Individual differences 2 - Cognitive Factors Flashcards
(18 cards)
What are cognitive distortions?
They are thinking patterns that are faulty and do not reflect reality e.g., attribution bias and minimisation.
What is hostile attribution bias?
When an individual perceives something to be the worst e.g., if someone smiles at you they believe they are thinking bad things about them.
How may hostile attribution bias link to criminal behaviour?
If they interpret someone’s behaviour as negative this could lead to false interpretation and increased aggression and therefore criminal behaviour.
What is the BAI? What are the three stages?
The Blame Attribution Index.
- External attribution blame
- Mental attribution blame
- Guilt feeling attribution
What is External Attribution Blame?
When an individual who has committed a crime tries to blame it on external factors such as society or the situation they find themselves in. Some may blame it on their victim.
What is mental attribution blame?
When an individual who has committed a crime blames their actions on their poor mental health and/or lack of self control due to this.
What is guilty feeling attribution?
When an individual does feel guilt or remorse for their crime.
What is mineralisation?
When an individual under exaggerates the consequences or seriousness of their actions.
How does minimalisation link to criminal behaviour?
Criminals may see their behaviour as not as extreme and therefore aren’t fearful of the consequences or feel any guilt towards their actions.
Link between minimalisation and sexual assault.
Usually sex offender show high degrees of minimalisation, research showed that sex offenders often blame their actions on their victims and claim that their clothes, actions etc are what lead to the assault.
What is Kohlburgs theory of moral reasoning?
This theory describes how as we develop as children we go through different stages of moral reasoning, he developed 3 stages and each stage displays a more developed understanding.
How did Kohlburg link his theory to offending behaviour?
He did a longitudinal study and found that only 10% of adults reached the post conventional stage (final stage) suggesting that the main stage was conventional level. He argued that adults in this stage felt like they could break the law as it maintained relationships and society. E.g., break the law to protect family member.
What did Hollin suggest about moral reasoning?
He argued that most crimes are committed at the pre conventional level as they don’t understand moral responsibility. They see the rewards as more important than the costs of their crime.
Research support - Moral reasoning (Gibbs)
Gibbs found that criminals deomstarte an egocentric personality they are more likely to view the crime as more rewarding to them rather than costly to them.
Research support - Hostile Attribution Bias
Schoneburg did an experiment and showed individuals emotionally ambiguous faces to two groups of people. One violent offenders and one control group, violent offenders were more likely to interpret the faces as hostile or angry compared to control group.
Evaluation - Contradictory evidence
Howitt and Sheldon conducted research to show how not all criminals have the same cognitive distortions. He found that contact and non contact criminals displayed different distortions therefore this theory can not be applied to all criminals
Evaluation - Kohlburgs theory
One key limitation of Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning is its low generalisability and validity. The theory is based on studies using male, Western participants and hypothetical dilemmas, which may not reflect real moral behaviour. This reduces its generalisability to diverse groups or real-life situations. As a result, its usefulness in explaining criminal behaviour is limited, because it may not accurately capture how moral decisions are made in real-life crime. This weakens its explanatory power, since not all criminals show poor moral reasoning, and not everyone with low moral reasoning commits crimes.
Evaluation - Application
These ideas have successfully been used in anger management. By recognising these cognitive distortions anger management has been able to help reverse these are reduce aggression.
