7 - Cognitive Explanations Flashcards
Define moral reasoning
Process by which an individual draws upon their own value system to determine whether an action is right or wrong.
What did Kohlberg propose?
That the quality of people’s judgments of right and wrong can be summarised by a stage theory of moral development.
Kohlberg (1973) based his stages on people’s responses to moral dilemmas.
How do offenders and non-offenders place on the stages of moral development?
Offenders are more likely to have their moral reasoning classified at the pre- conventional level
Non-criminals have progressed to the conventional level and beyond.
What is this significance of criminals being at the pre-conventional stage?
A person is punishment orientated (reasoning based on whether or not the act will lead to punishment) and reward orientated (reasoning based on what can be gained).
This is immature reasoning - teenagers and adults who still reason in this way may commit crime if they can get away with it and/or gain rewards (money, respect etc.).
Offenders tend to be more ego-centric than non-offenders and have poorer social perspective-taking skills. Individuals whose moral reasoning has reached higher levels sympathise with the rights of others and display more honesty and generosity.
What are cognitive distortions?
faulty and irrational ways of thinking that make people perceive themselves, other people and the world inaccurately and often negatively e.g minimalisation, hostile attribution bias
Describe minimalisation
When a criminal believes that their crime was trivial and downplays the impact of their crime on their victims. This is a common strategy that people use when attempting to avoid feeling guilt.
Euphemisms for their offences, e.g. a burglar may say they have been ‘doing a job’. Sex offenders are particular prone to minimalisation.
What is the evidence for minimalisation?
Found that among 26 incarcerated rapists 54% believed they had not committed an offence and a further 40% minimised the harm done to the victim.
Describe hostile attribution bias
Tendency to judge ambiguous situations, or the actions of others, as aggressive and/or threatening when in reality they are not.
Offenders may misread non-aggressive cues and this may trigger a disproportionate, often violent, response. The roots of this cognitive bias may lie in childhood.
What is the evidence for hostile attribution bias?
Presented 55 violent offenders with emotionally ambiguous faces. The offenders were more likely to perceive the image as hostile and angry than a control group.
What are the advantages of cognitive explanations?
Compared moral reasoning between 210 female non- offenders, 122 male non-offenders, and 126 convicted offenders using the ‘Socio- Moral Reflection Measure-Short Form’, which contains 11 moral dilemma-related questions, such as not taking things that belong to others. The offenders showed less mature moral reasoning that the non-offenders.
Understanding the nature of cognitive distortions = beneficial in the treatment of criminal behaviour. The dominant approach in the rehabilitation of sex offenders is CBT. This encourages offenders to ‘face up’ to what they have done and establish a less distorted view of their actions. A reduced incidence of cognitive distortions in therapy is highly correlated with a reduced risk of offending.
What are the disadvantages of cognitive explanations?
Argued that post-conventional level should be abandoned because it is culturally biased towards Western cultures and does not represent a natural maturational stage of cognitive development.
Level of moral reasoning may depend on the type of offence. Found that individuals who committed crimes for financial gain, such as robbery, were more likely to show pre-conventional reasoning that those convicted of impulsive crimes (such as assault), where no reasoning was evident
Cognitive approach good at describing the criminal mind, less successful at explaining it. Useful in predicting reoffending but do not give us much insight into why the offender committed the crime in the first place.
Cognitive distortions cannot be observed or measured. This means the cognitive explanation of criminal behaviour is not very scientific.
