Instrumental Crimes in terms of Evolutionary Psychology and Rational Choice Theory

The rational choice theories are empowered on explaining the instrumental crimes such as fraud, malversation and other financial crimes. It is due to the consonant of economic human as agent who can evaluate the costs and benefits of consequences his behavior and the financial nature if instrumental crimes. One of the crucial assumptions of rational choice theory is to consider human being as people who are aware and their behavior is egoistic. There is not any harmony between the real society and mentioned assumption, as we can see there are lots of cooperative behaviors among people. The rational choice theories are not successful in explaining criminal decision making cognitive process. On the other hand, evolutionary psychology as an interactional approach tries to explain that the fraudulently behaviors which end to instrumental crimes, are emerge from cooperative and sustainable strategies. Cooperative and sustainable strategies are emerged as the consequences of evolutionary psychological mechanism such as theory of mind, empathy and the sense of fairness that are related to cooperative strategies. In some cases these mechanisms pave the way for transmission and stability of cooperative behaviors; but in some occasions they provide necessary situation for executing free riding strategies for people. This is a descriptive analytic study that is based on fundamental orientation. The data of this paper has been collected based on secondary resources.