HEURISTICS AND BIASES, RATIONAL CHOICE, AND SANCTION PERCEPTIONS*

Published date01 February 2017
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12129
Date01 February 2017
HEURISTICS AND BIASES, RATIONAL CHOICE,
AND SANCTION PERCEPTIONS
GREG POGARSKY, SEAN PATRICK ROCHE,
and JUSTIN T. PICKETT
School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, State University of New York
KEYWORDS: decision-making, cognitive heuristics, perceptions of certainty, perceived
risk, deterrence
The relevance of several cognitive heuristics and related biases for rational choice
perspectives on crime, and for perceptions of sanction risk, were investigated. We
present findings from a series of randomized experiments, embedded in two nation-
wide surveys of American adults (18 and older) in 2015 (N=1,004 and 623). The
results reveal that offender estimates of detection risk are less probabilistically pre-
cise and more situationally variable than under prevailing criminological perspectives,
most notably, rational choice and Bayesian learning theories. This, in turn, allows var-
ious decision-making heuristics—such as anchoring and availability—to influence and
potentially bias the perceptual updating process.
“One point should be set immediately outside dispute. Everyone agrees that people
have reasons for what they do. They have motivations, and they use reason (well or badly)
to respond to these motivations, and reach their goals. Even much, or most, of the behav-
ior that is called abnormal involves the exercise of thought and reason.”—Simon, 1986.
Agency and choice often play an integral role in criminal transgression. Residential bur-
glars routinely consider the lighting and conspicuousness of potential targets to reduce the
likelihood of detection (Cromwell, Olson, and Avary, 1991; Wright and Decker, 1994).
Armed robbers often victimize other offenders to reduce the likelihood that the victim-
ization gets reported to authorities (Wright and Decker, 1997). Street-level drug dealers
sometimes store inventory in their mouths (in balloons), so they can readily swallow the
evidence if they encounter law enforcement (Jacobs, 1999). The results of longitudinal
studies of panel data have revealed that offending is negatively related to the perceived
certainty of punishment (Lochner, 2007; Loughran, Paternoster, et al., 2016), and
perceptions of sanction certainty are responsive to whether an actor has been punished
Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online
Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2017.55.issue-1/issuetoc.
This research was supported by funding from the University at Albany Faculty Research Awards
Program (FRAP)-Category B and from the Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center at the
University at Albany, SUNY.
The authors gratefully acknowledge constructive feedback from Tom Loughran, Jasmine Silver,
and Cindy Najdowski during the production of this article.
Direct correspondence to Greg Pogarsky, School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, State
University of New York, 135 Western Avenue, Draper Hall 219, Albany, NY 12222 (e-mail: gpog-
arsky@albany.edu).
C2017 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12129
CRIMINOLOGY Volume 55 Number 1 85–111 2017 85
86 POGARSKY, ROCHE, & PICKETT
for past offending experiences (Anwar and Loughran, 2011; Horney and Marshall,
1992; Matsueda, Kreager, and Huizinga, 2006). Moreover, the results of randomized
experiments have shown that rule breaking is reducible by clearly communicating an
elevated risk of punishment to potential offenders (Nagin and Pogarsky, 2003; Weisburd,
Einat, and Kowalski, 2008).
Among criminological perspectives, rational choice most directly addresses agency and
decision-making (McCarthy, 2002). Other theoretical perspectives, such as strain, learn-
ing, and life course, also address how perceptions of reality guide volitional conduct
(Agnew and Messner, 2015). Yet, perhaps because basic versions of the perspective
are so tractable, rational choice theory typically frames research on offender decision-
making. This persists despite fundamental critiques of the perspective, which include 1)
assailable assumptions, particularly about crime actors; 2) little explained variance in key
outcomes; 3) a focus on mostly instrumental rather than expressive offending; and 4) the
frequent exclusion of known predictors of crime (Paternoster, 2010; Pickett and Roche,
2016; Pratt, 2008; Tonry, 2008). Such critiques are often well founded.
Thus, rational choice applications in criminology seem incomplete, and sometimes inac-
curate, regarding crime actors and offending decisions. We argue that principles of heuris-
tic decision-making, drawn from behavioral economics and psychology, can improve the
descriptive accuracy of rational choice accounts of crime decisions (Pickett and Roche,
2016).1We examine this possibility with respect to one of the primary inputs into crime
decisions—the actor’s perception of arrest risk.
Existing research on crime risk perceptions from the standpoint of Bayesian learn-
ing theory has produced valuable insights (Anwar and Loughran, 2011; Kreager and
Matsueda, 2014; Pickett, Loughran, and Bushway, 2016; Wilson, Paternoster, and
Loughran, 2016), but it has only managed to account for a small portion of variation in
sanction risk perceptions. Moreover, the results of several studies have shown no corre-
lation between sanction perceptions and broader measures of objective punishment risk
(Kleck and Barnes, 2013, 2014; Kleck et al., 2005; Lochner, 2007). And researchers ex-
amining young felons have reported that some factors that should increase objective ar-
rest risk, such as carrying a gun, may reduce perceived arrest risk (Loughran, Reid, et al.,
2016).2Paternoster (2010: 808) characterized how much remains unknown about sanction
perception formation and updating as a “dirty little secret in deterrence research.” Fur-
thermore, variability exists among rational choice perspectives within criminology. For
example, the situational crime prevention perspective, which is also grounded in rational
choice principles (Clarke and Cornish, 1985), connects offending decisions primarily to
the characteristics of specific opportunities and situations.
Within this context, we seek to advance understanding of crime decision-making. Our
objective is to expand the theoretical and empirical scope of research on crime decisions
and perceptions of risk. We begin by identifying elements of rational choice discourse
that are compatible with heuristic choice. Ensuing empirical results show that several
cognitive heuristics from the behavioral economics and psychology literatures influence
how individuals form, modify, and use sanction perceptions in crime decisions.
1. For instance, priming effects have already been studied for the extent to which they impact crime
survey methodologies (see Bouffard, Exum, and Collins, 2010).
2. Not only are felony offenders susceptible to arrest simply for possessing a gun, but also the pres-
ence of a gun during crimes greatly increases the likelihood of victims notifying police (Baumer
and Lauritsen, 2010).

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