Western Criminology Review 7(3), 41–55 (2006) Testing the General Theory of Crime: Comparing the Effects of “Imprudent Behavior” and an Attitudinal Indicator of “Low Self-Control”

Abstract. The strongest criticism of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) A General Theory of Crime continues to be that it is tautological. The authors initially provided no operational definition of “low self-control ” and, therefore, researchers could not really tell if an individual had this characteristic unless they committed crime. Investigators have attempted to circumvent this criticism by using either attitudinal indicators of low self-control or “analogous” behavioral measures (some of which have included illegal conduct). In this paper, we compare the efficacy of two such measures in predicting involvement in crime and other social outcome variables. In so doing, we specifically attempted to exclude illegal conduct in our behavioral measure of “imprudent behavior. ” The results of our study demonstrate that the attitudinal indicator of low self-control is a relatively stronger predictor of crime than imprudent behavior. The implications of testing the theory with these and other measures are discussed. Key words: tautology; low self-control; imprudent behavio