Why is violent crime so common in the Americas?

Violent crimes, including murders, rapes, and assaults are substantially higher in the Americas than other regions of the world. This study investigated the role of single parenthood ratios in accounting for this regional variation in violent crime of 39 countries using INTERPOL data. It pitted the prediction of parental investment (calling for a delayed relationship between single parenthood and crime) against a mating aggression hypothesis that predicted a contemporaneous effect. Regression analyses found that current single parenthood ratios were strongly and consistently predictive of violent crimes whereas single parenthood ratios 18 years earlier were not and this conclusion remained following controls for income inequality and the population sex ratio. The results indicate that the regional difference in violent crime is best explained in terms of mating competition rather than reduced parental investment. Aggr. Behav. 32:1–9, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

To specialize or to innovate? An internalist account of pluralistic ignorance in economics

Academic and corporate research departments alike face a crucial dilemma: to exploit known frameworks or to explore new ones; to specialize or to innovate? Here I show that these two conflicting epistemic desiderata are sufficient to explain pluralistic ignorance and its boom-and-bust-like dynamics, exemplified in the collapse of the efficient markets hypothesis as a modern risk management paradigm in 2007. The internalist nature of this result, together with its robustness, suggests that pluralistic ignorance is an inherent feature rather than a threat to the rationality of epistemic communities.     

Does criminal offender treatment work?

In examining the effectiveness of offender treatment, this article attempts to integrate disparate bodies of knowledge. An overview of the effectiveness of offender treatment is presented. To put offender treatment into perspectives, the psychotherapy outcome literature for nonoffenders is briefly reviewed. The complexity of offender treatment is further explored by reviewing correlates and antecedents of criminality that include antisocial personality disorder, antisocial behavior in children, and substance abuse. Implications of the existing body of knowledge on future policy and more active involvement by psychologists are discussed.     

Are juvenile offenders extreme future discounters?

It has been the prevailing view that young offenders are more present oriented than their peers, but this view has little empirical basis other than the actions that have defined these youth as offenders. In the present study, we used a decision task with actual monetary consequences to assess the tendency of young offenders and a control group of high school students to discount the future. The young offenders were not significantly different from the students in discounting the future, even though the young offenders scored significantly higher on a sensation-seeking personality scale, were less likely to have lived with their fathers, and had changed schools more often. Young offenders and control participants were also similar in the extent to which they manifested a clear vision of the future by anticipating which future milestones would occur sooner, in a task pairing milestones with each other and with year markers.     

Do salespeople matter in competitive tenders?

Abstract

Organizational buyers are increasingly employing competitive tenders with objective buying criteria to mitigate the influence of personal relationships with suppliers and reduce the overall cost of buying. This paper investigates the role of salespeople’s relationships with buyers (i.e., purchasing managers) and how they affect supplier selection in such contexts. Drawing on data from 428 tenders across different buying organizations, this study shows that the quality of the salesperson’s relationship with the buyer influences the buyer’s evaluation of the tender proposal, which, in turn, affects supplier selection. Thus, the results support an indirect effect of salesperson relationship on supplier selection even in a tender context. In addition, the results indicate that the effect of a salesperson’s relationship on buyer’s proposal evaluation is contingent on the comprehensibility of suppliers’ proposals and buyer’s product knowledge. These results have significant theoretical and managerial implications for both buyers and suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) tender contexts.     

Is neutralization necessary for criminal behavior?

Criminological theories currently place much emphasis on neutralization of norms, i.e., extension or distortion of norms to allow guilt‐free infraction, as a key element in criminal behavior. This paper examines the major assumptions underlying the neutralization thesis and a critical alternative thesis, which argues that criminal beliefs rather than neutralizations permit criminal actions. Analysis of data from a sample of college students calls into question the neutralization theory assumption of homogeneity of moral values in this society. The alternative thesis is supported by the finding of variation in moral values and its link to differential criminal involvement. It is argued that this evidence precludes the need for a concept such as neutralization to account for criminal behavior.     

Do specific types of networking predict specific mobility outcomes? A two-year prospective study

Previous research has established a general relation between networking and career outcomes, as postulated by theories on protean careers and career self management. We suggest that specific facets of networking behavior differentially affect specific career mobility outcomes over time. In a 2-year prospective study, we examined the impact of six facets of networking on the likelihood receiving a promotion, changing employer, or remaining in the current position. Results show that internal networking is related to promotions and change of employer, whereas external networking is only related to change of employer. Moreover, internal networking shows a differential relation with the temporal proximity of promotions where using internal contacts predicts promotions in the first year and building and maintaining internal contacts predict promotions in the second year. However, this temporal pattern did not hold for external networking, where only maintaining external contacts predicted change of employer in the second year.     

Do People Comprehend Legal Language in Wills?

This study assessed the ability of laypeople to understand a document that most have read and signed: a last will and testament. We focused on concepts that are frequently included in wills, examined whether understanding can be enhanced by psycholinguistic revisions, and assessed comprehension as a function of age. Participants ages 32 to 89 years read will‐related concepts in (i) their traditional format, (ii) a version revised to increase readability, or (iii) a version in which, in addition to those changes, we explained archaic and legal terms. Results showed that increasing the readability and explaining terms enhanced participants' abilities to apply will‐related concepts to novel fact patterns and to explain their reasoning. We found no age‐related effects on comprehension, consistent with well‐documented findings that processing at the situation level of text comprehension is preserved in older adults. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest ideas for further research. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Programmers Prefer Predictable Expressions in Code?

Source code is a form of human communication, albeit one where the information shared between the programmers reading and writing the code is constrained by the requirement that the code executes correctly. Programming languages are more syntactically constrained than natural languages, but they are also very expressive, allowing a great many different ways to express even very simple computations. Still, code written by developers is highly predictable, and many programming tools have taken advantage of this phenomenon, relying on language model surprisal as a guiding mechanism. While surprisal has been validated as a measure of cognitive load in natural language, its relation to human cognitive processes in code is still poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationship between surprisal and programmer preference at a small granularity—do programmers prefer more predictable expressions in code? Using meaning-preserving transformations, we produce equivalent alternatives to developer-written code expressions and run a corpus study on Java and Python projects. In general, language models rate the code expressions developers choose to write as more predictable than these transformed alternatives. Then, we perform two human subject studies asking participants to choose between two equivalent snippets of Java code with different surprisal scores (one original and transformed). We find that programmers do prefer more predictable variants, and that stronger language models like the transformer align more often and more consistently with these preferences.