PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS: COGNITIVE EXPLANATIONS Flashcards
What are the cognitive explanations of offending behaviour?
Level of moral reasoning
Cognitive distortions
Who talks about moral reasoning?
Kohlberg - the first researcher to apply the concept of moral reasoning to offending behaviour
What are levels of moral reasoning?
Individuals will draw upon their own value system to determine whether an action is right or wrong.
- criminals have lower levels of moral reasoning (preconventional level 1 stages 1 and 2)
- non-criminals have higher levels of moral reasoning (postconventional morality level 3 stages 5 and 6)
What is used to determine which level of moral reasoning someone is in?
Heinz dilemmas or Moral dilemmas
Heinz dilemma table
Link moral development with criminality
Criminals at stages 1 and 2 are characterised by a need to avoid punishment and gain rewards, and is associated with less mature, childlike reasoning. Therefore criminals may commit crime if they reason they can get away with it or gain rewards.
This assumption is supported by studies which suggest offenders are more egocentric and display poorer social-perspective taking skills than non-offender peers. (Chandler). Individuals who reason at higher leveles tend to sympathise more with the rights of others and exhibit more conventional behaviours such as honesty, generosity and non-violence.
What are cognitive distortions?
errors or biases in people’s information processing characterised by faulty thinking. Criminals use this faulty thinking to justify their criminal behaviour and explain how they interpret other people’s behaviour
Two examples of cognitive distortions
Hostile attribution bias
Minimalisation
What is hostile attribution bias?
criminals judge ambiguous situations or the actions of others as aggressive and/or threatening when in reality they may not be.
Who provides research support for hostile attribution bias?
Schonenberg
Dodge and Frame
What did Schonenberg do and find?
55 violent offenders were presented with images of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions. When compared with a control group, offenders were more likely than non-violent PPs to perceive the images as angry/hostile.
What is minimalisation?
A type of deception where criminals deny or downplay the seriousness of an event or emotion.
- Some will underplay their offence, e.g. paedophiles may claim they were “just being affectionate” or fraudsters may claim “it wasn’t that much money compared to the company’s worth”
Dodge and Frame (1982):
children were showed an “ambiguous provocation” where the intention was neither clearly hostile or accidental. Prior to the study, children who has been judged as aggressive were more likely to perceive the situation as hostile.
Who provides research support for minimalisation?
Hashmall
Barbaree
What did Hashmall do and find?
35% of a sample of child molesters said that the crime they committed was non-sexual. 36% said that the victims had consented.
