Emotions in Criminal Decision Making

Abstract

Exceptions aside, emotional processes have failed to occupy a central position in criminological thought, in spite of the fact that they are intrinsically related to issues of crime and criminal justice. As Suzanne Karstedt forcefully argues, “Emotions pervade penal law and the criminal justice system. Offenders, victims and witnesses bring their emotions to the courtroom, criminal courts deal with crimes of passion, and their decisions can occasion public outrage and anger, or feelings of vengeance among victims. Offenders feel shame and remorse when they have transgressed the laws, and offences provoke feelings of moral disgust. At the same time, victims as well as offenders elicit our compassion and sympathy” (Karstedt 2002, cited under General Overviews). Yet surprisingly little systematic research has attempted to measure emotions or assess their influence on crime and related areas of criminal justice. As far as they have, emotions have featured more prominently in qualitative accounts using narrative or ethnographic approaches, compared with quantitative approaches that focus more on the criminal choice process. In recent years, emotions have also received more scholarly attention from more quantitatively oriented scholars, however, and studies are increasingly starting to address how they influence criminal decision making. Other behavioral and cognitive disciplines with more established research traditions on emotions, such as social psychology, can provide valuable input for criminologists in this context. This article provides an overview of the criminological literature on emotions and criminal decision making, and it also draws from relevant research and theorizing from other disciplines.

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
Emotions in Offender
DecisionMaking
-  
A it has been contended that emotions have been incorporated into all the
major theoretical perspectives in criminology (Benson and Livelsberger ), it is
probably more accurate to argue that with some notable exceptions (Braithwaite ;
Agnew ), emotional processes have failed to occupy a central position in crimi-
nological thought (Bouard, Exum, and Paternoster ; Giordano, Schroeder, and
Cernkovich ; Nagin ). As De Haan and Loader () observe, many estab-
lished modes of criminological thought pay little attention to or ignore entirely the
impact of emotions on their subject matter.
Importantly, research and theorizing that has given a more prominent role to emo-
tions has largely remained conned to narrative and interpretative studies or has treated
them as enduring individual dispositions (Loand ; Katz , ; Braithwaite
; Agnew ; Shover ; Lopez and Emmer ; Athens ; Wikström ;
Giordano et al. ). Very little attention has been given to the actual decision- making
processes of oenders. is inattention to the choice process has diverted attention from
issues that are fundamental to understanding crime as a phenomenon and also created a
fundamental disconnect with criminal law and, therefore, important questions of public
policy (Nagin , p. ).
As will be argued in more detail later, crime research examining emotions that did
take a decision- making approach (Grasmick and Bursik ; Grasmick, Bursik, and
Arneklev ; Nagin and Paternoster ; Piquero and Tibbetts ) has tended to
examine emotions as predictions of future feeling states rather than of emotions actually
experienced at the time of decision. Hence, these studies still modeled the decision pro-
cess as a largely cognitive enterprise and did not fully acknowledge the role of emotions
on oender decision making.
To begin, the next section provides some general observations and denitions regard-
ing emotions drawing from criminology’s sister disciplines in the social sciences. en,
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criminological decision- making research that has addressed the role of emotions is
discussed.
I. W A E
Whereas the question as to what exactly are emotions is still the subject of lively debate
among theorists (Keltner and Lerner ), many of their properties attract little dis-
agreement among experts. Emotions are one type or manifestation of what is referred
as “aect,” which is a general term denoting the subjective experience of feelings, such
as emotions, but also refers to moods and other visceral drive states, such as pain, drug
craving, and sexual arousal (Loewenstein ). Oen, these dierent feeling states are
indiscriminately referred to as emotions in the criminological literature, but this is inac-
curate. Moods and emotions are closely related but nonetheless distinct feeling states
(Beedie, Terry and Lane ). Moods are low- intensity, diuse (i.e., unfocused), and
relatively enduring aective states without a clear antecedent cause and therefore have
little cognitive content (e.g., feeling good or feeling bad) (Forgas , p.). Emotions,
on the other hand, are more intense than moods, more focused, short- lived, and usu-
ally do have a denite cause (e.g., being angry at, or fearful of, something) (Forgas ,
p.). Most denitions of emotion stress that they orient people to responding to events
in their environment (Keltner and Lerner ). Frijda and Mesquita (, p.), for
example, argue that emotions are principally modes of relating to the environment—
that is, states of readiness for engaging or not engaging in interaction with that
environment.
In the criminological literature, what is sometimes erroneously referred to as emo-
tions in fact refers to a more enduring propensity to experience certain types of feelings,
such as the tendency to experience negative feelings including anxiety and anger. is
is the case, for example, in general strain theory (Agnew ), according to which the
occurrence of negative life events and circumstances and the loss of positive stimuli are
assumed to generate negative feelings, such as anger and frustration, that create a pres-
sure for “corrective action,” which can take the form of criminal conduct (Agnew ,
). As Nagin (, p.) observes, the idea of emotions as a social force or external
agent that drives the individual toward or away from crime embedded in this type of
theory lacks a sense of people making choices— what is sometimes referred to human
agency. is chapter focuses on emotions as momentary and short- lived feelings with
a clear antecedent cause, and their inuence on the actual choice process, and not on
individual dispositions or enduring feeling states. e next section discusses a class of
emotions that have been dealt with in criminological research, and it is argued that these
emotions in particular have properties that make them well suited for incorporation in
rational choice frameworks. Later, it is argued that this does not apply to other types of
emotions for which these frameworks are ill- equipped.
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A. Shame and Guilt asPredictions of Future Feelings
One class of emotions that has attracted the attention of criminal decision making
researchers is formed by those emotions that share a moral character, such as shame
and guilt. ese emotions have historically also been pivotal in concepts of crime, jus-
tice, and culpability (Karstedt ). Moral emotions “function as an emotional moral
barometer by providing immediate and salient feedback on our social and moral
acceptability. at is, when we sin, transgress, or err, aversive feelings of shame, guilt, or
embarrassment are likely to ensue” (Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek , p. ). Shame
and guilt are also referred to as self- conscious emotions in the sense that they involve
self- reection and evaluation (Lewis ).
e fact that guilt and shame have a negative hedonic value or, in psychological par-
lance, are negatively valenced means that people are motivated to avoid experiencing
them and therefore have an intrinsic incentive to abide by social norms and to do the
right thing while avoiding doing wrong (van Winden and Ash ). When values or
norms are violated, they produce a sense of psychological discomfort, and the more
serious the perceived violation, the more painful is this emotional experience (Tangney,
Mashek, and Stuewig ). For example, whereas a speeding ticket might result in mild
embarrassment, a drunk- driving arrest could activate intensely uncomfortable feelings
of shame (van Winden and Ash , p.).
In criminological decision- making research, self- conscious and moral emotions
such as shame and guilt have tended to be modeled as anticipated costs to be taken into
account by the decision maker (Grasmick and Bursik ; Grasmick, Bursik, and Kinsey
; Bachman, Paternoster, and Ward, ; Grasmick, Bursik, and Arneklev ; Nagin
and Paternoster ; Paternoster and Simpson , ; Piquero and Tibbetts ;
Bouard, Exum, and Paternoster ; Kamerdze, Loughran, and Paternoster ;
Tibbetts ). ese studies have generally attempted to t emotions within rational
choice and deterrence frameworks. For example, Grasmick etal. (, pp.– ) argue
that the threat of shame and embarrassment function similarly to the threat of legal sanc-
tions by reducing the expected utility of a contemplated behavior and by varying along
the dimensions of subjective certainty and subjective severity. e desire to avoid feeling
the pangs of their conscience is assumed to steer people away from committing crime.
e dierence with formal sanctions is that instead of the state, is that in the case of moral
emotions the source of the threat of punishment is the self (Grasmick and Bursik).
In these studies, shame and guilt are not experienced as feelings at the moment of
decision making but are in fact cognitions about future feeling states; they are predictions
of aversive feeling states that may emerge aer a decision has been made (Frijda ;
Loewenstein etal. ; Bouard ; Loewenstein and Lerner ). Loewenstein
etal. () and Loewenstein and Lerner () refer to these types of emotions as antic-
ipated emotions, to be distinguished from emotions that are actually experienced at the
time of decision, such as the fear of negative consequences following criminal conduct
or the anger felt toward a wrongdoer. From a theoretical perspective, this distinction is
relevant because even though anticipated emotions can be and have been incorporated
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in rational choice- based models, the decision process remains modeled as the implic-
itly cognitive task of predicting future emotions and weighing them in terms of their
expected utility (Loewenstein etal.).
B. e Immediate Emotions Fear andAnger
Like shame and guilt, fear and anger have a negative hedonic value and are nega-
tively valenced. Dierent from shame and guilt, however, anger and fear are immedi-
ate rather than anticipated in nature. at is, in the decision- making context, fear and
anger constitute immediate visceral reactions to an event, situation, individual, or
prospect of sanction rather than feelings expected to be experienced sometime in the
future (Loewenstein et al. ; Loewenstein and Lerner ). Specically, immedi-
ate emotions “reect the combined eects of emotions that arise from contemplating
the consequences of the decision itself— what we call anticipatory inuences— as well
as emotions that arise from factors unrelated to the decision, which we call incidental
inuences” (Loewenstein and Lerner , p. ). For example, fear can be experienced
in response to anticipated decision outcomes, such as the threat of punishment, but also
toward an attacker.
e dierence between anticipated aect and immediate aect is not only pivotal for
our understanding of criminal decision making but also exposes an important limita-
tion of the dominant models of criminal decision making, which are based on the idea
of a reasoning or rational decision maker who weighs costs against benets to arrive at
a decision. Because the inuence of emotions may go unnoticed to the decision maker,
their inuence on the criminal decision process is not necessarily consciously mediated.
is makes them impossible to model as costs in ways similar to anticipated shame,
regret, or guilt (van Gelder ). In other words, as far as the dominant models of crim-
inal choice have addressed the role of emotions in crime causation, they have done so to
a limited extent only. e next section further elaborates on dierences between proper-
ties of the commonly used moral emotions and emotions such as fear and anger draw-
ing from psychological appraisal perspectives on emotion.
II. M S  E 
C  C D M:
D AT
According to appraisal theorists, emotions are responses to the environment geared
to help individuals respond to the challenges facing them (Smith and Ellsworth ;
Frijda , ; Ellsworth and Scherer ). e experience of an emotion is inti-
mately related to the subjective appraisal of the circumstances in which it is experienced
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(Smith and Ellsworth ). Emotions are furthermore adaptive in the sense that they
set in motion psychological and physiological processes to ready the body for action,
such as dealing with threat (Tooby and Cosmides).
Emotion appraisals, at the most general level, involve evaluative judgments of whether
an event is good or bad and whether people’s current actions and environment corre-
spond to their personal goals and expectations (Keltner and Lerner ). Dimensional
approaches to appraisal argue that combinations of a limited set of core dimensions of
appraisal— for example, the degree to which an individual is certain about what is going
to happen, the extent to which an individual has control over the environment, and the
degree to which others, the individual, or the situation are responsible for the events—
give rise to specic emotions (Smith and Ellsworth ). For example, anger and guilt
can be meaningfully distinguished with reference to these dimensions. In the face of a
negative event, blaming others produces anger, whereas blaming oneself produces guilt
(Keltner and Lerner ). Conversely, if the oense or frustration is viewed as caused
by someone powerful who may commit further oenses in the future, then fear may be
the emotional response (Frijda , p.).
An appraisal generates an action tendency, which is a state of readiness to execute a
given kind of action (Frijda , p.). As mentioned previously, a perceived oense or
frustration, for example, for which someone else is viewed as the cause and that could
have been avoided, can trigger anger. e intensity of the anger inter alia will depend
on the intentionality of the frustration, the proximity of the stimulus, and the stakes
involved (van Winden and Ash , p.).
According to appraisal theorists, the links between specic emotions and specic
appraisals and choice propensities are relatively systematic (Frijda ; Loewenstein
and Lerner ). In support of this assumption, Lerner and Keltner () found that
fearful and angry individuals (both dispositional and experimentally induced) diered
in their risk assessments and risky choice behavior. Fearful individuals made more pes-
simistic risk assessments and risk- averse choices in comparison to angry individuals.
is nding can be explained by the fact that anger is associated with appraisals of cer-
tainty and control, whereas fear is associated with appraisals of uncertainty and a lack of
control (see also Smith and Ellsworth ; Lerner and Keltner).
Appraisal frameworks, and their supportive empirical evidence, if taken seriously,
have important repercussions for theorizing about the inuence of emotions on crimi-
nal decision making because they show that rather than viewing them as irregular dis-
ruptions of sound decision making, emotions may serve adaptive functions and exert
an inuence on behavior that is systematic and therefore, to a certain extent, predict-
able. Note that the idea of emotions exerting a systematic inuence on behavior runs
counter to several fundamental assumptions underlying rational choice theory, which
assumes that people are capable of making adequate probability and utility calculations,
and while acknowledging that people can make mistakes in their calculations, these are
assumed to be unsystematic (Gilovich and Grin ). Next, empirical research on
the eects of anger and fear on criminal decision making are discussed separately.
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A. Anger
Anger is associated with a sense that the self or someone one cares about is oended or
injured or that interests or goals are threatened or frustrated (Lazarus ; Lerner and
Tiedens ). As mentioned previously, in terms of appraisal processes, anger is char-
acterized by a sense of certainty over what has happened and a notion of control over
the situation (Smith and Ellsworth ). In response to the anger- eliciting stimulus, the
angry decision maker may be motivated to “set things straight” and to punish or retali-
ate in some way against the perceived cause(s) of his or heranger.
At high levels of intensity, anger may “take over” people’s thoughts and guide their
actions to the point of leading them to act directly contrary to their self- interest
(Loewenstein ). erefore, despite its adaptive function, if not regulated and prop-
erly expressed, anger runs the risk of incurring long- term costs (Lemerise and Dodge
). Concerning the interrelation between emotion and self- control, Baumeister and
Heatherton () note thatan
emotion increases the salience of whatever produces the emotion and so attention
will tend to focus on whatever has prompted the emotion. Most commonly, some-
thing in the immediate situation is the cause and so emotion tends to have the eect
of concentrating in the here and now, thereby thwarting transcendence and making
self- regulation more dicult.(p.)
Loewenstein and Lerner () addthat
the strength of immediate emotions is that they provide such amorphous, but oen
important, inputs into decision making. e pitfall of immediate emotions is that
they oen crowd out considerations of expected emotions altogether and cause peo-
ple to make decisions that ignore or underweight important future consequences.
Both types of emotions, therefore, are essential to decision making, but the wrong
mix in the wrong situation can be destructive. (p.)
At lower levels of intensity, people seem able to overcome the inuence of immediate
emotions when they deem those emotions to be irrelevant to a decision at hand, but at
higher levels of intensity, emotions can progressively assume control of behavior.
Furthermore, intense anger may “spill over” and be directed at other things besides
the anger- eliciting stimulus. Subsequent decisions that are unrelated to the source of
one’s anger may still inuence attributions of blame, lead to the perception of ambiguous
behavior as hostile, and to discounting the role of uncontrollable factors (Loewenstein
and Lerner, ). Incidental moods and emotions can therefore inuence normatively
unrelated judgments and decisions. Anger as a consequence of a conict at work, for
example, may facilitate road rage later on the wayhome.
Several criminological studies have examined the role of anger in a decision- making
context (Broidy ; Capowich, Marerolle, and Piquero ; Exum ; Mazerolle,
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Piquero, and Capowich ; Carmichael and Piquero ; Shalvi, van Gelder, and
van der Schalk ; van Gelder, Reynald, and Elers ). In one study, Exum ()
experimentally examined the eect of anger (provoked by a false accusation by the
experimenter) and alcohol intoxication on violent decision making using a “bar ght”
scenario. It was found that participants who had been assigned to consume alcohol
reported higher probability scores for other male- referent aggression in the anger-
provoking condition compared to nonprovoked controls, although not for themselves.
Furthermore, there was no independent eect of anger (or alcohol) on intentions to
aggress. Perceived costs and benets of violent decision making also remained unaf-
fected under dierent levels of anger (Exum).
Carmichael and Piquero (), also using a bar ght scenario and linking perceived
anger (as opposed to actually induced anger such as in the study by Exum []) to
rational considerations, such as perceived formal and informal sanctions, did nd a
direct eect of perceived anger on intentions to aggress. In addition, they found that
perceived anger was related to perceived thrill (of engaging in an assault) but not to
either formal or informal sanctions. Finally, they found that the eect of informal and
formal sanctions varied under dierent levels of perceived anger. Individuals perceiving
little anger were more likely to be deterred than those perceiving highanger.
Schweitzer and Gibson () and Shalvi etal. () found that when people think
that they are treated unfairly, they become angry at the person responsible for it and
feel justied taking revenge on him or her. In the study by Shalvi etal., it was found
that when people believe they are treated unfairly, they experience more anger and are
also more prone to dishonestly disadvantage the person who evoked their anger in com-
parison to non- angered individuals. In their experiment, each participant wrote a short
essay and subsequently evaluated an essay written by a student from another univer-
sity (in reality, a computer) who simultaneously evaluated the participant’s essay. In the
experimental condition, the evaluation by the other student was overly harsh and criti-
cal. Aer the experiment, the (real) subjects engaged in a simple task that allowed them
to anonymously determine their own as well as the other’s monetary outcomes allegedly
as part of the experiment. It was found that anger led to dishonestly disadvantaging the
other (Shalvi etal.).
Van Gelder, Reynald, and Elers () examined both moral emotions and anger in
two experimental studies addressing the question of whether and to what extent feelings
of anger inuence the impact of moral emotions on decisions to oend. In the rst study,
anger operationalized as a consequence of being treated unfairly was shown to make
people more prone to dishonestly disadvantage those who had treated them unfairly.
Although moral emotions were negatively related to intentions to oend, this eect
was muted and lost its deterrent potential under conditions of anger. In addition, the
results of the second study revealed that immediate shame (i.e., experimentally induced
shame), which was generated by means of a writing task in which subjects were asked
to write about an event or situation that had led them to experience intense feelings of
shame and that was therefore normatively unrelated to the situation and the decision
outcomes, was also negatively associated with criminal choice. erefore, immediate
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shame that is felt at the time of decision, and that is normatively unrelated to the deci-
sion at hand, was shown to inuence criminal decisions negatively.
B. Fear
Karstedt () notes that both popular wisdom and criminological theory have “estab-
lished fear of sanctions as a cornerstone and powerful mechanism of the criminal jus-
tice system, the thing that makes it work” (p.). Indeed, fear was the foundational
premise of the original deterrence model proposed by utilitarian philosophers Beccaria
and Bentham. For example, in Essay on Crimes and Punishments, Beccaria (/ )
writes that “the laws are obeyed through fear of punishment” (p.). In a similar vein,
Bentham () writes, “It is the fear of punishment, in so far as it is known, which pre-
vents the commission of crime” (p.). Over time, however, the idea of deterrence hav-
ing an emotional basis was somewhat lost. e following passage from Loewenstein
() is worth quoting in extenso in this context:
When Jeremy Bentham … rst proposed the construct of utility, emotions gured
prominently in his theory. Because Bentham viewed utility as the net sum of positive
over negative emotions, he devoted a substantial part of his treatise on utility to a dis-
cussion of the determinants and nature of emotions. When neoclassical economists
later constructed their new approach to economics upon the foundation of util-
ity, however, they rapidly became disillusioned with utility’s psychological under-
pinnings and sought to expunge the utility construct of its emotional content. is
process culminated in the development of ordinal utility and the theory of revealed
preference which construed utility as an index of preference rather than of happi-
ness. (p.)
In criminology, the essence of the deterrence model laid out by Beccaria and Bentham
remained largely intact until economist Becker () in his seminal article integrated
utility ideas into the criminal decision- making process (Piquero etal. , p. ).
According to Becker, the decision to oend is based on the same principles of cost–
benet analysis people use when selecting legal behaviors. In other words, the choice for
crime is a purely rational one according to thisview.
Becker’s ideas resonated with crime researchers, and in the mid- s criminolo-
gists began to understand deterrence theory as a theory about the perception of sanc-
tion threats (Paternoster ). at is, most decision- making studies in criminology
have operationalized deterrence as a function of the perceived probability of sanction
and the perceived severity of sanction, possibly complemented with the perceived celer-
ity of that sanction’s imposition (Zimring and Hawkins ; Klepper and Nagin ;
Bachman etal. ; Nagin and Paternoster , ; Paternoster and Simpson ;
Nagin and Pogarsky).
Although the role of fear of sanction may be implicitly present in empirical studies
on perceptual deterrence, little systematic research has attempted to directly measure
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it. Most research essentially equates fear of punishment with perceived risk of sanc-
tion. However, as is argued in detail in chapter of this volume, perceptions of sanction
severity and probability incur in part dierent mental processes than does fear of pun-
ishment, and cognitions of sanction severity and probability are dierent from people’s
emotional reaction toward sanctions (van Gelder and de Vries ,).
In support of the idea that fear of sanction as an emotional experience is dierent
from the perceived risk of sanction as a cognitive process, van Gelder and de Vries ()
examined both the negative feelings of fear, worry, and anxiety and the perceived risk
of sanction, operationalized in line with deterrence theory as the product of the per-
ceived probability of sanction and its perceived severity, as predictors of criminal choice
alongside personality traits using a scenario design. ey found that both negative aect
and perceived risk of sanction predicted criminal choice, with the former being a stron-
ger predictor than the latter. e dierence between the emotional response to sanction
(i.e., fear of punishment) and the cognitive response to it (i.e., perceived risk of sanc-
tion) was further demonstrated in a subsequent article (van Gelder and de Vries )in
which the authors used a priming task to show that having participants rely on their
thinking strengthened the relation between perceived risk and criminal choice, whereas
having them rely on their feelings strengthened the relation between negative aect and
criminal choice. In other words, fear of crime and perceived sanction appear to belong
to dierent mental modes of information processing— a “cool” cognitive mode versus a
“hot” aectivemode.
III. C
is chapter provided an overview of research and theorizing on the role of emotions
on oender decision making. It was argued that the treatment of emotions in the crimi-
nological literature on oender decision making has been limited, and research that has
addressed emotions has tended to focus on a specic type of emotion (i.e., anticipated
moral emotions) rather than emotions actually experienced at the time of decision.
e relative neglect of emotions in crime research has meant that dominant models of
criminal decision making tend to draw from the rational choice paradigm and consider
emotions to be largely irrelevant to the decision process or as unsystemic inuences
subverting sound decision making only. is is somewhat ironic given the fact that the
architects of the rational choice paradigm in criminology argued that their perspective
was based on psychological research: “[A] considerable body of recent psychological
research on information processing and decision making has passed largely unnoticed
by criminologists” (Clarke and Cornish , p. ; see also Cornish and Clarke ).
Yet this work has received only sparse updating since. Consequently, insights from
approximately three decades of research in the very same tradition that forms its basis
have gone relatively unnoticed in criminal decision- making research (Van Gelder et
al. ). is research has shown that emotions, and also other feeling states such as
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moods and visceral factors, play a fundamental role in human decision processes, along-
side rational and cognitive considerations that commonly feature in theories of criminal
decision making (van Gelder et al. ). In these three decades, research in all elds of
psychology has led to a robust science of emotion that appears to represent a paradigm
shi in thinking about human nature (Keltner and Lerner , p. ). is science may
also prove vital to our understanding of crime. It is hoped that crime researchers will see
the potential of this still largely open eld in their discipline.
N
. For a more extensive discussion of the dierences between moods, emotions, and visceral
drive states such as sexual arousal and drug craving, see van Gelder etal. () and van
Gelder ().
. Amore extensive treatment of moral emotions is provided by in chapter of this volume.
. For an overview of work on perceptual deterrence, see chapter  in this volume.
. For a discussion of dual process, see chapter of this volume.
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