Preferences predict who commits crime among young men

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2112645119

Understanding who commits crime and why is a key topic in social science and important for the design of crime prevention policy.

In theory, people who commit crime face different social and economic incentives for criminal activity than other people, or they evaluate the costs and benefits of crime differently because they have different preferences. Empirical evidence on the role of preferences is scarce. Theoretically, risk-tolerant, impatient, and self-interested people are more prone to commit crime than risk-averse, patient, and altruistic people.

We test these predictions with a unique combination of data where we use incentivized experiments to elicit the preferences of young men and link these experimental data to their criminal records. In addition, our data allow us to control extensively for other characteristics such as cognitive skills, socioeconomic background, and self-control problems.

We find that preferences are strongly associated with actual criminal behavior. Impatience and, in particular, risk tolerance are still strong predictors when we include the full battery of controls. Crime propensities are 8 to 10 percentage points higher for the most risk-tolerant individuals compared to the most risk averse.

This effect is half the size of the effect of cognitive skills, which is known to be a very strong predictor of criminal behavior. Looking into different types of crime, we find that preferences significantly predict property offenses, while self-control problems significantly predict violent, drug, and sexual offenses.

Cognitive skills are known to be strong predictors of criminal behavior (32, 33). One likely reason is that low-skilled individuals obtain lower wages in the labor market and, therefore, face lower opportunity costs of crime (4). Cognitive skills are also known to be correlated with preferences (34) and are therefore potential confounders. SI Appendix, Table S2 shows that all three preferences measures are correlated with cognitive skills measured in terms of individuals’ GPAs at the end of compulsory schooling (age 15 to 16). The correlation between altruism and GPA is particularly pronounced with less skilled individuals being less altruistic on average.

In Table 1, fourth column, we include the individual’s percentile rank position in the GPA distribution in the regression. As expected, this is a strong predictor of crime. Moving up 10 percentiles in the grade distribution is associated with a 1.7 percentage point decrease in the crime propensity conditional on the other characteristics. Now, altruism is no longer significant, but the effects of risk tolerance and impatience are still large and significant. The effect of moving up 10 percentiles in the risk tolerance distribution or in the impatience distribution corresponds to about a half and one-third of the effect, respectively, of moving up 10 percentiles in the GPA distribution.