Elements of unacceptable risk taking in combat units: An exercise in offender profiling

The problem that we address in this study is concerned with profiling the antisocial risk taker, who either admits to risky behaviour and/or implies such behaviour, solely through anonymous self report. Specifically, we were interested in profiling those military conscripts who engage in weapon-related risky behaviours. To this end, we constructed a risk-taking questionnaire, assessing violations of military conduct, and tapping various target risk-taking activities (i.e., weapon-related risk taking). In attempting to draw a personality profile of a weapon-related risk taker, we assumed that the offender would probably score high on both psychoticism (P) and neuroticism (N), though not necessarily high on extraversion (E), and thus would conform to some current ideas on the relationship between personality and criminality. We also viewed the offender using a sensation-seeking lens, assuming that the offender, serving in a combat unit, would score high on thrill and adventure seeking, but more importantly, would also score high on both disinhibition and boredom susceptibility, both of which would predispose him to an impulsive, unsocialized form of sensation seeking. In the data analysis, we tried to mesh both patterns of risk taking and antisocial predispositions in order to achieve some degree of coherence. Our results indicate that target offenders seem to score high on P and low on the Eysenckian Lie Scale (L).