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believe that the certainty, celerity and severity of crime’s danger do not apply to them, are
unlikely discouraged by the possibility of harm; for these people, it is their fearlessness, rather
than their fear of harm that influences the decision to offend.
Our hypothesis—that perceptions about danger influence offending—draws on insights
offered in various theories in the “rational action paradigm” (Jaeger et al. 2001). Theories in this
paradigm assume that people have relatively stable preferences (or tastes) for various outcomes
and can assign a measure of satisfaction to these outcomes. People’s subjective expected utility
functions are the product of their assessment of the likelihood of an outcome being realized and
the satisfaction it will provide, together with their approach to the risk associated with obtaining
the outcome and to time-discounting. Rational actions reflect a decision in which people chose
an action based on ex ante expectations that it will result in the best outcome. In other words,
people act rationally when they optimize, selecting an action (from the set of feasible actions)
that will maximize their expected utility.
Although the rational action paradigm is not without limitations, there are no widely
accepted alternatives. We assume that we can usefully view offending as a risky decision
executed under conditions of uncertainty (Nagin & Paternoster 1993; Schmidt & Witte 1984);
but, we recognize that a variety of factors influence people’s preferences—approach to risk,
time-discounting and their perceptions of an outcome’s likelihood—and that perceptions change
as people acquire additional information, encounter new situations and change related
perceptions (Nagin 1998). The rational action paradigm is therefore, most useful for
understanding decision-making when preferences are relatively unambiguous; in this case, we
assume that people usually prefer safety to harm.
Convention