Crime, Choice, and Context

Abstract

This special issue is the result of a workshop held on 22 October 2021 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany. The reason for organizing the workshop was that in spite of its ubiquitous influence on human judgment and decision making, the study of context has not yet reached center stage in research on criminal choice. The workshop addressed this hiatus and set the stage for novel research that revisits the multidisciplinary roots of the study of criminal decision making and expands its rational choice foundations. To this end, participants to the workshop were invited to examine how context shapes criminal decision processes. More specifically, they were encouraged to do so in ways that move beyond the axiomatic construct of rational decision making underlying neoclassical economics to incorporate findings and theoretical perspectives from several decades of research in criminology, behavioral economics, and psychology.