Forensic Psychology - Psychological explanations of offending behaviour

Question 1

Eysenck’s theory of the criminal personality

Answer 1

personality is biologically based and that personality traits include dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism that can be measured using a personality questionnaire.

He later added a third dimension - psychoticism

Question 2

Extraverts and criminal behaviour

Answer 2

have an underactive nervous system which means they constantly seek excitement, stimulation and are likely to engage in risk-behaving behaviours.

They also tend not to condition easity

Question 3

Neuroticism and criminal behaviour

Answer 3

Neurotic individuals tend to be nervous, jumpy and over-anxious and their general instability means their behaviour is difficult to predict

Question 4

The criminal personality

Answer 4

The criminal personality type is neurotic-extravert

The typical offender would also score highly on measures of psychoticism - a personality type characterised as cold, unemotional and prone to aggression

Question 5

The role of socialisation -

Eysenck

Answer 5

Criminal behaviour is developmentally immature - selfish and concerned woth immediate gratification; children are taught to delay gratification ad be more socially oriented

People with high E and N scores have nervous systems that make them difficult to condition - as a result, they would not learn to respond to antisocial impulses and instead act antisocially in situations where the opportunity presented itself

Question 6

Evidence supporting Eyesneck’s theory:

Answer 6

Eysenck compared EPI scores of 2070 male prisoners’ scores and 2422 male controls. Prisoners recorded higher scores of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism than the control group

Question 7

Bartol and Holanchock

Answer 7

studied Hispanic and African American offenders in a maximum security prison and found prisioners were less extraverted than a non-criminal control group.

Bartol suggested this was because the sample was a different cultural group which questions the generalisability of the criminal personality

Criticism of Eysenck

Question 8

Farrington et al

Answer 8

Reviewed several studies and reported that offenders tended to score high on P measures but not for E & N. These findings therefore do not fully support Eysenck’s theory for all three traits.

Criticism of Eysenck

Question 9

Mischel

Answer 9

Mischel argues we play many different parts and our personality may change depending on who we are with and the situation we are in.

There may be no fixed and unchangeable ‘true self’ directing our behaviour, criminal or otherwise so personality may not be reducible to a ‘score’ as eyesneck suggests

Criticism of Eysenck

Question 10

Kohlberg

Answer 10

proposed people’s decisions and judgements on issues of right and wrong can be summarised in a stage theory of moral development - the higher the stage, the more sophisticated the reasoning

based on people;s responses to a set of moral deliemas

Question 11

Levels of moral reasoning:

Answer 11

Level 1: preconventional morality - rules obeyed to avoid punishment or personal gain

Level 2: conventional morality - rules obeyed for approval or maintaining social order

Level 3: postconventional morality - individuals establish their own rules according to personal ethical principles

Question 12

Kohlberg’s model - criminality

Answer 12

Criminal offenders are more likely to be classified at the pre-conventional level of kohlberg’s model whereas non-criminals generally progressed to the conventional level and beyond

The pre-conventional level is characterized by by a need to avoid punishment and gain rewards and is associated with less mature, childlike reasoning thus adults/adolescents who reason at this level may commit crime

Question 13

Cognitive distortions

Answer 13

Erros/biases in people’s information processing system characterised by faulty thinking

Examples:
Hostile attribution bias
Minimalisation

Question 14

Hostile attribution bias

Answer 14

Tendency to misinterpret the actions of others (assume others are being confrontational when they are not)

Offenders may misread non-agressive cues (such as being looked at) and this may trigger a disproportionate often violent response

Question 15

Minimalisation

Answer 15

An attempt to downplay the seriousness of an offense

Burgarls may describe themselves as ‘doing a job’ or supporting my family as a way to minimise the seriousness of their offense

Question 16

Palmer and Hollin

Answer 16

Compared moral reasoning between non-offenders and convicted offenders using the Socio-Moral Reflection Measure (SRM-SF) which contains 11 moral dilemma-related questions such as not taking things belonging to others and keeping a promise to a friend,

The delinquent group showed less moral reasoning which is consistent with Kohlberg’s predictions

Question 17

Cognitive explanation - application of research

Answer 17

Understanding cognitive distortions has been proven beneficial in the treatment of criminal behaviour.

Cognitive behaviour therapy encourages offenders to ‘face up’ to what has been done and establish a less distorted view of their actions.

CBT reduced denial and minimisation is highly correlated with a reduced risk of reoffending

Question 18

Thornton and Reid

Answer 18

found individuals who committed crimes for financial gain such as robbery were more likely to show pre-conventional moral reasoning (thinking they good get away with it) rather than those convicted of impulsive crimes such as assault where no reasoning seems to be evident

Thus the level of moral reasoning depends on the type of offense

Criticism of Kohlberg’s cognitive explanations

Question 19

Cognitive explanations - lack of explaining origin

Answer 19

Cognitive explanations are ‘after the fact’ theories that may help predict/reduce ‘reoffending’, they do not give insight as why like the offender committed the crime in the first place like other theories e.g eyesnecks theory

Question 20

Differential association theory

Answer 20

Proposes that indviudals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for criminal behaviour through association and interaction with different people

Question 21

DAF - Crime as a learned behaviour

Answer 21

Offending behaviour may be acquired in the same way as any other behaviour through the process of learning through interactions with significant others the child associates with e.g. family/peer group

Criminality arises from: learned attitudes towards crime + learning of specific criminal acts

Question 22

DAF - pro-criminal attitudes

Answer 22

if the number of pro-crimiinal attitudes outweigh the number of anti-criminal attitudes, an individual will go on to offend

Question 23

DAF - learning criminal acts

Answer 23

offender also needs to learn techniques of commiting crime e.g. how to break into someone’s house

explains how crime may ‘breed’ among specific social groups/comunities but also why prision inmates reoffend

Question 24

Farrington et al

Answer 24

longitudinal study of males from south london identified one of the key risk factors to an individual committing crime was family criminality

Supports Sutherland’s differential association theory because he suggests we learn crime as we do any other behaviours through the process of socialisation and being exposed to criminal attitudes and behaviours which we may then go on to imitate.

supporting evidence for DAF

Question 25

Mednick et al

Answer 25

study over 13,000 danish adoptions found that when neither the biological nor adoptive parents had convictions, the percentage of adoptees who did was 13.5%

figure rose to 20% when either of the biological parents had convictions (but the adoptive parents didnt)

suggests that genetic inheritance plays an important role in offending which Sutherland seems to disregard

Question 26

Explanatory power of DAF

Answer 26

The theory is able to account for crime within all sectors of societies

from how burglary may be clustered within w/c communities + how m/c share deviant norms and values to commit white-collar crime

Question 27

Environmental determinism - DAF

Answer 27

Not everyone who is exposed to criminal influences goes on to commit crime so crime should be considered on an individual case-by-case basis.

This can lead to the stereotyping of individuals that come from a crime-ridden background as ‘unavoidably criminal’.

Question 28

Psychodynamic explanations of offending

Answer 28

The superego works on the morality principle and exerts its influence for punishing the ego through guilt for wrong doung

Blackburn argued that if the supergo is somehow defiecent/inaqeduate then criminal behaviour is inevitable because the id is given ‘free rein’ and is not properly controlled

Question 29

Three types of inadequate superego:

Answer 29

1. The weak superego
2. The deviant superego
3. The over-harsh superego

Question 30

The weak supergo

Answer 30

If the same-sex parent is absent during the phallic stage, there is no opportunity for identification and a child cannot internalise a fully-formed superego

This would make immoral or criminal behaviour more likely

Question 31

The deviant superego

Answer 31

Occurs when the superego the child interalises has deviant/immoral values

This leads to offending behaviour e.g. a boy raised by a criminal father is not likely to associate guilt with wrongdoing

Question 32

Psychodynamic - The over-harsh supergo

Answer 32

A normal supergo has rules but is forgiving of transgressions however
an excessively punitive (over-harsh) supergo means the individual is crippled by guilt/anxiety

This may (unconsciously) drive the individual to perform criminal acts in order to satisfy the superego’s overwhelming need for punishment

Question 33

Psychodynamic - Gender bias

Answer 33

An assumption within the Freudian theory is that girls develop a weaker superego than boys because they have less pressure to identify with the mothers than boys who experience castration anxiety,

This is countered by statticis of male-female ratio of inmates in prison.

Question 34

Psychodynamic - unconscious concepts:

Answer 34

Psychodynamic explanations suffer from a lack of falsifiability - the unconscious concepts mean the applications to crime are not open to empircal testing so the argument of the inadequate supergo can oly be judged on face value rather than scientific worth.

This explanations is henceforth regarded as pseudoscientific and may contribute little to out understanding of crime or how to prevent it