What Motivates People to Commit Crimes?
New Max Planck Partner Group with University of Alabama to research criminological issues
The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg is pleased to announce a new Max Planck Partner Group. The research group “The Motivated Offender and Criminal Decision-making: A Theoretical Advancement” will focus on offenders’ motivations. The international team is led by the American researcher William P. McClanahan, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. The criminologist is a familiar face to the Institute: before joining the University of Alabama, he was a postdoc in Freiburg for four years.
Motivation and opportunity perception are of central importance for understanding crime. In researching these themes, McClanahan can build on previous research concerned with the behavior of home burglars.
As a member of the Max Planck research project Virtual Burglary, he focused on burglars’ approaches to selecting objects and to the burglary itself. To this aim, he used virtual reality versions of residential areas in which the burglars moved around, enabling the researchers to observe burglars’ behavior and eye movements “in real time.”
In his new research group, the criminologist now seeks to go one step further and concentrate more on the various motivations that lead people to commit a crime. What are the dynamic influences on decision-making processes? How does the perception of the risks and benefits of a crime change?
McClanahan reports: “In an earlier study, I saw how a burglar was deterred when he wanted to break into a house that showed signs of gun ownership. He assumed that he would probably be injured if he broke into the house. For another burglar, however, the same house was an ideal target because firearms are valuable and easy to sell. The example shows how different the motivation of criminals can be.”
For their research, the new team will again work with incarcerated subjects and use virtual reality. McClanahan will cooperate closely with Jean-Louis van Gelder, head of the Department of Criminology at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg and one of the pioneers and leading minds in criminological research using virtual reality. Van Gelder is the founder of MAXLab Freiburg, the first independent research lab to conduct this type of criminological research using virtual reality.
The common goal of Jean-Louis van Gelder and William Patrick McClanahan is to better understand criminal motivation in order to predict criminal behavior. They plan joint workshops, publications, and conferences. The findings of their criminological research will also be incorporated into the training of police and the judiciary and will help in the development of new strategies and laws.
Max Planck Partner Groups are led by outstanding early career researchers who, after a research stay at a Max Planck Institute, move to a respective research institution or university, preferably in their home country. The Partner groups are set up for a maximum duration of five years.