Key Words Flashcards
Offender profiling
A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown offenders
The top-down approach
Profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down to lower levels in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene
Organised offender
An offender who shows evidence of planning, targets a specific victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher-than-average intelligence
Disorganised offender
An offender who shows little evidence of planning, leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower-than-average intelligence
The bottom-up approach
Profilers work from evidence collected from the crime scene to develop hypotheses about the likely characteristics, motivations and social background of the offender
Investigative psychology
A form of bottom-up profiling that matches details from the crime scene with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological theory
Geographical profiling
A form of bottom-up profiling based on the principle of spatial consistency - that an offender’s operational base and possible future offences are revealed by the geographical location of their previous crimes
The criminal personality
A feature of Eysenck’s theory of crime, an individual who scores highly on measures of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism and cannot easily be conditioned, is cold and unfeeling, and is likely to engage in offending behaviour
Level of moral reasoning
Refers to the way a person thinks about right and wrong. It is presumed that such thinking then applies to moral behaviour. The higher the level, the more that behaviour is driven by a sense of what is right and the less it is driven by just avoiding punishment or avoiding the disapproval of others
Cognitive distortions
Faulty, biased and irrational ways of thinking that mean we perceive ourselves, other people and the world inaccurately and usually negatively
Hostile attribution bias
The tendency to judge ambiguous situations, or the actions of others, as aggressive and/or threatening when in reality they may not be
Minimalisation (or minimisation)
A type of deception that involves downplaying the significance of an event or emotion. A common strategy when dealing with feelings of guilt
Differential association theory
An explanation for offending which proposes that, through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for offending behaviour
Psychodynamic explanations
A perspective that describes the different forces (dynamics), most of which are unconscious, that operate on the mind and direct human behaviour and experience