Exploring the Interplay of Trait Self-Control and Goal-Directedness: Empirical Evidence for their Relative Efficacy and Underlying Mechanisms

• In Event: Examining Theoretical Propositions for Offending Career Dimensions

Abstract

Since the middle 1980s, desistance has become an increasingly studied topic among criminologists attempting to explicate processes that generate the abandonment of crime across the life-course. Despite considerable evidence that most offenders eventually mature out of delinquent behavior, several fundamental issues remain unresolved. One major issue involves the idea that criminality, often referred to as self-control in the criminological literature, can be a subject of changeability in producing the process underlying desistance from crime. In this paper, devoted to a recent application of the dual-process approach to decision-making brought about by the study of psychology and neuroscience, I attempted to answer this unsolved question by focusing on the important role of agency (choice) as a key to the explanation of the self-control development and associated changes in criminal behavior. Specifically, I provided how human agency can be conceptualized and explained in relation to the concept of self-control and investigated this concept into two forms of action control, goal-directed and habitual decision-making.

Author

• Young Ju Chae, Northeastern University