Virtual Bar Scenes Are a New Tool to Study Why People Commit Crimes in the Heat of the Moment

A young man enters an occupied and weakly lit pub on Amsterdam alone to wait for the arrival of friends. A weak dance beat plays in the background. A drunk man approaches the bar and orders drinks in a noisy and unpleasant way. He proceeds to taunt the newcomer, Burp on his face and his approach: “What? Do I hit you or what? “

On a virtual reality headset (VR) where this scene is played out, a question is superimposed on the screen: “How are you feeling right now?” The headband, which looks at the scene from the point of view of the newcomer, can then move their eyes to assess their level of disgust, anger, embarrassment, fear, excitement and other emotions using a scale of one, “not at all”, at seven, “a lot”.

This exercise is part of a study designed to decode how emotions influence criminal behavior, an area of ​​research that has been sub-studied in criminology, explains Shaina Herman, criminologist at the Max Planck Institute for the study of crime, security and law in Freiburg, Germany. “We use virtual reality technology where we can put the participants in an immersive crime opportunity. The objective is to manipulate their emotions in real time,” said Herman during a session on crime and decision -making of justice on February 16 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Progress of Science (AAAS) in Denver, Col. A – Faced with an emotionally intense situation.

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Herman’s work could help explain why people commit crimes in the heat of the moment – these and the second degree murder, assault, domestic violence and certain types of flight. It shows that virtual environments can powerfully induce specific emotions such as anger or excitement, and it is a step towards determining the way in which these emotions affect its will to perform a criminal act, such as the start of a fight in a bar. Herman’s research should appear in a future issue of the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

Emotions unleashed by unforeseen circumstances can distort the rational calculation of a person of the cost of their actions – which can involve shame, for example, or an estimate of the chances of being caught – towards the advantages of the crime. They can help explain the fact that people who, depending on their personality, seem extremely unlikely to commit a crime are in fact capable during the time to do so. “Sometimes people can be very moral or have all these characteristics of the prosocial personality, and yet they will be a crime,” explains Herman. “Emotions could explain why.”

Virtual reality suggests this new work, can help explain how emotion affects decision -making that could lead to committing a criminal act. Criminologists cannot ethically carry out experiences in the field to study this issue. “I cannot very well ask a participant of the study to commit a crime and then, while he commits the crime, interviews the way he perceived the situation [and his] Emotions, ”said Herman.

Criminologists have used written vignettes to place people on a scene, but such descriptions cannot transmit subtle non -verbal clues – a coarse gesture or a frozen look – which can trigger someone in real life. “It does not necessarily seem real of life to read a description of a situation,” explains Jessica Deitzer, criminologist at the University of Nebraska Omaha, who was not involved in the new research. Another problem, known as Deitzer, is that the written vignettes leave a lot of details to the imagination, which introduces the variation between the subjects. The VR approach, she says, helps to solve both problems. “It’s very immersive, and you can imagine being in this situation. And that does not leave things on the context at random, ”she says.

Max Planck’s criminologist, Jean-Louis Van Gelder, who launched the use of virtual reality in criminology a few years ago, instructed Herman and her husband, the criminologist Timothy Barnum, with the creation of bar grain films to show the usefulness of technology in a controlled experience. Herman and Barnum aligned producers, directors and actors, and at the end of 2021, they went to Amsterdam for three days of filming. They brought German actors and filled a wrapped bar with Dutch extras. Once the films have produced, the researchers have recruited more than 100 men aged 18 to 30 in bars, restaurants and universities of Freiburg for their experience.

The participants watched one of the three films filmed with a 360 -degree photo and sound. Some of them watched the video that presented the heinous drunk man, who was supposed to induce anger and embarrassment. Others had a meeting designed to arouse excitation or sexual excitation. He included a woman who headed for the bar, established visual contact with the participant, gave him a flirtatious way and then ordered him a beer, which she told the bartender to charge her tab. A third group saw a scene in which nothing remarkable has happened.

The researchers found that the virtual scenes brought out the expected emotions – annual or excitement – based on the ratings of the participants before and after being submerged in the videos. The “anger” and “excitement” videos have also produced stronger emotions of the planned type than neutral video. The effects were enormous, said Herman, as well as specific. “Not only can we use virtual reality to change emotions at the moment, but we can really target the emotions we try to get,” she said. As part of the study, the monitoring equipment has captured physiological responses, such as a heart rate peak, which often accompanies increased emotions.

Herman and his colleagues have also collected data, which have not yet been analyzed, on how anger or excitement affects the decision to start or intervene in one or put an end to sexual harassment. For this part of the study, the participants responded to additional images. In the scenario of anger, the drunk boss had a push match with another man. He then returned to the bar, caught the participant’s beer and took a sip while looking at him. In the excitement episode, the participants watched a patron aggressively hit the woman from the previous video, who obviously turned upside down when he blocked his way to his table.

The researchers asked the participants about the way in which these scenes and their emotions that result from them influence the cognitive factors known to influence decisions on the advisability of committing a crime. These factors include the perception of risk arrest, the morality of an aggressive or criminal act and the benefits of such action. For example, a child might think that committing a crime makes him cool – a social reward – but an adult could be concerned with the way such behavior might look like others. “What we want to understand is how these emotional states change the way people perceive these cognitions, change the way they see the risk [and] Change the way they really make decisions, ”says Herman.

Herman’s work is part of a broader trend in criminology that tries to use the principles of behavioral economy to understand non -rational factors in decision -making in the context of crimes, said Gregsky, criminologist at the University of Albany and the former public defender, who also spoke during the AAAS session. “We use intuitions, emotions and other visceral clues in the environment, and they actually affect our judgments,” he said in his speech. For example, when people feel good in an activity, they will tend to overestimate its advantages and underestimate the potential consequences, he says.

An intuitive factor that plays a role in the wandering police shootings, said Pogarsky, is “to amortize” – in this case, by a distributor. “It turns out that the information communicated by the distributor can affect the probability that there is an erroneous police shooting,” said Pogarsky at the meeting. If a distributor pronounces the word “pistol” by describing the scene, an respondent agent is predisposed or “started” to see a firearm, even if a suspect retires from his pocket is a portfolio or a mobile phone. In a study that involved a simulated environment that was not VR, when the distributor said that the aggressor had a “pistol”, the chances of a erroneous shooting doubled compared to the cases where the distributor had not said that the subject had a pistol, said Pogarsky.

The VR could be part of the solution in such situations, suggested Herman. Technology could be used to simulate heated scenarios and allow agents to practice their response, she said. Likewise, virtual simulations of stressful counterfeit in a courtroom could help prepare victims of crimes or other witnesses to take a stand.

The bar bar clips, which are in German, have been baptized in English, Dutch and French, and Herman and his colleagues plan to make them widely accessible to researchers. The episodes can be in demand: at the meeting of the American criminology company last November, the researchers waited online to live the immersive action, known as Deitzer. The new results also underline the usefulness of virtual reality to understand crime, inspiring Deitzer, for its part, to consider using it to investigate how adolescents make decisions concerning the committing crimes. “I think we will see more in the future,” she says.