Perceived Certainty of Punishment, Reward Perceptions, and Offending Among Serious Juvenile Offenders: The Moderating Role of Temperance

This study examines whether perceived certainty of punishment influences general offending through cognitive evaluations of personal rewards, social rewards, and social costs, and whether temperance moderates these pathways across adolescence and early adulthood. Using longitudinal data on 1,354 serious juvenile offenders from the Pathways to Desistance Study, we estimated a cross-lagged moderated mediation framework separately for adolescence and early adulthood. Certainty was associated with lower reward perceptions and higher perceived social costs, but only personal rewards significantly predicted offending. Temperance moderated the personal rewards–offending association during adolescence ( b = 0.050, p < .05) but not early adulthood. Findings support a cognitive cost–benefit pathway of deterrence and identify temperance as a boundary condition of reward-driven offending in adolescence.