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The present research note studies the interaction between the ability to exercise self-control and extremist moral beliefs with regard to the explanation of violent extremism. Although some evidence exists for the interaction between moral beliefs and self-control in the explanation of adolescent offending, no previous study has studied this interaction effect in a survey of young adults and with regard to politically or religiously motivated violence. This study therefore extends the existing literature by testing a key proposition of Situational Action Theory. We use a large-scale web survey of young adults in Belgium. The results support the hypothesis that the effect of the ability to exercise self-control is conditional upon one’s extremist beliefs. The results are stable across extremism-specific measures of extremist beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situational Action Theory (SAT) is a recently developed general action theory of crime that integrates and synthesizes existing individual and ecological explanations. SAT explicitly states that the individual's propensity for criminal behaviour (morality and self-control) and exposure to criminogenic settings (rule breaking peers and time spent in unsupervised, unstructured activities) interact to determine whether a crime is committed. In the present article, core assumptions of SAT are tested by estimating cross-sectional and lagged models on two-wave panel data from adolescents in The Hague (The Netherlands). Generally, the findings support SAT, including the situational interaction between morality and self-control. However, the findings also raise questions about SAT. In particular, we did not find lagged effects of morality on later offending, and we found only a few significant interaction effects on offending between the two peer variables and morality and self-control. Generally, there was not much support for the SAT theory that adolescents with low morality or low self-control are more vulnerable to (situational) peer influences. The article concludes with a discussion of how additional situational peer variables may be included in SAT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is a well-documented gender difference in offending, with evidence that boys, on average, are more involved in crime than girls. Opinions differ, however, on whether the causes of crime apply to girls and boys similarly.Aims: Our aim is to explore crime propensity in boys and girls. Our research questions were (1) are there differences between boys and girls in moral values and self-control; (2) are these attributes similarly correlated with offending among girls and boys; and (3) is any interaction effect between morality and self-control identical for girls and boys.Methods: Data were drawn from the Malmö Individual and Neighbourhood Development Study, which includes 481 girls and boys aged 16-17. An 8-item self-control scale was derived from Grasmick's self-control instrument; we created a 16-item morality scale. Analysis of variance was used to test for differences in scale scores.Results: There were significant gender differences in moral values but not self-control. Moral values and self-control were significantly correlated with offending among both girls and boys. In the multiple regression analysis, the three-way interaction term used to test the interaction between gender, self-control and moral values was non-significant, indicating that the magnitude of the self-control-moral value interaction is not affected by gender.Conclusions: Our findings indicate that effects of morality and self-control are general and apply to girls and boys similarly, so more research is needed to explain gender differences in crime prevalence. © 2018 The Authors Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]