Moral Values, Social Trust and Inequality: Can Values Explain Crime?

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Abstract
Cross-national social attitude data from the World Values Surveys (1981‐1983, 1990) were analysed to explore whether values can ‘explain’ crime. Mirroring patterns of offending and in contrast to other values, tolerance for a sub-group of materially self-interested attitudes were found to be significantly higher in men, younger people, larger cities, and had increased over time. These self-interested values were also found to be associated with victimization rates at the national level as measured by the International Crime Victimisation Surveys. Multivariate models incorporating self-interested values, economic inequality, social trust and the interaction between these variables explained two-thirds of variance in victimization at the national level. Implications and contrast with the previous literature are discussed.

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