Crime, Choice, and Context

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00224278231153943
• Author: Jean-Louis van Gelder,Daniel S. Nagin
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Crime, Choice, and

Context

Jean-Louis van Gelder

1,2

and Daniel S. Nagin

1,3

Keywords

context, crime, decision making, rational choice, peers, morality

Introduction

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 decision making, the study

of context has not yet reached center stage in research on criminal choice.

The workshop addressed this hiatus and set the stage for novel research

that revisits the multidisciplinary roots of the study of criminal decision

making and expands its rational choice foundations. To this end, participants

to the workshop were invited to examine how context shapes criminal deci-

sion processes. More specif‌ically, they were encouraged to do so in ways

that move beyond the axiomatic construct of rational decision making

underlying neoclassical economics to incorporate f‌indings and theoretical

perspectives from several decades of research in criminology, behavioral

economics, and psychology.

1

Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Freiburg, Germany

2

Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

3

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jean-Louis van Gelder, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law,

Department of Criminology, Günterstalstraße 73 | 79100 Freiburg, Germany.

Email: j.vangelder@csl.mpg.de

Special Issue: Crime, Choice, and Context

Journal of Research in Crime and

Delinquency

2023, Vol. 60(4) 407–415

© The Author(s) 2023

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00224278231153943

journals.sagepub.com/home/jrc