Forensic Flashcards
Crime
an act committed in violation of the law of a particular society and has punishments
Deviance
Anything that breaks or causes offence to societal norms and values
Offender profiling
Observable details of a crime scene and use it to make descriptions about the offender
Aims of offender profiling
- narrow field of enquiry & list of likely suspects
- helps solve and identity offenders
What country uses the top-down approach
US
Top down approach
Using knowledge and information from previous crimes and offenders to match with the current offender
What was the top down approach based on
- based on interviews with 36 sexually motivated murderers as it was hypothesised they had similar characteristics
Organised offenders
- usually plan crimes ahead of time
- high intelligence
- target a specific victim
- very little evidence of crime
Disorganised offender
- act impulsively
-below average intelligence - lots of evidence at the crime scene
Limitation of the top down approach
- small sample size
- lacks validity : limited to sexually motivated murderers
- interviews weren’t standardised so lacked objectivity
- ## organised/ disorganised relies on a false dichotomy (unsuitable)
Personality
individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes a person who they are
What was Eysenck’s original 2 main personality traits
- Introversion/Extraversion
- Neuroticism/Stability
What did Eysenck later add to the personality trait
- Psychoticism/ Non psychoticism
Introverts
- Less likely to commit crime as they do not seek arousal and prefer a quiet life
Extroverts
- Under active nervous system so they require excitement to increase neurotransmitters such as adrenaline
Neurotic individuals
- More inclined to crime as tend to be overly anxious, easily stressed, unpredictable and nervy
Psychotic
agressive, manipulative, irresponsible, impulsive and risk-taking
Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI)
A questionnaire to measure the personality traits to determine the extent to which a person can be described as having a criminal personality
What did Eysenck conclude from his EPI
That individuals with a criminal personality would score high would have higher extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism
- they are more likely to be impulsive and lack guilt and those are the reasons why some some might commit crime
Research of Eysenck’s theory - Singh
Compared 50 female truants with 50 female non truants aged 16 and found that truants scored higher on neuroticism and extraversion
Research for Eysenck’s theory - Singh & Rani
Tested 100 criminals and 100 no criminals on different personality traits using EPI and found that criminals scored higher on extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism with the key feelings of personality being anxiety, impulsiveness, assertiveness, unhappiness, risk taking
Cognitive explanations for offending behaviour
- Level of moral reasoning
- Cognitive distortions
Moral reasoning
A persons sense of right or wrong
Cognitive distortions
faulty and negative thought processes and this affects how they perceive the environment
Types of cognitive distortions
- hostile attribution bias
- minimalisation
Hostile attribution bias
A tendency to interpret neutral behaviour from others as threatening or dangerous.
Someone with HAB will always be on the look out for confrontation/perceived threat from others which leads to them being confrontational themselves.
Minimalisation
Downplaying another offence by an offender, as a way of reducing guilt,shame or responsibility for the offence
Example of minimalisation
A prolific shoplifter arguing that the shops overcharge for their goods so what’s the harm?
What did Kennedy and Grubin concluded about minimalisation
It’s highly prevalent amongst sex offenders who tend to blame the victim as they believe the abuse was a positive thing for the victim, so their own culpability is reduced
Differential Association theory
Assumes that individuals learn criminality and offending behaviour through contact and experience with others who are criminals
Who proposed DAT
Sutherland - as a way of understanding how crime is transimitted and generated between people
