ABSTRACT
Elite deviance refers to unethical, exploitative, harmful, and sometimes criminal acts that are made possible by a person's or a group's access to wealth and power. This type of deviance is typically not vigorously pursued by criminal justice agencies and is sometimes even perfectly legal. The phenomenon of elite deviance has been approached from four different but interrelated perspectives. In the order in which they have appeared in the literature on deviance, they are subcultural, cultural, psychological, and evolutionary. A vast body of research on deception among plants and animals has uncovered several important principles that are especially relevant for white-collar crime. The first principle is that "the deceiver and deceived are locked in a co-evolutionary struggle". Self-deception occurs when true information about themselves and the world is preferentially excluded from people's consciousness by the unconscious parts of the brain. Self-deception is useful because it helps deceivers overcome a problem that comes with acting deceptively.
