Personality, Identity, and Crime
Independent Research Group
The research group “Personality, Identity, and Crime” focuses on individual differences in (un)ethical and prosocial vs. antisocial behavior. Prior research consistently shows that people differ in their moral understanding, their moral identity, and their actual moral behavior. Our research resorts to diverse and innovative methodology to obtain a better understanding of the interplay between self-perception, other-perception, identity, and behavior in the context of moral vs. immoral – including criminal – behavior. We particularly focus on the questions how and which personality traits can account for these individual differences and how these differences shape future behavior and personality development. Ultimately, our goal is to promote theory development in psychology and criminology and to further bridge the gap between these two research traditions.
Photo: © iStock.com/Yana Tikhonova
Research Topics
Self-knowledge and the Desire to Change One’s Personality
The desire to change is an important requirement for volitional personality change. Especially when it comes to morality-related traits, however, people rarely see a need to change for the better, that is, to become more moral. This is because most people have an overly positive self-image about their own morality, that is, they think of themselves as relatively moral compared to others although they do not always behave accordingly. In our research, we examine whether – and, if so, how – tailored interventions for increasing self-knowledge about one’s own morality can be used to instill desires to change for the better in the moral domain. Our initial findings show that feedback about one’s own morality can be a useful means to motivate people to become more moral in the future. Based on this evidence, we study different approaches for increasing self-knowledge and their effect on actual moral behavior and personality development.
Key publications:
Personality and Prosocial Behavior
Prosocial behaviors such as fairness, cooperation, trust, and trustworthiness are among the most important building blocks of harmonious social relationships and well-functioning societies. However, prosocial behavior is often associated with (short-term) individual costs, for example, the investment of time and money. It is therefore less surprising that there are strong individual differences in the tendency to act in prosocial ways: Whereas some people willingly take on individual costs to benefit others, other people are primarily interested in maximizing their own personal profit and do not shy away from exploiting others. With our research, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of such individual differences in prosocial behavior. In this regard, we primarily focus on the interplay between different personality traits with characteristics of situations affording prosocial actions.
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Third-party funded project:
csl.mpg.de/projects/personality-and-prosocial-behavior
Criminal Behavior and Personality
Prior research in psychology and criminology has linked different personality traits to criminal behavior. This evidence, however, remains largely heterogenous and unsystematic and there is a lack of a more comprehensive understanding about which personality traits relate to which types of criminal behavior – and why. Our research aims to close this gap. Specifically, our goal is to develop and empirically test a theoretical framework on the link between criminal behavior and personality using diverse and innovative methods – which has important implications for both (personality) psychology and criminology.
Key publications:
Relation between Self-perception and Other-perception
In our everyday social interactions, we are regularly required to judge what others, including strangers, are like. But how do we form such judgments? In our research, we study the influence of judges’ own personality traits on how they perceive others. Specifically, we target the phenomenon of assumed similarity which describes the observation that people perceive others as somewhat similar to themselves. Prior research has shown that assumed similarity is particularly robust for characteristics that are related to universal values, which also includes morality-related traits. We aim to gain a better understanding of the boundary conditions and underlying psychological processes of these assumed similarity effects as well as of the consequences that assumed similarity in the moral domain have for ethical vs. unethical and criminal behavior.
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