The Role of Morality in Individuals’ Willingness to Offend Within a Rational Choice Perspective

ABSTRACT

Although rational choice theory has been widely researched, the role of morality is underemphasized in explaining individuals’ willingness to offend (WTO). The present study uses survey data and vignettes to evaluate the association between morality and WTO across several scenario manipulations. We also compare results across multiple analytical strategies. Our findings indicate that those with strong moral beliefs are less likely to offend regardless of context, but that context does matter for those with weak moral beliefs. Findings are also consistent across analytical strategies, suggesting that modeling choice has no substantive influence when assessing this research question.

KEYWORDS:

• Morality
• rational choice
• situational context
• offending
• decision-making

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sensitivity testing determined that removing the least attentive students (those who correctly answered less than half of the attention checks) from the sample did not impact substantive conclusions. Therefore, we retained these students in the models.

2. We report Cronbach’s alpha for our multi-item scales; however, we did not rely on this sole statistic (Hoekstra et al., 2019). Exploratory factor analysis also indicated that each multi-item scale loaded on a single factor.

3. Drinking and driving indicators extracted from global list and combined to create one variable measuring moral attitudes toward drinking and driving (Cronbach’s α = 0.94). OLS regression of this indicator relative to the global measure provide substantively consistent results.

4. Based on a suggestion from an anonymous reviewer, we considered the extent to which our situational manipulations were statistically insignificant because cognitive perceptions of costs and benefits were entirely mediating their relationship with WTO. To do this, we ran iterative models and found no substantive differences between the direct effects of the manipulations on WTO before and after the inclusion of the cognitive cost/benefit variables. That is, the direct effects of the manipulations are non-significant when included in the model alone, so they are not associated with a person’s willingness to drink and drive.