Crime and Criminal Thinking
This bias involves overemphasizing someone's personal characteristics when explaining their behavior while underestimating situational factors.
fundamental attribution error
What distinguishes law from other types of social rules?
Law differs from other social rules because it consists of formally established rules backed and enforced by the authority of the state.
Why do criminologists calculate crime rates per 100,000 people instead of simply reporting the number of crimes?
Crime rates are calculated per 100,000 people so researchers can compare crime across places or populations of different sizes. Raw crime counts can be misleading because a larger population will generally have more crimes simply because more people live there.
What is the “age-crime curve”?
The age-crime curve is the pattern in which offending generally rises during adolescence, peaks during late adolescence/early adulthood, and then declines as people age.
How do sociologists define and measure socioeconomic status?
SES is a person's social and economic position, commonly measured using income, education, and occupation/occupational status.
Name TWO ways popular culture, media, or politicians can contribute to myths about crime.
They can overemphasize sensational or unusual crimes, making them seem more common than they actually are, and they can portray crime in exaggerated or misleading ways, shaping inaccurate beliefs about crime and criminals.
Research using the prisoner's dilemma suggests people aren't always purely selfish or purely prosocial. What factor can influence whether someone cooperates?
Whether the people know or have a relationship with one another can influence cooperation. People are more likely to cooperate with someone they know/an acquaintance than with a stranger.
1. City A has 500 reported crimes and a population of 100,000; What is the crime rate per 100,000 people?
2. City B has 1,000 crimes but a population of 500,000. Which city has the higher crime rate?
1. 500 per 100,000
2. City A.
Generally, what happens to offending as people move from adolescence into adulthood? Is this pattern identical for every type of crime?
Offending generally increases during adolescence, peaks in late adolescence/early adulthood, and decreases as people move into adulthood.
No, this pattern is not identical for every type of crime. Different types of crime can have different age patterns.
How is poverty related to, but different from, socioeconomic status?
Poverty specifically refers to having very low economic resources/income, while SES is broader and includes factors such as income, education, and occupation.
So poverty is one aspect of socioeconomic circumstances, while SES captures a broader social/economic position.
A researcher wants to study behaviors that society considers harmful even when those behaviors are not technically illegal. Which definition of crime would be more useful: legal or non-legal? Explain why.
A non-legal definition would be more useful because it includes behaviors that society considers harmful or problematic even if they are not prohibited by criminal law.
Name the THREE major data sources criminologists use to study crime.
Why are estimated Part I crime rates generally higher in the NCVS than in the UCR? Which one is likely to be more accurate, and why?
Part I crime rates are generally higher in the NCVS because the NCVS includes victimizations that were not reported to police, while the UCR is based on crimes known to/reporting to police.
What is the victim-offender overlap? Why might victims of crime also be more likely to offend?
The victim-offender overlap is the finding that people who are victims of crime are also more likely to be offenders.
Victims may also be more likely to offend because the same risky people, places, behaviors, and social environments can expose someone to both victimization and offending.
Person → Neighborhood → City
Match each concept to the level where it is being discussed:
A person explains their own success as being caused by their ability but attributes their failures to outside circumstances. What psychological concept does this illustrate?
Self-serving bias
A person attributes their successes to their own abilities or characteristics but explains failures by blaming outside circumstances.
A criminologist wants to know about crimes that victims experienced but never reported to police. Which data source would be particularly useful?
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is particularly useful because it captures crimes that victims experienced even when they did not report them to police.
What happened to U.S. Part I crime during the crime drop of the 1990s?
U.S. Part I crime decreased substantially during the 1990s.
Name FOUR potential explanations for the victim-offender overlap.
Why does it seem unlikely that the relationship between poverty and crime primarily reflects poor people's attempts to meet basic necessities?
It seems unlikely that the poverty-crime relationship is primarily about poor people committing crime to obtain basic necessities, because research finds that the relationship between poverty and crime involves broader socioeconomic and community conditions, including factors such as concentrated poverty, inequality, unemployment, and other conditions.
Identify the three psychological concepts represented in this scenario.
Identify the three psychological concepts represented in this scenario.
Jordan gets caught cheating on an exam. His professor says Jordan is just a dishonest person. Jordan says he only cheated because the exam was unfair. Jordan also believes that everyone else would probably cheat if they were in his position.
A. What crimes were reported to police?
B. What crimes did people experience, including some that weren't reported?
C. What crimes do people admit committing?
Crime rates increased from 50 crimes per 100,000 people to 100 crimes per 100,000 people. Someone says, ‘Crime doubled because the number of crimes doubled.’ What information would you need before deciding whether that statement is correct?
You would need to know the actual number of crimes and the population size at both points in time.
The crime rate went from 50 to 100 per 100,000, so the rate doubled. But that does not necessarily mean the actual number of crimes doubled, because the population may also have changed.
For what types of crimes is the gap between male and female offending relatively high, and for what types is the gap relatively low?
The male–female offending gap is relatively high for serious/violent offenses and relatively low for minor/less serious offenses.
So the difference between male and female offending is not equally large across all types of crime.
Researchers find that race remains associated with serious, high-frequency offending even after statistically controlling for socioeconomic status. Does this mean socioeconomic status has no relationship to crime? Explain what the findings suggest.
No. Finding that race remains associated with serious/high-frequency offending after controlling for SES does not mean SES has no relationship with crime.
It means that SES does not completely explain the relationship between race and serious/high-frequency offending. SES can still be related to crime while other factors also contribute to the observed relationship.