Conscience, Significant Others, and Rational Choice: Extending the Deterrence Model

TLDR

Crime deterrence involves state sanctions, social embarrassment, and personal shame, each presenting varying degrees of certainty and severity. The study proposes that significant others and conscience act as social controls analogous to the State. The authors measured perceived threats of shame, embarrassment, and legal sanctions for tax cheating, petty theft, and drunk driving, then examined how these perceptions influence criminal intentions in a random adult sample. Shame and legal sanctions reduce intentions to commit tax cheating, petty theft, and drunk driving, whereas embarrassment effects are inconsistent with expected‑utility predictions.

Abstract

We propose that significant others and conscience function as agents of social control in a manner similar to the State. All three pose possible threats or costs that are more or less certain and severe which actors take into account in considering whether or not to violate the law. State-imposed costs, which have been addressed in the literature on deterrence, are material deprivations in the form of fines and incarceration. Socially imposed costs are the embarrassment or loss of respect actors might experience when they violate norms which significant others support. Self-imposed costs are shame or guilt feelings which actors might impose upon themselves when they offend their own conscience by engaging in behaviors they consider morally wrong. The threats of shame and embarrassment, like the threat of legal sanctions, affect the expected utility of crime and, thus, the likelihood that crime will occur. In the research reported here, parallel measures are developed of the perceived threats of each of these three kinds of punishment for three illegal behaviors (tax cheating, petty theft, drunk driving). The effects of these perceived threats on people's intentions to violate the law are then examined in a random sample of adults. Threats of shame and of legal sanctions inhibit the inclination to commit each of the three offenses, but the findings for embarrassment appear less compatible with the expected utility model.