Beyond Legal Deterrence: Individual Differences and Willingness to Offend

DOI

The present dataset consists of cross-sectional survey data collected from general community participants by undergraduate psychology students. The study assessed demographic variables, antagonistic traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism), self-control, guilt, shame, moral disengagement, moral identity, and materialism, as well as participants’ willingness to commit a crime if all crimes were legal for a day. The data collection aimed to replicate and extend the study by Meldrum et al. (2021), which examined individuals’ willingness to engage in criminal acts—including murder—in the absence of legal controls. In addition to this general question, we included a new questionnaire assessing participants’ likelihood of committing specific types of crimes (e.g., theft, murder, kidnapping, sexual offenses) under such conditions. Data collection was approved by the Ethics Review Board of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (TSB_RP807).

IBM SPSS, 27

The variable Q5_Others (containing additional self-reported information about past criminal behavior) was deleted from the dataset because it potentially included identifying information.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/CZJ4Q4
Related Identifier IsCitedBy https://doi.org/10.1177/00224278251394278
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/CZJ4Q4
Provenance
Creator Macías-Vasileff, Valentina (ORCID: 0009-0000-8594-784X); Bogaerts, Stefan ORCID logo; Garofalo, Carlo ORCID logo; Erbas, Yasemin ORCID logo; De Caluwé, Elien ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor TiU Dataverse Admins; Macías-Vasileff, Valentina; Tilburg University; DataverseNL
Publication Year 2026
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact TiU Dataverse Admins (Tilburg University); Macías-Vasileff, Valentina (Tilburg University)
Representation
Resource Type Survey data; Dataset
Format application/pdf; application/x-spss-sav
Size 429774; 2114345
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences