Inside the Criminal’s Mind: Using Virtual Reality to Understand Criminal Decision-Making

Inside the Criminal’s Mind: Using Virtual Reality to Understand Criminal Decision-Making

Crime, by definition, is a hidden behavior. This makes it hard for researchers to study and reduce crime. An international collaboration of researchers uses Virtual Reality to go inside the criminal mind to understand when a crime might occur and why
dr Patrick McClanahan

Patrick McClanahan, Ph.D.

Postdoc in the criminology department at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security & Law

In criminology, there is a key concept that says the environment or situation influences our perception and decision-making, which in turn influences our behavior, in this case the likelihood of committing a crime (Barnum et al., 2021; Eck & Clarke, 2019). When speaking about this decision-making process, we are talking about the weighing up of the risks and rewards associated with committing a crime. When the rewards outweigh the risks, crime is likely to occur (Apel, 2013; Nagin, 2013). However, crime, by definition, is a hidden behavior, restricting the ability for researchers to assess it.

Over time, researchers have developed a number of ways to examine criminal decision-making including examining trends with real-world data, using written hypothetical scenarios, and directly interviewing offenders

While research using such methods have supported the environment-perception link in criminal decision-making, there are still limitations. For example, real-world studies can confirm that a crime has occurred, but have no perceptual data from the offender’s perspective (Taylor, 2018), hypothetical scenarios tend to only examine low level crime in samples of non-offenders, such as students (Dhami et al., 2004; Payne & Chappell, 2008; Peterson, 2001), and interviews capture the offender’s perspective but suffer from confounds such as memory recall and deception (Elffers, 2010; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Small & Cook, 2021).

Researchers of the Virtual Burglary Project (VBP), address these limitations by harnessing the power of virtual reality to assess criminal decision-making

Importantly, virtual reality is mobile and allows them to take the equipment to those who know the most about crime, offenders themselves (Mania & Chalmers, 2001). The Virtual Burglary Project is an international, multi-institutional collaboration that’s used VR to examine criminal decision-making in a number of prisons across Europe and America (Meenaghan et al., 2020; Nee et al., 2019; Van Gelder, 2023; van Gelder et al., 2017, 2019, 2019).

In one of the most recent data collection sessions, Patrick McClanahan, PhD, from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security & Law: MPICSL, travelled to Pennsylvania in the United States and spent six months collecting data from 160 incarcerated burglars across four state prisons. Participants were encouraged to (virtually) scope out a neighborhood for targets to break into.

By getting to observe the (virtual) crime commission act unfold in real-time, and through extensive interviews with each inmate, Patrick was able to understand how certain physical features of a house or neighborhood make a house a good or bad target

From this research, Patrick will publish several empirical papers and present his findings at many academic conferences. Importantly, Patrick strives to provide practical information to people on how they can reduce their risk of becoming a victim of a burglary. Patrick shares such practical tips on the podcast Doing Time, Talking Crime by the MPICSL (Episode 1; Episode 2).

To learn more, connect with Patrick McClanahan (@_WPM3_) and the MPICSL (@the MPICSL) on X (previously Twitter), or visit the webpages linked below:

References:

  • Apel, R. (2013). Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime: Implications for Criminal Deterrence. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 29(1), 67–101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-012-9170-1
  • Barnum, T. C., Nagin, D. S., & Pogarsky, G. (2021). Sanction risk perceptions, coherence, and deterrence*. Criminology, 59(2), 195–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12266
  • Dhami, M. K., Hertwig, R., & Hoffrage, U. (2004). The Role of Representative Design in an Ecological Approach to Cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 130(6), 959. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.6.959
  • Eck, J. E., & Clarke, R. V. (2019). Situational Crime Prevention: Theory, Practice and Evidence. In M. D. Krohn, N. Hendrix, G. Penly Hall, & A. J. Lizotte (Eds.), Handbook on Crime and Deviance (pp. 355–376). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20779-3_18
  • Elffers, H. (2010). Misinformation, misunderstanding and misleading as validity threats to offenders’ accounts of offending. In Offenders on Offending. Willan.
  • Mania, K., & Chalmers, A. (2001). The Effects of Levels of Immersion on Memory and Presence in Virtual Environments: A Reality Centered Approach. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 4(2), 247–264. https://doi.org/10.1089/109493101300117938
  • Meenaghan, A., Nee, C., Van Gelder, J.-L., Vernham, Z., & Otte, M. (2020). Expertise, Emotion and Specialization in the Development of Persistent Burglary. The British Journal of Criminology, 60(3), 742–761. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azz078
  • Nagin, D. S. (2013). Deterrence in the twenty-first century. Crime and Justice, 42(1), 199–263.
  • Nee, C., van Gelder, J.-L., Otte, M., Vernham, Z., & Meenaghan, A. (2019). Learning on the job: Studying expertise in residential burglars using virtual environments*. Criminology, 57(3), 481–511. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12210
  • Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231.
  • Payne, B. K., & Chappell, A. (2008). Using Student Samples in Criminological Research. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 19(2), 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511250802137226
  • Peterson, R. A. (2001). On the Use of College Students in Social Science Research: Insights from a Second-Order Meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Research, 28(3), 450–461. https://doi.org/10.1086/323732
  • Small, M. L., & Cook, J. M. (2021). Using Interviews to Understand Why: Challenges and Strategies in the Study of Motivated Action. Sociological Methods & Research, 004912412199555. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124121995552
  • Taylor, R. B. (2018). How Do We Get to Causal Clarity on Physical Environment-Crime Dynamics? In G. J. N. Bruinsma & S. D. Johnson (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Criminology (p. 0). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190279707.013.2
  • Van Gelder, J.-L. (2023). Virtual Reality for Criminologists: A roadmap. Review of Research, 52, in press.
  • van Gelder, J.-L., de Vries, R. E., Demetriou, A., van Sintemaartensdijk, I., & Donker, T. (2019). The Virtual Reality Scenario Method: Moving from Imagination to Immersion in Criminal Decision-making Research. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 56(3), 451–480. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427818819696
  • van Gelder, J.-L., Nee, C., Otte, M., Demetriou, A., van Sintemaartensdijk, I., & van Prooijen, J.-W. (2017). Virtual Burglary: Exploring the Potential of Virtual Reality to Study Burglary in Action. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 54(1), 29–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427816663997