Actions speak louder than words: Using virtual reality to understand collaborative decision-making in residential burglary by dr. Iris van Sintemaartensdijk
The majority of young offenders act in pairs or groups. This is especially true for crimes such as burglary and robbery. Despite increasing attention on decision-making processes in residential burglary, there has been little focus on the role of joint decision-making during the actual completion of an offence. Uncovering decision-making processes in offending behaviour can be ethically and practically problematic. The use of virtual reality (VR) is proving to be an invaluable tool for observing and recording offence-related behaviour.
In this first study, we use VR to see how students co-offend in a virtual burglary scenario. Two people are asked to come to the lab and pretend to be burglars. Their objective is to successfully complete this burglary together. They are allowed to roam around in one virtual house, and have to decide together what items to take and when to leave the house. Not only what they take and how long they stay in the house is measured, their heart rate measures are also recorded and participants answer a range of questionnaires on cooperation, personality traits, game experience and how they experienced the VR environment. Their vocalisations in the environment are also recorded.
The first results of this study show that participants felt immersed in the environment, with a higher heart rate when committing the burglary compared to simply being in the neighbourhood. Cooperation was seen as more sufficient when there was a high knowledge of what a successful burglary consists of or when participants knew each other well.
This study sets the foundation for the first VR study to explore joint decision-making in offender pairs.
Links
Watch the video below for a demo from the BMS lab that was used for this project! Click here to go to the page of the BMS lab.
