New methods for examining expertise in burglars in natural and simulated environments: preliminary findings

Abstract

Expertise literature in mainstream cognitive psychology is rarely applied to criminal behaviour. Yet, if closely scrutinised, examples of the characteristics of expertise can be identified in many studies examining the cognitive processes of offenders, especially regarding residential burglary. We evaluated two new methodologies that might improve our understanding of cognitive processing in offenders through empirically observing offending behaviour and decision-making in a free-responding environment. We tested hypotheses regarding expertise in burglars in a small, exploratory study observing the behaviour of ‘expert’ offenders (ex-burglars) and novices (students) in a real and in a simulated environment. Both samples undertook a mock burglary in a real house and in a simulated house on a computer. Both environments elicited notably different behaviours between the experts and the novices with experts demonstrating superior skill. This was seen in: more time spent in high value areas; fewer and more valuable items stolen; and more systematic routes taken around the environments. The findings are encouraging and provide support for the development of these observational methods to examine offender cognitive processing and behaviour

The scripts and expertise of firesetters: A preliminary conceptualization

“…First, burglars are not opportunists; rather they explicitly discriminate between targets using environmental cues (e.g., occupancy, accessibility, and security; Bennett & Wright, 1984;Maguire & Bennett, 1982). Second, in simulated environments, burglars-relative to non-criminals-use distinctive and systematic routes (Nee et al, 2014;Taylor & Nee, 1988). Third, burglars rely on previous learning when making decisions regarding target selection and responses to environmental cues (Nee & Taylor, 2000).…”

Learning on the job: Studying expertise in residential burglars using virtual environments*

“…Security cues are usually downgraded as weak spots can be found because of human fallibility (Clare, ; Nee & Meenaghan, ). Once inside, experienced burglars target unidentifiable, valuable, and portable goods (Clare, ; Maguire & Bennett, ; Nee et al., ). Offender‐based findings indicating the “perfect” burglary target have been supported by numerous studies in which the features of burgled versus nonburgled properties are compared, the most innovative using data from Google Street View (Langton & Steenbeek, ).…”

“…In two recent studies, researchers have explored the potential of virtual environments to study burglary behavior and provide the basis for the current research endeavor. In the first study, Nee and colleagues () explored whether participants would behave comparably in a real house versus a simple, virtual simulation of the same house. Six experienced ex‐burglars and an equal‐sized control group of university students undertook mock burglaries in both settings.…”

“…Nee et al. () and Van Gelder et al. () were primarily concerned with testing the functionality of virtual environments for the study of burglary and established the feasibility of the VR method for crime research.…”

“…() were primarily concerned with testing the functionality of virtual environments for the study of burglary and established the feasibility of the VR method for crime research. In these studies, however, scholars relied on very small (Nee et al., ) or student samples (Van Gelder et al., ) and used a restricted virtual environment consisting of a single house that could be burgled. In our current study, we extend this previous work in a variety of ways.…”