Olof Dahlbäck

Accident-proneness and risk-taking☆

Accidents are unplanned or unforeseen injurious events. If an individual is prone to make decisions which lead to injurious consequences and is prone to make decisions which lead to consequences which were not planned or foreseen, then this individual can be assumed to be accident-prone. The propensity to make decisions which lead to injurious consequences is affected by the propensity to take risks. Individuals who take greater risks more often meet with injurious consequences of their decisions. Individuals who are more prone to repress the anticipation of unpleasant things and who are less able to accept uncertainty more often make decisions which lead to unplanned or unforeseen consequences. Therefore, the coefficient for the regression of accident-proneness on the propensity to take risks will have a higher value for individuals more given to repression and for individuals who are less able to accept uncertainty. This hypothesis is tested with data from two independent investigations and is supported.

Criminality and risk-taking☆

To commit a crime often involves taking a risk. It is assumed that the criminality of individuals has a positive relationship with their inclination to take risks and that the commission of crimes with an extremely low or an extremely high probability of detection is not affected as strongly by this inclination as is the commission of crimes with a moderately high probability of detection. These statements are empirically tested and found to be true.

The Individualism‐Holism Problem in Sociological Research

This paper treats the problem of which type of units, individuals or whole societies, should be used when explaining societal phenomena. It is argued that factors operating at the individual level in principle form societies, and that societal phenomena therefore should ideally be explained at this level. However, it is also argued that many societal phenomena cannot in practice be analyzed at the individual level in a clear and strict way, but rather must be analyzed holistically, because it is not known how they are related to individual factors due to the complexity of societies. For societies to be described and analyzed in a clear and strict way, they must as a rule be much simplified, and such simplification is often made easier by abandoning the individualistic perspective. If researchers still wish to describe a connection between individual factors and a societal phenomenon, they often must do so in vague terms. There are also other problems with the individualistic perspective that make it difficult to use. However, using the holistic perspective may be risky, as shown by two hypothetical examples.

An experimental analysis of risk taking

A descriptive model of risk taking is presented according to which the utility of a choice of a risk-filled course of action is a function of the utility values and the probabilities of the outcomes of this choice and of an individual parameter indicating an inclination to take risks of a certain magnitude. According to this model, favorable and unfavorable outcomes are weighed differently in decisions. The moments of the probability distribution over the utility values of outcomes are not explicitly considered. The model has been tested by asking 71 university-level students to design risk-filled action alternatives assumed to be equal in utility to alternatives having only one outcome. Outcomes were fictitious and monetary. The risk-taking model gives a better explanation of the utility of alternatives than a model according to which expected utility is maximized, but the improvement is rather small. According to the model, the subjects were on the average somewhat more cautious than would be implied by the maximization of expected utility. However, it proved problematic to identify simultaneously the inclination to take risks and the utility values of outcomes. As expected, the utility function obtained when risk taking was assumed to exist was concave but less so than when no risk taking was assumed to exist. The possibilities of using the model in further research are discussed.

An Aggregation Model

Previously, I have discussed the fact that empirical research has no clear results to show about how the relationship at the aggregate level between crime and measures of the severity and probability of punishment is constituted. I suggested that the problem should be analyzed by calculating macro models on the basis of the micro assumption of rational choices. In this chapter I do this by applying the basic model for normalized utility (according to which t = pu f + 1 − p; see Section 4.3) to synthetic data. As far as I know, the analysis presented here is the first of its kind.

Using Single-Equation Models of Function-of-Functions Type in Sociological Research

This paper argues that single-equation explanatorymodels of many types of social phenomena should not be built in accordance with establishedsociological ways of thinking. In sociological research, the focus is often on the causal mechanisms behindphenomena, and it is often interesting to use models that show the hierarchical causal structure,that is, how influences are nested in the causal process. I propose such a model with a form that reflectsa two-step structure. According to this model, the dependent factor is a product of independentfactors that are linear functions of variables. The model, which should be used with the factor product inunexpanded form, can be assumed to have wide application. However, the models used insociological research and discussed in textbooks are generally very different. They do not have afunction-of-functions form, but take a form in which variables are directly entered. Furthermore,even if they take interaction into consideration, they are linear in an extended sense because they construeit as one or more terms that are products of single variables. In comparison with the proposed typeof model, these models are technically simpler. However, this paper argues that the proposed typeof model is superior in many contexts because it better reflects the causal process.

Analyzing the Relationships between Individual Criminal Behavior and the Severity and Probability of Punishment

This paper deals with problems encountered in analyzing how an individual is deterred from committing a crime by the severity and probability of punishment. It is argued that it might be advantageous to base such an analysis on a model of maximization of expected utility. According to this model, the attractiveness of committing a crime is strongly affected by the product of the relative utility of committing the crime and being punished as compared with the utility of not committing the crime times the probability of the punishment. This implies that the bivariate linear relationships of choices to commit or not to commit crime and the severity and probability factors are dependent on the variations in both these factors and their mean values. In this paper, these bivariate relationships are analyzed in two ways – formally-algebraically and by numerical examples.

Book Reviews : James S. Coleman: Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990. xvi + 993 pp:

answer will be: a huge treatise on the principles of social theory, conceived in the grand tradition of methodological discourse, and with targets set high: to provide a sound conceptual and axiomatic basis for social theory. The volume is organized in five main parts, to which should be added an introductory chapter on explanation in social science. The first two parts deal with the properties of actors, authority relations, social exchange, collective behavior and norms, the third with corporate action and social choice. In the fourth part, Coleman develops his ideas on the rise of corporate

Ethnic Discrimination in Reports of Offenders to the Police

Are persons of foreign extraction discriminated against when crime victims decide whether they will report the offenders to the police? Is it, when relevant circumstances are taken into account, more probable that the general public report offenders if these are of foreign extraction than if they are not? This question is interesting for at least two reasons. One reason is that such discrimination conflicts with demands for equality. Another reason is related to the fact that if there is ethnic discrimination in the reports to the police, registered data on offenders will be distorted since they largely originate from such reports.1 Explaining whether ethnic discrimination exists in the reports could therefore shed light on some criminological problems. For example, it is possible that it could help answer the question of whether immigrants tend to be more criminal than natives. This question has been raised in many European countries, because it has been found that immigrants are overrepresented in official statistics of persons suspected of a crime.

The Assumption of Rationality

What is meant by a rational crime, or a rational action in general? The fact that something is rational implies that it is reasonable, that is, in accordance with sound thought or judgment. In this book, this reasonableness refers to individuals’ choices. Thus, considering the rationality of a person’s action here means considering whether, or to what extent, the person has chosen this action according to reason. In judging this, one must consider what the chosen action was worth to the person in comparison to other actions that he might have chosen. Fundamentally, the concept of rationality implies that a rational person should choose the ‘best’ course of action (if there is only one such course), that is, the action that will benefit him as much as possible, that has the highest ‘utility’ for him.