Self-Control and Curiosity: Has Curiosity Been an Overlooked Concept in the Crime/Deviance Decision-Making Process?

ABSTRACT

We conducted an empirical test of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s, 1990 A General Theory of Crime in this exploratory study to introduce the concept of curiosity to criminological theory. Specifically, we tested whether self-control was significantly associated with curiosity and whether curiosity significantly predicted a crime/deviance index beyond the effects of self-control. An original eight item curiosity scale was created that measured both an attitudinal curiosity dimension and a behavioral curiosity component and compared the ability of this new measure with the capability of the most commonly used self-control scale in predicting a crime/deviance index. Data was derived from a convenience sample of college students. As theoretically predicted, self-control was significantly correlated with curiosity, and the curiosity scale significantly predicted the crime/deviance index, beyond the effects of the self-control scale. More conservative tests demonstrated that curiosity also significantly predicted involvement in more specific illegal/deviance measures, including those involving somewhat serious delinquent/criminal conduct. The findings led us to conclude that curiosity may be another additional cause of crime/deviance beyond the effects of self-control, curiosity explains more than just involvement in exploratory types of illegal/deviant behavior, and that curiosity has been an overlooked concept in the crime/deviance decision-making process.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ One classic example is how “curiosity drove Pandora to open the box despite being warned of its pernicious contents” (Hsee and Ruan 2016: 665). The lure of finding out what was inside the box was tempting enough to outweigh the malevolent threats associated with opening it up. Another example is how the “failure to curb curiosity drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden” (Berlyne 1978: 99).

² We hope readers understand the immense challenges that we and future researchers face in attempting to try to integrate the concept of curiosity into criminological theory. How do we incorporate it within criminology when psychology, itself, has not answered such basic questions such as: What curiosity is? How many dimensions does it include? How do you measure it? Do stated operationalizations for curiosity really measure different concepts? And given the lack of clarity in psychology, how are we in criminology to distinguish this concept and measures for it from other concepts that already have a history in criminology (e.g., sensation seeking)? We are taking the initial step in that endeavor.

³ The literature linking curiosity and deviance does not typically include multidimensional measures for curiosity. In fact, much of the support is from “non-controlled research” (Hsee and Ruan 2016: 660). Many researchers simply ask their respondents a single question for why they did something – smoke, use e-cigarettes, drink alcohol, engage in sexual activities, set fires, use a certain drug and/or switch to a different drug – and then ask them to choose among multiple reasons for doing so with one option being because of curiosity. The research that does include multidimensional measures for curiosity generally finds that it is the thrill-seeking dimension that is associated with “impulsive problems such as chemical substance use and abuse, gambling, aggression, and unsafe sexual behaviors” (Kashdan et al. 2018: 145). Therefore, the extant literature on the curiosity/deviance relationship seems to cry out for studies that use multivariate analyses with at least two-dimensional measures for curiosity, which are operationalized separate from measures for thrill-seeking, impulsivity, sensation seeking, and the like to see if they produce similar relationships as those reported above.

⁴ Our procedures are similar to Grasmick et al.’s (1993) original operationalization of self-control where they included the words “dislike really hard tasks” in a question to measure the dimension of simple tasks, incorporated the word “risk” in the first item to measure the risk-seeking, used the words “something physical” to measure preference for physical (as opposed to mental) activities, added the word “myself” in the first question measuring self-centeredness, and also included the word “temper” in the first item to operationalize the temper component.

⁵ We initially pretested six items for each of the two dimensions on students in a handful of undergraduate criminal justice classes. Our goal was to reduce these twelve items down to four questions for each of the two elements. After the data was collected it was entered into the computer and a series of reliability analyses led to the identification of four reliable items for each dimension, which also proved to be reliable for the eight-question curiosity scale.

⁶ This interpretation is similar to the conclusion that low self-control is accounted for by six sub-dimensions (see Arneklev, Grasmick, and Bursik 1999; Grasmick et al. 1993; Kobayashi et al. 2010).

⁷ We do not believe; however, that this is the final definitive test of this issue (see Arneklev, Grasmick, and Bursik 1999; Longshore, Stein, and Turner 1998; Longshore, Turner, and Stein 1996; Piquero and Rosay 1998 as examples of research that have tested the dimensionality of Grasmick’s self-control scale).

⁸ Chronback’s Alpha for the four item Attitudinal scale (not reported in the table) is .868 and Chronback’s Alpha for the four item Behavioral curiosity scale (also not reported in the table) is .856. Neither of these Alphas can be improved with the deletion of any of the four items from each the two subscales.

⁹ We feel that this simple finding, which is consistent with that found by Grasmick and Bursik (1990) whose research was based on a probability sample, helps to validate our data derived from a convenience sample of respondents.

¹⁰ We report OLS regression results so that standardized regression coefficients for self-control and curiosity can be compared and because this procedure also allows us to report change in R² values for regression models that include self-control (but not curiosity) to those that include both self-control and curiosity as predictor variables. (Those later results are reported below.) However, there may be some concern that our dependent variables may be skewed and, therefore, binomial regression might be more appropriate. To check on this, we ran SPSS Descriptive Statistic diagnostics on our count measure dependent variables and found that the Skewness Statistic indicated that the dependent variable in Table 4 (the General Crime/Deviance Index) and the dependent variables in Modules 1 (MS/HS Delinquency/Deviance Index) and Model 2 (College/Crime Deviance Index) of Table 5 had values under 1.0 (Skewness Statistics were .460, .275, and .804 respectively). Only Module 3 of Table 5 included a count measure dependent variable (MS/HS & College) Gambling with a Skewness Statistic over 1.0 (1.106). We conducted binomial regression with this dependent variable and found that the Omnibus Test was significant (<.001) indicating that the model fit the data well and both self-control (p = .011) and curiosity (p = .017) were significant in predicting the two-item gambling measure (similar to the results reported in Model 3 of Table 5).

¹¹ Use of prescription drugs in high/middle school and use of force in college were significantly correlated with one another (r = .120; r = .026). However, the Chronbach’s Alpha that was produced by the two items was only .197. Therefore, we did not report the change in R² results in Table 5 based on the two items added together as another dependent variable. We do note here that there was, once again, a significant change in the R² produced when curiosity was added into the second equation predicting the summed serious illegal behavior item.

¹² Gottfredson and Hirschi (2019: 113) now contend, for example, that perceptions of criminal opportunities and low self-control capacity are so intricately linked that measures of the former can be used in lieu of operationalizations for the latter. They are both indications of the same underlying thing. Curiosity may work in a similar manner; it may shape the detection of criminal/deviant opportunities. For example, some may see a product on a shelf in a store as an opportunity to buy, others may be curious as to whether it represents an opportunity to steal.

¹³ We should note here that we did test for interaction effects between curiosity and self-control on each of the six dependent variables listed in Tables 4 and 5. However, none of the interaction terms proved to be significant and, therefore, we do not report those findings.

¹⁴ The most immediate question to answer is whether curiosity is simply another word for sensation-seeking? We believe that curiosity is related to and at times may lead to sensation seeking but that they are not the same thing. For example, based on his findings Byman (2005: 1376) concludes that curiosity and sensation seeking are completely different traits and that it is simply “not possible that the same higher-order construct lies behind both factors.” Lindgren et al. (2010): 513) came to the same conclusion when they also answered this question empirically and found that “curiosity and sensation seeking accounted for unique variance in alcohol related problems.” Our belief is consistent with these conclusions in that curiosity is related to, but distinct from, sensation-seeking and that both can be found within the first socioemotional system of the dual systems model where an increase in dopamine, which plays a “critical role in the brain’s reward circuitry, … is likely to increase reward-seeking behavior” (Steinberg 2010: 217; Steinberg 2014). This position is like Zuckerman’s (1994: 180, underline added), for example, who does not conclude that sensation seekers are always curious people, but rather “…high sensations seekers… [list of things they do here] … and are generally curious.”

¹⁵ We contend that curiosity is related to but is a different trait than those recognized in the criminological literature, such as impulsivity, risk-taking, thrill seeking, sensation-seeking, as well as low self-control (Byman 2005; Casey, Jones, and Somerville 2011; Lindgren et al. 2010; Steinberg 2010). Empirically, this is important to demonstrate because sensation-seeking measures have been used to operationalize curiosity, sensation-seeking seems very similar to diversive curiosity, and diversive curiosity sounds very similar to behavioral curiosity. We do not directly have a sensation-seeking scale to empirically compare with, but we do have a measure for the risk-seeking dimension of Grasmick et al.’s (1993) self-control scale (and risk-seeking is closely related to sensation seeking; see Wood, Pfefferbaum, and Arneklev 1993). As expected, the behavioral dimension of curiosity is significantly correlated with risk-seeking (r = .325, <.001). We also applied principal components analysis to the eight items, which illuminated two eigenvalues above 1.0 (3.438, 1.716, .863, etc.). We examined a two-factor solution and regardless of rotation used (varimax, oblimin, quartimax, etc.) the four behavioral curiosity items loaded cleanly on one factor and the four risk-seeking items loaded on a second factor. In addition, our curiosity scale is not significantly correlated with the impulsivity dimension of Grasmick et al.’s (1993) self-control scale (r = .070, p = .195, N = 342) nor is the smaller four-item behavioral curiosity scale significantly related to the same impulsivity scale (r = .056; p = .298, N = 342) (although the impulsivity dimension is significantly related to the general crime/deviance index [r=.183, p=<.001, N = 342]).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce J. Arneklev

Bruce J. Arneklev is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests include testing theories of crime especially those including or related to the concept of “low self-control.” He has developed original quantitative measures for concepts such as “low self-control,” the “desire to control ‘low self-control’,” “curiosity,” and “exploratory deviance.” A portion of his present research looks at whether curiosity may be an overlooked concept in criminological theory. His research has been published in Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology.