Not (Entirely) Guilty: The Role of Co-offenders in Diffusing Responsibility for Crime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: Test the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis by examining associations between the presence, number, and role of co-offenders and adolescents’ perceived responsibility for criminal behavior. Methods: The study uses data from the Crossroads Study, a longitudinal study of 1,216 male adolescents who were arrested for the first time. A series of generalized ordered logistic regressions assess how different features of the group context are linked to adolescent offending. Models first examine the relationship between the presence of a co-offender and adolescents’ perceptions of responsibility for their crime, followed by co-offending specific models examining the impact of the number of co-offenders and role in the co-offense. Results: Adolescents’ perceptions of responsibility for criminal behavior decrease when they co-offend, as the size of the group increases, and when crime is not solely their idea. Conclusions: The study's findings are consistent with the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis, which highlights an important psychological experience tied to the group context. The findings contribute to our understanding of adolescent risky decision-making and shed insight into how the group context may facilitate criminal behavior.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".