Altered Social Cognition Associated with Kleptomanic and Instrumental Thefts
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Theft, including shoplifting, extorts a pervasive societal and economic burden. However, the neurobehavioral mechanisms underlying recurrent theft remain sparsely understood. In this study, we investigated social cognition deficits in theft recidivists with kleptomania (TR+K) and instrumental theft recidivists without kleptomania (TR-K) compared to control subjects without criminal records (CT), for which the Social Norms Questionnaire (SNQ-22) to assess explicit moral knowledge, alongside the Dictator Game (DG) and Hawk-Dove Game (HDG) to evaluate discretionary and competitive resource allocation with others, respectively, were administered. Bayesian statistical analyses revealed that all groups demonstrated comparable social norm recognition in SNQ-22 and prosociality in the DG. However, distinct behavioral profiles emerged in specific contexts, such that TR+K exhibited more unfairness than CT and TR-K at discretionary resource allocations in the DG, whereas in the HDG, TR-K demonstrated more aggressive, resource-monopolizing responses, particularly when against an aggressive opponent, than CT and TR+K. These results suggest that theft recidivism may stem from contextual failures rather than general deficits in moral knowledge, which are distinct between TR+K rooted in the internal factor, such as heightened loss aversion, and TR-K characterized by impulsivity over the external factor, such as social conflicts with others.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT
Theft imposes a massive economic and societal burden, yet the psychological mechanisms driving repeat offenses remain poorly understood. We found that repeat offenders recognized social rules as well as non-offenders; therefore, recurrent theft was not caused by a lack of moral understanding. Instead, their criminal offenses are based on specific contextual failures in decision-making. In particular, kleptomania may be driven by internal factors such as loss aversion, while instrumental theft may be driven by impulsive reactions to external social conflicts. The findings suggest that shifting the focus from generalized punishment to context-specific psychological rehabilitation is important for reoffending prevention.
