Personality and crime: Mediating the agreeableness-offending and conscientiousness-offending relationships with proactive and reactive criminal thinking

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the personality dimensions of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness are linked to future offending by way of criminal thinking. Participants were 1294 (1115 boys, 179 girls) adjudicated delinquents from the Pathways to Desistance study. The Agreeableness and Conscientiousness scales of the NEO-PI-SF served as the independent variables in this study, proactive (moral disengagement) and reactive (cognitive impulsivity) criminal thinking served as mediator variables, and the total offending variety score from the Self-Reported Offending (SRO) scale served as the dependent variable. Contrasting target (Agreeableness → moral disengagement → offending; Conscientiousness → cognitive impulsivity → offending) and control (Agreeableness → cognitive impulsivity → offending; Conscientiousness → moral disengagement → offending) pathways, it was determined that proactive but not reactive criminal thinking mediated the Agreeableness-offending relationship and that reactive but not proactive criminal thinking mediated the Conscientiousness-offending relationship.