Simply criminal: Predicting burglars’ occupancy decisions with a simple heuristic.

Snook, Brent; Dhami, Mandeep K.; Kavanagh, Jennifer

doi:10.1007/s10979-010-9238-0

Cited by 42 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(79 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This is consistent with past literature on youth risk taking that highlights the significance of the benefits to youth and offenders' use of simple decision strategies (e.g., Feeney, 1986;Garcia-Retamero & Dhami, 2009;Lavery et al, 1993;Parsons et al, 2000;Parsons et al, 1997;Shapiro et al, 1998;Siegel et al, 1994;Snook et al, 2009). It is also consistent with the idea that outcomes are easily to mentally construct and apply to decisions to engage in future behaviours.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…Over half said their decisions to rob were impulsive and did not involve planning, and nearly two-thirds said they had not thought at all of the negative consequences of committing the crime such as getting caught. More recently, studies have shown that burglars use "fast and frugal" heuristic strategies, that rely on one cue alone, in their decision about whether a residential property is occupied or not (Snook, Dhami, & Kavanagh, 2009) and in their choice of which property to burgle (Garcia-Retamero & Dhami, 2009). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Crime as risk taking

Dhami

Mandel

2012

Psychology, Crime & Law

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crime as risk taking

Dhami

Mandel

2012

Psychology, Crime & Law

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Research has found that this was the most important cue in burglar's decision-making, but importantly was also the most 'ecologically valid or predictive of actual occupancy' (Snook, Dhami and Kavanagh, 2010). In this study, the presence of a vehicle in the driveway of a property was not always viewed as a deterrent.…”

Section: Occupancymentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Nee and Meenaghan, 2006), whereby the offender knocks on the front door of the property and waits to see if someone answers. If somebody did, the A key determinant in target selection was whether there was a car parked on the driveway (similarly found by Bennett and Wright, 1984;Snook, Dhami and Kavanagh, 2010).…”

Section: Occupancymentioning

confidence: 80%

Honour among thieves? How morality and rationality influence the decision-making processes of convicted domestic burglars

Taylor

2013

Criminology & Criminal Justice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. 1 Permanent repository link Honour among thieves? How morality and rationality influence the decisionmaking processes of convicted domestic burglars AbstractGaining the offender perspective is central to understanding domestic burglary, and is well documented. This paper presents findings from 30 semi-structured interviews with convicted domestic burglars conducted in Greater Manchester, United Kingdom. The findings support the dominant supposition that domestic burglars operate within a bounded rationality, broadly calculating reward and risk in the commission of their offences. In addition, it was found that a sense of abstracted morality impacted on decision-making. Burglars used cognitive 'codes of practice' which influenced target appraisal, shaped modus operandi, guided the search process, and impacted on items stolen. The findings suggest that the role of neutralization techniques and morality should be (re)incorporated into the understanding of domestic burglars as rational offenders.

show abstract

“…Studies have shown that the matching heuristic is as good as regression and nonstatistical linear (compensatory) models in fitting decision data in expert or professional decision-making domains such as medicine, law and crime, and that it outperforms these compensatory models at cross-validation where it makes predictions on a new sample of data (e.g., Dhami & Harries, 2001;Dhami & Harries, 2010;Kee et al, 2003;Snook et al, 2011). In the judicial decision-making context, Dhami and Ayton (2001) found that when predicting individual judges' bail decisions on hypothetical cases comprising nine cues, the matching heuristic contained only one cue for 75% of the judges.…”

Section: Analyze Individual Judges' Decision Data Using Psychologicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

On getting inside the judge’s mind.

Dhami¹,

Belton²

2017

Translational Issues in Psychological Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

According to the scales of justice, the judge, in an unbiased way and directed by law, attends to all of the available information in a case, weighs it according to its significance, and integrates it to make a decision. By contrast, research suggests that judicial decision-making departs from the cognitive balancing act depicted by the scales of justice. Nevertheless, the research is often dismissed as irrelevant, and the judiciary, legal policymakers and the public remain largely unconvinced that the status quo needs improving. One potential rebuttal to the scientific findings is that they lack validity because researchers did not study judges making decisions on real cases. Another potential argument is that researchers have not pinpointed the psychological processes of any specific judge because they analyzed data over judges and/or used statistical models lacking in psychological plausibility. We review these 2 grounds for appeal against the scientific research on judicial decision-making, and note that it appears researchers' choices of data collection methods and analytic techniques may, indeed, be inappropriate for understanding the phenomena. We offer 2 remedies from the sphere of decision-making research: collecting data on judicial decision-making using representative design, and analyzing judicial decision data using more psychologically plausible models. Used together, we believe these solutions can help researchers better understand and improve legal decision-making. What is the significance of this article for the general public?We propose that researchers studying judicial decision-making ought to examine decisions made on real(istic) cases using a representative experimental design, and they should analyze individual judge or bench decision data using psychologically plausible models. This will make the research more relevant to the judiciary and thus make it more difficult for judges and legal policy-makers to ignore the findings.

show abstract

Simply criminal: Predicting burglars’ occupancy decisions with a simple heuristic.

Cited by 42 publications

References 30 publications

Crime as risk taking

Crime as risk taking

Honour among thieves? How morality and rationality influence the decision-making processes of convicted domestic burglars

On getting inside the judge’s mind.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About