Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

White-collar crime traditionally has not been an issue that has interested biologists or psychologists. Rather, it has served as a sociological battering ram with which to falsify conventional wisdoms such as the link between crime and poverty, low social class, youth, impulsivity, bad [Page 470]genes, and so on. The search for individual differences between “criminals” and “the rest of us” that characterized 19th- and early-20th-century criminology was never applied to white-collar criminals because people of respectability and high social status were not the imprisoned social deviants whose persistent misconduct had to be explained. Similarly, in the more recent criminal careers literature, late onset and non-violent offenders have been neglected. Longitudinal studies tend to start at age 8 to 10 and to end before major white-collar crime opportunities present themselves. Where fraud has been included in such studies—for example in Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's general theory of crime—the focus has been not on elite managers (few of whom are convicted) but on high-frequency deceivers (like credit card fraudsters) who demonstrate some of the same personality traits that characterize other “mainstream” delinquents. It might be fruitful to examine the links between impulsivity, the culture of masculinity, and high-risk economically harmful decisions taken by stock and derivatives market traders rather than by street market traders, as well as by senior banking executives in search of those short-term performance-related bonuses that will move them from millionaire to billionaire. However, little such research has been done, and senior bankers may well be less accessible than market traders to cortisol/testosterone measurement (Coates & Herbert, 2008; Levi, 1994).

A focus on differences between individuals in the propensity to commit crime may lead us to neglect situational influences on criminality. One of the differences from “normal” offenses (other than, arguably, in a more punctuated way, domestic violence) is the sheer length of time taken for some white-collar and corporate offenses to unfold. Thus, in 2008 (originally, 1981) Michael Levi examined bankruptcy (and other) frauds in terms of a threefold typology: first, pre-planned frauds, in which the business scheme is set up from the start as a way of defrauding victims (businesses, public sector and/or individuals); second, intermediate frauds, in which people started out obeying the law but consciously turned to fraud later; and third, slippery-slope frauds, in which deceptions spiraled, often in the context of trying—however absurdly and overoptimistically—to rescue an essentially insolvent business or set of businesses, escalating losses to creditors.

In short, motivation to defraud is a heterogeneous rather than a single phenomenon. One aspect upon which Edwin Sutherland and his followers focused was on the learned attitudes to the situational morality of business conduct—later described as techniques of neutralization by sociologists and as cognitive dissonance by psychologists. The motivational constructs (or, to the more skeptical, ex post facto rationalizations) used by fraudsters have been a consistent theme since Donald Cressey's classic study of embezzlement, in which he argued that people became embezzlers if and only if they had non-shareable problems, saw embezzlement as a solution to those problems, and found ways of reconciling the commission of embezzlement with their view of themselves as respectable people.

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