Morality and Delinquency: Toward a Moral Intuitionist Approach

• In Event: New Directions in Moral Criminology

Abstract

Research on the association between morality and delinquency has yet to take full advantage of the explosion of research that has occurred in the field of moral psychology. To help fill this gap, we examine the relationship between moral intuitions and delinquency using a national sample of Icelandic youths (n=7,404). Results show that individualizing moral intuitions (i.e., those that emphasize the individual as the center of moral concern) are associated with lower levels of violent and property delinquency and higher levels of illegal substance use, and that binding moral intuitions (i.e., those that emphasize the group or society as the center of moral concern) are associated with lower levels of illegal substance use and, to a lesser extent, higher levels of violent delinquency. These results hold after controlling for self-control, parental control, parental support, school attachment, foreign language spoken at home, gender, age, SES, and GPA. Analyses examining the effects of self-control and parental control at varying levels of morality yielded mostly null results. Overall, our findings show that binding and individualizing moral intuitions are associated with delinquency and suggest that a moral intuitionist approach is useful for examining the morality-delinquency relationship.

Authors

• Eric Silver, Pennsylvania State University

• Jasmine R. Silver, Rutgers University - Newark