Situational Choice and Crime Events

This article explores offender choice and the concept of rationality. We begin by presenting two traditional perspectives on rationality, the first being the pure economic model and the second being the sociological perspective from traditional criminologists. We then address a potential middle ground known as bounded rationality. This part of the article reviews contemporary developments in brain and cognitive sciences, which shed light on the complexity of how people make choices. We then question the usefulness of the term rational choice and instead suggest that situational choice may be a more useful term. We conclude by using situational choice to link crime science and life course/developmental perspectives and discuss broad applications of situational choice.