Christopher Palmore, Ph.D.

Christopher Palmore was compelled to study criminology after reading research interviews with victims discussing interactions with law enforcement when he was a graduate student — and he hopes his students make their own discoveries through their research experiences, too. This fall, he’s teaching Criminology and a course called Society and the Individual. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from California State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Criminology, both from Pennsylvania State University.

I’m a criminologist and I specialize in research related to violence and victimization. A lot of my work focuses on cognition, attribution, and decision-making. Some of my work looks at how offenders view opportunities for crime. I also have some work on how and why verbal disputes escalate to violent interactions. Lastly, I have spent a chunk of my career looking at how people attribute blame to victims and the various factors and biases that influence victim-blaming.

Generally, most people think that criminology is like a television show where they track violent people and solve horrific crimes quickly with very advanced technology. In reality, it is a social science that examines crime, offenders, victims, and social reactions to crimes in a systematic manner. We collect and examine data and there is a lot of writing involved.

Criminology is an interdisciplinary field. Although most of the field is sociological in nature, we get contributions from psychology, economics, medicine, social work, political science, and other fields. Our approach to the study of crime, offenders, and social reactions to crime necessitates a liberal arts education that emphasizes critical thinking, problem solving, and the ability to examine literature from multiple disciplines.