Psychological Explanations of crime Flashcards
According to Eysenck What is our personality?
innate and has a biological basis
What do individuals with a criminal personality will score highly on?
measures of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism
What are people with this personality type like?
difficult to condition (train) and cold and unfeeling and it is these traits which may explain their criminality
What did Eysenck’s study involve?
2070 male prisoners and 2422 male controls
What did the prisoners in Eysneck’s study score highly on?
extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism than the non-criminal controls
What did Farringtin find in his review of Eysneck’s study?
only found evidence of prisoners scoring higher on measures of psychoticism
What is an issue with the research?
culturally biased. Holanchock studied Black and Hispanic criminals in America and found them to be less extroverted than non-criminal control groups
What is an issue with measuring personality through a psychometric test?
Validity,
as is the notion that personality is a stable entity. Most people would argue that personality changes over the years and as a person matures
What are cognitive distortions?
errors in the way an individual thinks, which can be used to explain how criminals justify their behaviour
What are the two cognitive distortions?
- Hostile attribution bias
- Minimalisation
What is a hostile attribution?
A tendency to misinterpret the actions of others, seeing them as hostile or confrontational when they are not
What did Schonenberg and Justye (2014) do?
showed violent offenders emotionally ambiguous faces, finding that the participants were more likely to perceive the expressions as angry and hostile, compared to a matched control group
What is minimalisation?
Denying or downplaying the seriousness of an offence. This may involve using euphemisms (‘job’ rather than ‘robbery’)
What did Pollock and Hashmall (1991) find?
that 35% of a sample of child molesters tried to justify their actions by claiming they were ‘showing affection’ or that the child consented
What did Palmer and Hollin (1998) find?
that, when presented with moral dilemmas, convicted offenders showed less mature moral reasoning than non-offending males and females. This supports Kohlberg’s suggestion that lower levels of moral reasoning is a factor in criminal behaviour.
What has cognitive distortions proved?
useful in treating criminal behaviour. Through CBT, offenders can be encouraged to confront the seriousness of their actions, and research has found that successfully overcoming denial is correlated with lower rates of re-offending. This gives the cognitive explanation a useful real-world application.
What did Langdon et al (2010) argue?
that intelligence may be a better predictor of criminal behaviour than moral reasoning. People with very low intelligence, and also therefore low levels of moral reasoning, are actually less likely to commit crime. Kohlberg’s theory would struggle to explain this
What does differential association hypothesis suggest?
that through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motivation for criminal behavior
How might differential associations vary?
IN frequency, duration, priority and intensity
What is the process of learning criminal behavior associated with?
criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning. (behaviorism: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, social learning theory
What does the differential association not account for?
Individual differences. Some people are much more susceptible (easily led) to the influence of others. Therefore the theory neglects to consider the role of temperament and personality
What does the psychodynamic explanation of offending see as crucial in explaining crime?
The supereo, moral component of the personality
What does Blackburn (1993) argue?
that if the superego (the moral part of the personality) is deficient then criminality is inevitable as the Id (pleasure principle) is not properly controlled and we are going to give into our urges and impulses
When does a weak superego develop?
if the same-sex parent is absent during the phallic stage of psycho-sexual development. This would mean that we would fall to internalize the moral values of the same sex parent
When may a deviant superego may develop?
if the child internalizes the morals of a criminal or deviant same-sex parent
When may a over-harsh Superego develop?
if he same-sex parent is overly harsh. This may mean an individual is crippled by guilt and anxiety and commits crime in order to satisfy the superego’s need for punishment
What is another psychodynamic theory?
Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis
What does Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis predict?
that if an infant is deprived of a mother or mother figure during the critical period of attachment in the first few years then there will be serious and permanent consequences. These consequences included mental abnormalities, delinquency, depression, affectionless psychopathology and even dwarfism
Why is the psychodynamic theory heavily criticised?
Freud’s theory is seen as sexist as he focuses on the Oedipus Complex and added the Electra complex as an afterthought. In fact Freud argued that females were less moral than males. This is because males fear castration by their father for moral transgressions, whereas females only fear losing their mother’s love! However, the vast majority of criminals are male, not female. Males outnumber females in prisons throughout the world
