The Role of Affect in Intended Rule Breaking

Abstract

Objectives: Through a mood induction procedure, we prime positive, negative, or a neutral affective state and examine its effect on intentions to cheat on an exam and drinking and driving. Method: University students served as subjects for the study. They were provided with a questionnaire that randomized a mood induction procedure. Respondents were asked to recall (1) a recent positive event or experience, (2) a recent negative event or experience, or (3) their favorite books. They then completed a questionnaire that asked about their current mood state and got their responses to two hypothetical crime scenarios—cheating on an exam and drinking and driving. They were also asked questions pertaining to perceived risk, their decision-making style, impulsivity, and confidence. Results: We found that those experiencing an intense positive mood state were generally less likely to report that they would cheat or drive drunk relative to the negative and neutral state. However, we found little support for the suggested mediating causal mechanisms. Conclusions: Affective states milder than emotions are related to intentions to commit acts that are in the long-term harmful and go against self-interest. The relationship between affect states and criminal decision making can benefit from additional research.

Fight or flight: Integral emotions and violent intentions

“…The goal of the current study was to test the role situationally induced integral emotions play in decisions to engage in a range of (passive and aggressive) behaviors in response to provocation. Scholars interested in the association between affect and cognition in criminal decision-making have generally primed study participants to experience incidental emotions prior to vignettes and outcome measures (e.g., Exum, 2002;Kamerdze et al, 2014;Loewenstein et al, 1997). An important strength of the aforementioned methodology is that participants evaluate vignettes in a "hot" emotional state.…”

“…Person A is at the bar celebrating a work promotion, whereas person B is there to "blow off steam" after a bad day. It is plausible that person A would be less likely to respond aggressively to the stranger than person B (e.g., Exum, 2002;Kamerdze et al, 2014). Noncriminological findings on risk-related decision-making, however, indicate that risk is perceived to be higher under negatively valenced emotional states than under positive states (Elster, 1998;Johnson & Tversky, 1983;Slovic & Peters, 2006).…”

“…To test our hypotheses, we administered an online survey during the fall of 2017 to a nationwide sample of adult (18 years of age and older) U.S. residents. Although criminological RCT researchers have commonly employed experimental studies on samples of college students (Bouffard, 2002;Carmichael & Piquero, 2004;Kamerdze et al, 2014;van Gelder & de Vries, 2014), increasingly decision-making researchers have turned to online samples (Pickett, Roche, & Pogarsky, 2018;Pogarsky et al, 2017). The participants were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk TM (MTurk TM ).…”

“…We addressed the robustness of this finding by conducting a supplemental experiment similar to that ofKamerdze, Loughran, Paternoster, and Sohoni (2014) in which participants were successfully primed to experience angered and fearful incidental states using a recall exercise prior to queries about general risk and behavioral intent (findings and materials available by request). Importantly, intentions to consider punching a stranger did not vary across experimental groups.…”

Perceived Control, Severity, Certainty, and Emotional Fear: Testing an Expanded Model of Deterrence

“…In an emotional deterrence framework, fear of apprehension and possibly other emotions, like anticipated regret (Kahneman 2011; Kamerdze et al 2014; Warr 2016), would be expected to mediate the relationships between relevant cognitive judgments, like the perceptions of the costs/benefits of crime, and offending. Thus, emotions like fear would provide a crucial mechanism by which perceptions influence offending.…”