Crime and social cognition: a meta-analytic review of the developmental roots of adult criminal thinking

Abstract

In an effort to investigate and verify the developmental roots of adult criminal thinking, a meta-analysis was performed on nine social cognitive variables organized into three clusters and hypothesized to precede the criminal thinking dimensions of proactive criminal thinking, reactive criminal thinking, and criminal identity. The three proactive antecedents were moral disengagement, neutralization, and positive outcome expectancies for crime; the three reactive antecedents were hostile attribution biases, temporal discounting, and thrill/sensation seeking; and the three criminal identity antecedents were criminal self-efficacy, feared possible selves, and reflected appraisals. A series of random effects meta-analyses were performed, the results of which revealed the presence of significant pooled effect sizes for the proactive (k = 26, r = 0.34), reactive (k = 25, r = 0.25), and criminal identity (k = 11, r = 0.24) antecedents as correlates of juvenile delinquency and adult crime. Restricting the analyses to studies with prospective data indicated that each antecedent cluster successfully predicted future offending. The results of this meta-analytic review denote that social cognitive variables proposed to serve as antecedents to adult criminal thinking both correlate with and predict delinquency and general offending in adolescent populations.