2023
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.221385
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Desperation and inequality increase stealing: evidence from experimental microsocieties

Abstract: People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime. It is not clear why it makes sense for them to do so, given that apprehension and punishment may make their situation even worse. Recent theory suggests that people should be more willing to steal if they are on the wrong side of a ‘desperation threshold’; that is, a level of resources critical to wellbeing. Below such a threshold, people should pursue any risky behaviour that offers the possibility of a short route back above, an… Show more

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Cited by 5 publications
(4 citation statements)
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“…Research using Prolific has been validated by comparison with other sampling methods for a number of known findings in psychological and political science (Coppock 2019;Peer et al 2022). The Prolific pool overrepresents younger and more educated people compared to the UK adult population (for details see Radkani et al (2023) ). To mitigate the lack of age diversity, we created sample quotas for each of the age categories 18-34, 35-49, 50-65 and 65+ to match the age structure of the UK population.…”
Section: Participantsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Research using Prolific has been validated by comparison with other sampling methods for a number of known findings in psychological and political science (Coppock 2019;Peer et al 2022). The Prolific pool overrepresents younger and more educated people compared to the UK adult population (for details see Radkani et al (2023) ). To mitigate the lack of age diversity, we created sample quotas for each of the age categories 18-34, 35-49, 50-65 and 65+ to match the age structure of the UK population.…”
Section: Participantsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The mutual policing theory explains the fall of the moralistic aspect of religion. People in rich, modern environments exhibit especially high levels of social trust (De Courson & Nettle, 2021;Nettle, 2015;Petersen & Aarøe, 2015;Ortiz-Ospina, 2017), spontaneous prosociality towards strangers (Holland et al, 2012;Nettle, 2015;Silva & Mace, 2014;Zwirner & Raihani, 2020), and low rates of crime, violence, and homicides (de Courson et al, 2023;De Courson & Nettle, 2021;Radkani et al, 2023). In this context, we argue that people are less inclined to believe that the prospect of supernatural punishment is necessary to ensure other people's cooperation.…”
Section: Explaining the Fall Of Prosocial Religionsmentioning
confidence: 92%
“…Data quality is typicality adequate and many inperson psychology findings replicate when data are collected this way (Peer et al, 2022). We have investigated the UK Prolific pool elsewhere: relative to the national population, there is an overrepresentation of younger people and people with university degrees (Radkani et al, 2022). However, most pool members are not students, and they are older than typical student pools.…”
Section: Study 1 Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As our claim that P3 was supported depended on using a non-preregistered analysis, we therefore decided to double the sample size. Multiple rounds of peeking at data increases type-I error rates, which can be compensated by reducing the α-level required in the final analysis (Sagarin et al, 2014). In this case, the critical value is reduced to 0.034, which should be interpreted as the threshold of statistical significance in what follows.…”
Section: Methodsmentioning
confidence: 99%