Sensation Seeking

The headlines are all too familiar. “Bored local youths vandalize synagogues.” “Gang ‘wilding' leaves rape victims near death. A further reading [Page 1468]reveals no compelling reason for the crimes. The youths are from upstanding families; the teens have never been in trouble with the law; the gang members are neither poverty-stricken nor cognitively impaired. All of the usual lenses through which we examine criminal behavior fail to provide a working model to explain the offenses. There are only the suspects' own words, such as these from Brenda Spenser, a sixteenyear-old mass murderer: “I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day. I just started shooting for the fun of it” (Meloy 1997: 110).

With respect to the vast majority of criminal offenses, intent is easily understood, or at least easily categorized. When a drug addict sticks up a convenience store or a woman kills her husband for the insurance money, the personal gain for the offender is obvious. Likewise, the actions of an army deserter, a jealous husband, and a violent terrorist can be appreciated within some logical framework, however abhorrent the acts they commit. Even the seemingly incomprehensible acts of the mentally ill can now be critically evaluated within the context of medicine and law. Practitioners become more erudite about criminal motivation each day, although causes are often relatively subtle, developmentally distant, or psychologically perverse.

Yet despite this growing sophistication, the social science literature is still replete with descriptions of crimes, both trivial and heinous, that are committed without apparent motive. The general public is particularly mortified by “motiveless” crimes because they seem so random and senseless. Police, attorneys, mental heath professionals, and jurists often struggle to impose structure and meaning on misdeeds for which there exists no reliable frame of reference. Indeed, many gratuitous offenses seem to have resulted from nothing more than ennui, an overpowering appetite for excitement, or a crippling tension relieved only through histrionic deviance. Such crimes appear to be committed only for the sensations they provide the criminal. of course, other crimes, even those with a rational primary motive, may be fueled in part by a need or wish to experience the “high” of rule violation, the thrill of risking capture, or the intoxication of crossing a moral boundary.

That crime has both seductive and repellent aspects, even for those who are only crime watchers, is undisputed. More controversial is the theoretical debate over what drives some individuals across the line of voyeuristic fascination to full-blown adventures in crime. Sensation-seeking behaviors, as they relate to crime, have been explicated as peer-sanctioned responses to boredom, as a demonstration of sensual associations forged during childhood traumas, as evidence of an underlying psychopathology, and most recently, as potentiated by a neurophysiological imperviousness to arousal. Can these theories account for offenses as diverse as joyriding and serial murder? If so, what are the implications?