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Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security & Law
Department of Criminology
CrimRxiv Consortium, Founding Member
A pillar of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law is its Department of Criminology. They create novel ideas to advance criminology and be a global hub for interdisciplinary research. The research program is structured along three different axes or key areas of scientific interest: 1) Theoretical Innovation, 2) Methodological Innovation & Technology, and 3) Putting Crime Science into Practice. Follow them on Twitter @MPICSL.
Published: Sep 20, 2024
Guardianship is a core tenet of routine activity theory and collective efficacy. At its outset, routine activity research assumed that the mere presence of a guardian was sufficient to disrupt many forms of crime. More recent research, however, has taken as a starting point ...
Published: Aug 23, 2024
The scale of violent intergroup conflict in humans is astonishingly large compared to other mammals. This capacity for war is closely linked to our exceptionally cooperative abilities. The parochial altruism model formally describes how within-group cooperation and ...
Published: Jul 29, 2024
Research increasingly aims to better understand criminal behavior in context. Invariably, this entails integrating sociological (and other) perspectives on structure and environment, with psychological and economic notions of individual decision processes. Unique among ...
Published: Jun 18, 2024
Guided by General Theory of Crime and Psychosocial Maturity Hypothesis, we investigated co-development between short-term mindsets (impulsivity and future orientation) and risk behaviors (cannabis use and delinquency). Parallel process latent growth modeling on three-wave ...
Published: Jun 02, 2024
Motivated by theoretical accounts positing that participation in intergroup conflict is driven by a desire to promote the in-group, past studies have explored the link between prosocial personality dimensions and out-group harm. However, while dimensions such as Honesty-...
Affect, emotions, and crime decision-making: emerging insights from immersive 360° video experiments
Published: Mar 05, 2024
This study investigates the effectiveness of immersive 360° video technology in evoking and manipulating two emotions, anger, and sexual arousal, relevant to criminal decision-making. Additionally, we provide a focused review of emotions in decision-making research in ...
Published: Feb 27, 2024
It is well-established that unstructured unsupervised socializing with peers (UUS) motivates deviance while in that specific context. In this article, we extend this situational view by arguing that repeated UUS may also gradually shape adolescents’ norms and decision making ...
Published: Feb 08, 2024
High levels of Fear of Crime (FOC) are associated with people engaging with their community less, lower use of public spaces, and a general sense of overall anxiety. In short, such fear may reduce the livability of an area. The primary goal of this research was to examine the ...
Published: Jan 22, 2024
This article describes a novel multimodal method to examine decision- making: Virtual Reality-Based Retrospective Think Aloud (VR-RTA). This method taps directly into the offenders’ perspective and aims to enhance memory recall. We apply this method among a sample of ...
Published: Nov 27, 2023
Engagement with smartphone-based interventions stimulates adherence and improves the likelihood of gaining benefits from intervention content. Research often relies on system usage data to capture engagement. However, to what extent usage data reflect engagement is still an ...
Published: Nov 22, 2023
We developed and tested a smartphone-based intervention, FutureU, that aims to stimulate future-oriented thinking and behavior by strengthening the degree to which people identify with their future self. In order to examine the potential of this intervention prototype and ...
Published: Nov 20, 2023
Explaining prosocial behavior is a central goal in classic and contemporary behavioral science. Here, for the first time, we apply modern machine learning techniques to uncover the full predictive potential that personality traits have for prosocial behavior. We utilize a ...
Published: Oct 20, 2023
This Research Note describes the MAXLab Aggression and Bystander Intervention Scenario Set (MAXLab_ABISS). This modular stimulus set contains various immersive 360° videos that can be used to study decision making in situations of interpersonal violence. The goal of ...
Published: Oct 16, 2023
Here we introduce a Special Section of Child Development entitled “Formalizing Theories of Child Development.” This Special Section features five papers that use mathematical models to advance our understanding of central questions in the study of child development. This ...
Published: Oct 11, 2023
Over the past years, research has shown that virtual reality (VR) technology can be used to observe, interpret, and change human behavior and cognition in a variety of domains. This chapter explores the potential of VR as a tool to observe, interpret, and change human ...
Published: Sep 30, 2023
The Department of Criminology at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law,in Freiburg, Germany is seeking to recruit several Behavioral Scientists at the Postdoc Level.
Published: Sep 30, 2023
The Department of Criminology at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law,in Freiburg, Germany is seeking to recruit several Behavioral Scientists at the Postdoc Level.
Published: Aug 20, 2023
Explanations for human behaviour can be framed in many different ways, from the social-structural context to the individual motivation down to the neurobiological implementation. We know comparatively little about how people interpret these explanatory framings, and what they inf
Published: Jul 16, 2023
The study of sanctioning effects has a rich history in deterrence and labeling theory. Most analyses have only used official data to study these effects. Yet, some more recent studies indicate that it is necessary to investigate self-reported as well as official data since it ...
Published: Jul 11, 2023
Wie auch in anderen Regionen Deutschlands ist in Baden-Württemberg die Anzahl der Wohnungseinbruchdiebstähle in den Jahren 2007 bis 2014 stark angestiegen. Um dem entgegenzuwirken, startete die baden-württembergische Polizei unter Leitung des Landeskriminalamts (LKA) ...
Published: Jun 29, 2023
Interest in the psychology of misinformation has exploded in recent years. Despite ample research, to date there is no validated framework to measure misinformation susceptibility. Therefore, we introduce Verification done, a nuanced interpretation schema and assessment tool ...
Published: Jun 28, 2023
Beim Bundesverfassungsgericht ist gegenwärtig eine Verfassungsbeschwerde von Professor Mark Stemmler (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) gegen die Beschlagnahme von Forschungsdaten anhängig (AZ 1 BvR 2219/20). Stemmler leitete das von der DFG geförderte Forschungsprojekt ...
Published: Jun 11, 2023
Predominant explanations of the victim-offender overlap tend to focus on shared causes, such as (low) self-control or risky lifestyles. Such explanations bypass the possibility of a causal link between victimization and offending. We draw on evolutionary developmental ...
Published: Jun 06, 2023
Open-Ended Registration | Megastudy project to investigate the effectiveness of honesty oaths on reducing dishonest behavior. This procedure details how treatments are rated and selected for final inclusion.
Published: Jun 02, 2023
In the last decade it has become clear that replicability of empirical psychological researchshould be better. Open science practices aim to enhance the transparency of researchthereby both enabling others to reproduce the results presented in a paper and increasingthe ...
Published: Apr 21, 2023
This file contains the preregistration of a study in which we will examine whether different clusters can be identified in how users use an intervention smartphone application (“app”) and feel engaged with it. Moreover, we will study how the identified clusters relate to ...
Published: Apr 04, 2023
Parochial altruism suggests that humans are intrinsically motivated to harm out-groups, and that this is tightly connected to a preference for benefitting their in-group. Yet, there is little evidence for the kind of unconditional out-group harm suggested by this account, nor ...
Published: Mar 03, 2023
Cyberspace creates opportunities for new forms of crime that may be related to specific personality characteristics of offenders. Few studies have investigated the personality characteristics of cyber offenders. We address this gap by comparing a judicial sample of 261 ...
Published: Feb 23, 2023
This special issue is the result of a workshop held on 22 October 2021 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany. The reason for organizing the workshop was that in spite of its ubiquitous influence on human judgment and ...
Published: Feb 22, 2023
There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or ‘enduring neighbourhood effects’. Here, we identify a single ...
Published: Feb 08, 2023
Populism and beliefs in conspiracy theories fuel societal division as both rely on a Manichean us-versus-them, good-versus-evil narrative. However, whether both constructs have the same dispositional roots is essentially unknown. Across three studies conducted in two ...
Published: Dec 20, 2022
Short-term mindsets are associated with self-defeating behaviors, such as delinquency and alcohol use. In contrast, people who consider the longer-term consequences of their decisions tend to report positive outcomes, like feeling more competent and enhanced goal achievement. ...
Published: Nov 02, 2022
To explore why system contact often has no crime-preventative effect, the current study examined the effects of juvenile justice contact on Situational Action Theory's (SAT) causes of crime, including personal morals, deviant peer associations, and detection risk perceptions. ...
Published: Oct 31, 2022
The majority of differential deterrability research has investigated whether people differ in the extent to which a perceived threat of sanctions deters them from committing a crime. Less is known about the differential influence of criminal justice intervention on sanction ...
Published: Aug 09, 2022
Does the basic trait Honesty-Humility predict the type of moral concerns people express in language? We explore whether Honesty-Humility relates to the expression of five moral concerns in language—namely, care/harm, justice/fairness, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, ...
Published: May 09, 2022
In a French-German study including a large survey of adolescents in four cities, we analyze the interaction patterns during stops. Based on the respondents’ reports of their last experience of a police stop/encounter, we look at the likelihood that they assessed the ...
Published: Apr 05, 2022
This study examines the deterrent effects of neighbourhood watch signs and police signs as measures of symbolic guardianship on burglars versus non-offenders. In a virtual reality experiment, 181 burglars and 172 non-offenders scouted a virtual neighbourhood and were exposed ...
Published: Apr 06, 2021
People consider potential risks and rewards while deciding whether to engage in crime. Such perceptions and their impact on behavior can vary according to individual differences like criminal self-efficacy, or one’s perception of criminal competency. We examine perceptions of ...
