Explaining Judgments on Rule Violations

This volume highlights the complex relations between empathy, individualizing and groupish moral intuitions, (anticipated) moral emotions, and moral judgment. It is rooted in the notion that human moral systems were not immune to evolutionary processes and thus shaped by biological and cultural evolutionary forces (e.g. natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, sexual selection, cultural mutation, ecological selection pressures, etc.). This edition proposes a conceptual model of both distal and proximal variables to integrate insights from Moral Foundations Theory with theorizing on commitment strategies by linking empathy and moral intuitions to moral emotions (guilt, anger, disgust), and moral judgment in the context of distinct rule violations. The proposed model is tested using data from a convenience sample of young adults in Belgium, who responded to written hypothetical scenarios in a large-scale online survey. This volume is ideal for moral theory researchers in criminology, psychology, and related disciplines. Ann De Buck (*1966) is Doctoral Researcher and academic assistant in Criminology (since 2016) at Ghent University, Faculty of Law and Criminology. She is currently working on a doctoral research project, under the supervision of prof. dr. Lieven Pauwels, entitled “Moral emotions and moral cognitions in context: rule-breaking as cooperation failure”. Her fields of interest are interdisciplinary theory-testing research, rule-breaking decision strategies, juvenile delinquency, morality. She has written articles in English and Dutch peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Community Psychology, European Journal of Criminal Policy and Research, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform, Psychometrica Belgica, the European Journal of Criminology, Panopticon. She aims to finalize her doctoral research project by the end of 2022. Lieven J. R. Pauwels (°1974) is Professor of Criminology (since 2007) at Ghent University, Faculty of Law and Criminology. He is Director of the Institute for Criminal Policy and Research. He has been conducting theory-testing research for the past 18 years as a junior researcher, post-doc researcher, and since 2007 as a Professor of Criminology. He has written over 100 articles in Dutch, German, and English peer-reviewed Journals. He contributed to a number of Oxford Handbook Series that are relevant for criminology and he published books on Testing Situational Action Theory (2010), Problematic youth Group involvement as a situated choice (2015), and Social Disorganization Theory (2007). He is the author of widely used textbooks (in Dutch) on theories of crime causation and quantitative methods for criminologists. He is a Board member of the European Society of Criminology, the American Society of Criminology, and former president and co-founder of the Flemish Society of Criminology (VVC). His fields of interest are interdisciplinary theoretical integration, the explanation of prosocial and antisocial behavioral strategies, person-environment interactions, rule-breaking decision strategies, juvenile delinquency, and violent extremism.