Perceptual deterrence research has consistently found that criminal offending is inversely related to subsequent perceptions of the risk of being caught or arrested. This inverse relationship has been dubbed an “experiential effect,” reflecting the idea that people learn by committing (undetected) crimes that the detection or arrest risk is lower than first feared. The current study explores the validity of this experiential argument. It relies on self-report data from 3,259 adolescent participants in the panel study Crime in the modern City (Duisburg, Germany). We computed detection rates and risk perceptions, and used fixed effects models to investigate the proposed experiential learning process. Most findings support the experiential argument: (1) juvenile offenses were rarely detected by the police, (2) juveniles (especially those inexperienced with crime) tended to overestimate the detection risk, (3) juveniles reduced their risk perceptions when they committed crimes, (4) this reduction occurred primarily among those who overestimated the detection risk in periods when they were not committing crimes. However, the study also produced the surprising finding that the experiential effect seems to be short-lived: people appeared to return to initial risk perception levels when they stopped committing crimes. Overall, the results corroborate the experiential argument. However, they also indicate that the argument may need revision to account for the potential short-term nature of the experiential effect. This “ephemerality effect” is good news for policy, as lowered risk perceptions will in most cases only temporarily increase the likelihood of future delinquency.

感知威慑研究一致发现，刑事犯罪与随后对被抓获或被捕风险的感知呈负相关。这种反向关系被称为“经验效应”，反映了人们通过实施（未被发现的）犯罪来学习发现或逮捕风险低于最初担心的想法。目前的研究探讨了这种经验论点的有效性。它依赖于来自现代城市犯罪小组研究（德国杜伊斯堡）的 3,259 名青少年参与者的自我报告数据。我们计算了检测率和风险感知，并使用固定效应模型来研究建议的体验式学习过程。大多数调查结果支持经验论点：（1）青少年犯罪很少被警方发现，(2) 青少年（尤其是没有犯罪经验的人）倾向于高估侦查风险， (3) 青少年在犯罪时降低了风险感知，(4) 这种降低主要发生在那些在犯罪期间高估侦查风险的人。不犯罪。然而，该研究还产生了令人惊讶的发现，即体验效应似乎是短暂的：当人们停止犯罪时，他们似乎恢复到最初的风险感知水平。总的来说，结果证实了经验论点。然而，他们也表明，该论点可能需要修改，以说明经验效应的潜在短期性质。这种“短暂效应”对政策来说是个好消息，