A2 Psychology at Spalding Grammar School

The main debate in Forensic Psychology is about whether offenders really have distinctive pathological (ie unhealthy) thinking patterns, or whether they think just like everybody else but from an unusual set of circumstances. Really, this is another variation of the DISPOSITIONAL-SITUATIONAL debate.

A popular psychological view is RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY (eg Cornish & Clarke, 1986). Ronald Clarke argues that offenders don't act on impulse; they rationally choose to commit crimes. The basis of this decision is the COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS that you read about when you were studying Piliavin et al. for AS. If offenders stand to gain more than they lose, then it's rational for them to commit the crime. So why aren't we all out committing crimes? Partly this boils down to individual differences: not everyone finds crime thrilling or interesting. Partly it is affected by your social position: people with careers and families stand to lose too much by getting caught, but people without commitments (and with family and friends who are convicts) don't view prison as such a big cost. This links in with Travis Hirchi's Social Bonds Theory.

This still doesn't explain crimes of great (and unnecessary) violence or sexual assault, where the benefit would seem to be slight but the costs are very great. To explain these it's tempting to argue that offenders do not think the same way as ordinary people. This view was taken by Samuel Yochelson & Stanton Samenow (1977, 1984). These two doctors worked together at St Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, DC where they profiled and counselled 255 male offenders using psychodynamic (Freudian) techniques. They concluded that criminals have distinct thinking patterns and routinely make "THINKING ERRORS" when faced with a problem that lead them into choosing the criminal rather than law-abiding option. There were 52 distinct thinking errors including: 

• being fearful of other people and needing to have power and control; while at school these participants considered requests from parents and teachers to be impositions
  
• not accepting responsibility for their own behaviour; these participants felt no obligations to others and only followed their own interests
  
• not having empathy with or trust in other people; these people were habitually angry as a way of life
  
• regularly fantasising about the excitement of committing crimes (but not the consequences of being caught); they usually pre-judged situations and found it hard to make decisions responsibly

In other words, offenders are not impulsive and do make a rational choice to commit crimes, but their thinking errors mean that their cost-benefit analyses produce different results from ordinary people. Yochelson & Samenow developed cognitive treatment programmes for offenders to confront then "cure" these thinking errors. However, of the 255 participants only 30 completed the programme and only 9 genuinely changed their ways.

Another idea about offenders having pathological thought processes is the concept of the PSYCHOPATH. This was originally researched in Hervey Cleckley's 1941 book The Mask of Sanity - and yes, that's the same Cleckley from Thigpen & Cleckley, but before he met Eve Black. Cleckley defines psychopaths as callous, lacking in empathy, insincere and manipulative. He distinguishes between primary psychopaths who have a lack of fear and therefore are capable of great violence and secondary psychopaths who feel fear but are compelled to seek out risk and excitement. Psychopaths are quite capable of passing themselves off as normal and many don't become criminals - but those who do can be very dangerous indeed. Dr Robert Hare (1980) developed an observational checklist to identify psychopaths in the prison population. The HARE PSYCHOPATHY CHECKLIST (PCL) has 20 behaviours, based on Cleckley's definitions, and prisoners who score 30+ out of 40 should be considered to be psychopaths.

Click here to see a version of the PCL online.

James Blair et al. (1997) carried out an experiment comparing 18 prisoners diagnosed as being psychopaths using the PCL with a control group of 18 non-psychopathic prisoners. They were shown a slide show of 28 colour slides, with 10 being distressing: 5 contained distress cues (like the face of someone crying) and 5 contained threatening stimuli (like a shark or a gun pointing at you). Biological responses were measured using SKIN CONDUCTIVITY RESPONSE (SCR): minute changes in perspiration on the fingertips caused by stress and picked up on a polygraph machine (like a lie detector). Blair found that the psychopaths responded in the same way as the control group to the threatening stimuli and the ordinary slides but had a much lower response to the distress cues.

Blair blames this effect on a process in the brain called the Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM). In most people this is a natural response to feel anxiety at the sight of other people in distress; in normal upbringing, parents encourage and strengthen the VIM. Psychopaths have an under-functioning VIM: they simply aren't affected by other people's tears, cries or distress.

This view does demonise offenders, treating them as subhuman creatures without pity or remorse, in need of curing. An argument against this was DRIFT THEORY put forward by David Matza (1964). Matza focused on delinquents and carried out unstructured interviews with young offenders who told him about their moral codes and the guilt they felt for their crimes and their victims. Matza, perhaps rather naïvely, concluded that offenders have the same values as non-offenders.

So why do they do crimes? Matza suggests that all humans have two sets of values: formal values about working hard, obeying laws and respecting people; and subterranean values about seeking excitement, being spontaneous and expressing emotions. Ordinary people express their subterranean values on stag nights and holidays in Ayia Napa but offenders express those same values on less appropriate occasions. Why do they do this? Matza argues that young people go through a period in late adolescence of feeling intensely powerless and alienated. He calls this a mood of fatalism. By acting out their subterranean values, delinquents experience a mood of humanism: they feel they matter, they are noticed and have an effect on the world. Eventually, most people assert a mood of humanism through the respect that comes through work, settling down, raising a family etc and they embrace society's formal values again.

Drift Theory is quite good for explaining how delinquent teenagers make a rational choice to offend but it's less successful at explaining habitual or career criminals. Matza himself appeals to Labelling Theory to explain why some people get "stuck" in a mood of fatalism and don't drift back out of delinquency as they are supposed to.

It's common for newspapers to call criminals "wicked" or "evil" so psychologists look at why some people seem to have very little concept of right and wrong. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1932) proposed the idea that we develop in our moral thinking as we get older. You read about Piaget and his stages of cognitive development when you were studying Samuel & Bryant for AS. Piaget argued that children start off in the premoral stage up until about age 5; young children have little understanding or morality or rules. The moral realism stage includes children up to 9 or 10 who takes rules seriously and do not question them; children at this stage judge right and wrong more by the consequences than by someone's intentions. The last stage is the moral relativity stage which begins around age 7 and overlaps with the second stage; children learn to question rules, create their own rules and develop their own personal notions of right and wrong.

Piaget's ideas were picked up by Laurence Kohlberg (1975). In the 1960s, Kohlberg asked hundreds of children to sit through a 2-hour interview. He started off with 58 boys from Chicago aged between 7 and 16 but expanded to look at children in the UK, Mexico, Taiwan and Turkey. They would listen to 10 short stories that contained MORAL DILEMMAS - situations where no course of action was clearly the morally right one - and Kohlberg asked them to justify their answers. He wasn't interested in what course of action the respondents suggested, more in the reasons they came up with for their solution. He used these answers to design a more complex version of Piaget's model of moral development.

Click here for a description of the Heinz Dilemma and Kohlberg's stages

Kohlberg's scale of moral development begins at stages 1 & 2, which he calls preconventional morality. These stages are typical of children, although some adults think this way. At this level people are very unquestioning about right and wrong and see morality as about avoiding punishment. This is quite a selfish mentality that sees nothing wrong with taking what you want in life so long as you don't get caught.

Kohlberg's stages 3 & 4 are called conventional morality and are more typical of adult values. They involve conforming to society, respecting authority and keeping promises. At this level people are concerned to be a "good person" and start to care about the effects behaviour has on society as a whole.

Kohlberg's stages 5 & 6 fall under post-conventional morality. These are less common attitudes, even in adults; in fact, Kohlberg stopped scoring people at stage 6 because he felt no one he interviewed showed consistent level 6 thinking. At this level, people start taking diversity into account, begin to question society's values and even challenge them. At stage 6, someone might try to change society based on a higher idea of goodness or justice. People like the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, the peaceful protester Mahatma Ghandi and the genocidal warlord Adolf Hitler might all fit into this category.

Research suggests that a great many offenders in prison are stuck at Kohlberg's preconventional level of moral development. Programmes like EQUIP (John Gibbs et al., 1984) are aimed at teaching young people to see things from other people's viewpoints and have had some success at raising offenders to conventional moral thinking.

There are several problems with this approach, however. Firstly, moral thinking is not necessarily the same as moral behaviour: it's all very well to know that something's wrong and be able to explain why it's wrong but it doesn't mean you won't give in to temptation. In fact, people quite low down Kohlberg's scale might lead more moral lives than people quite high up it. A related problem is that crime is not always immoral. There are plenty of criminal acts that are also morally wrong (murder, stealing) but there are also quite a few things that are against the law but which many people do not regard as immoral - speeding, for example, or smuggling. Then there are acts which are immoral but aren't against the law - adultery would be a good example. Moral development doesn't necessarily match up with being law-abiding. In fact, the highest stages of moral development may be less law-abiding, since these are people who think it's right to break the law for the sake of their principles. You also might have noticed that Adolf Hitler would probably score level 6 on Kohlberg's scale, which makes you wonder how VALID it is...

Kohlberg was also challenged by one of his own colleagues, Carol Gilligan (1982) who noticed that women typically scored less than men on Kohlberg's tests and accused his moral scale of being androcentric (male-orientated). Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's scale was all based around rights and principles which is (she says) the way men tend to think about morality. According to Gilligan, women tend to see morality more in terms of relationships, compassion and caring for others.

Click here to read a summary of Gilligan's book, In A Different Voice

A very different approach was taken by Sigmund Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Freud argues that morality is created by conflict between different parts of the mind. The basis of personality is the Id, which is the irrational source of all our desires. The Id's needs are entirely related to pleasure.  The Id has no idea about the outside world, cannot plan or communicate. When criminals act on impulse and take what they need without considering the consequences for themselves and other people, they are being motivated by the Id.

The Ego develops later than the Id when toddlers learn to explore the world. The Ego understands reality, can plan and communicate. It has no desires of its own but it works to gratify the desires of the Id. Sometimes that means deferring (putting off) some of the Id's desires till later. The Ego has no sense of right and wrong, but it does understand punishment and tries to avoid it. Someone motivated entirely by the Id and the Ego would be a psychopath.

The Super-ego emerges when the child goes through a period of conflict with its parents around age 5 (the Oedipus Complex). The Super-ego is the voice of conscience and gets its way by inflicting anxiety on the Ego - the pangs of guilt and shame. Freud argues that the secret is to strike a healthy balance between the desires of the Id and the guilt of the Super-ego. Freud believed that criminals actualy have over-powerful Super-egos. This means they are unconsciously seeking out situations where they can get punished! According to Freud, criminals actually get an unconscious "kick" out of being chased by policemen, locked up in cells and condemned by judges. This might explain why so many criminals leave obvious clues behind or return to the crime scene: on an unconscious level, they want to be caught. 

Social Cognition is the way our thought processes change when we find ourselves in a particular social situation. One of the main psychologists of Social Cognition was Leon Festinger (1952) who first used the term DEINDIVIDUATION to describe how human thinking changes when we feel diguised or anonymous - for example, when we are in a large gang or wearing uniforms or face masks.

A classic lab experiment into deindividuation was carried out by Philip Zimbardo (1970) who gave a group of female volunteers the job of delivering electric shocks to another woman every time she failed in a task. In fact, the woman they were shocking was a confederate and the shocks were fake (just like in Milgram's obedience study). Half the women wore badges so they could be identified by name but the other half were assigned numbers and wore heavy robes and hoods (a bit like the Ku Klux Klan) that completely disguised them. The hooded women gave twice as many shocks as the control group. Zimbardo replicated this study many times, with different ages and sexes, and always got the same results. When he asked the confederate to be rude to the volunteers the control groups increased their shocks, but the deindividuated group shocked more and gave out the shocks arbitrarily, regardless of how the confederate behaved.

Johnson & Dowling (1979) replicated Zimbardo, but put the female volunteers in nurses' uniforms. Dressed like this, they gave fewer shocks. Dressed as soldiers, they gave the most shocks of all! This suggests that deindividuation doesn't necessarily make us aggressive and immoral; it just makes us very sensitive to behavioural cues in the environment. Put another way, you are tempted to act the way you are dressed and because the women associated nurses with caring behaviour, they behaved less antisocially when dressed that way.

Another study into deindividuation was carried out by Edward Diener et al. (1976) at Halloween. Diener left out a bowl of candy for trick-or-treaters and a notice telling them only to take one sweet each; a bowl of money was left out too. Over 1000 children were covertly observed. Diener found that children were much more likely to take extra sweets or steal money if they were masked or in large groups. When he set up a full-length mirror behind the candy bowl, the amount of filching decreased. This was because the children could see themselves in the mirror as they went to steal and this snapped them out of their deindividuated state.

Leon Festinger (1956) also came up with another term useful for understanding social cognition: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling produced by having two contradictory ideas in your head, such as "I am a good person" and "I have just murdered this old lady". Festinger tested this out in a 1959 experiment which involved giving students a very boring task (turning wooden pegs round and round) then bribed them $1 or $20 to go and persuade another student (actually a confederate) that the task had been really interesting. He then got the students to rate how interesting they thought the task had been. Those in the $1 group rated the task as interesting, but those in the $20 group reported it as boring. This can be explained by cognitive dissonance because lying to the other student created dissonance ("I am truthful" vs "I just told a lie") so the $1 students managed to persuade themselves that they hadn't lied and the task had been interesting, just to get rid of the dissonance. And the $20 group? They'd been paid twenty bucks, which was a good enough reason to lie without creating dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance creates a tendency in offenders to blame their own victims:

• "He shouldn't have got in my way"
• "She was asking for it, dressed that way"
• "He can afford it, driving a flash car like that"

A particular type of cognitive dissonance is the BELIEF IN A JUST WORLD. This was researched by Melvyn Lerner & Caroline Simmons (1962). Rather like the hooded women study, a group of female volunteers were shown another women (a confederate) attempting a task and (apparently) getting shocked by the experimenter every time she made a mistake. The experimental group believed there was nothing they could do to prevent this but the control group were given the option to stop the shocks half way through. Lerner & Simmons then gave the women a questionnaire, with a critical question about how attractive and friendly they thought the shocked women was. In the condition where the participants couldn't help the shocked women, they rated her as less attractive and less desirable as a friend than the group who had ended her suffering. In other words, faced with someone suffering they convinced themselves that she must in some way have deserved it.

Apparently, the Belief in a Just World is very powerful. We need to think the world is fair and just otherwise leaving the safety of our own home and interacting with other people would be too scary and traumatic. When bad things happen to innocent people and there's nothing we can do to set things right, we experience cognitive dissonance: "The world is just and fair" vs "This terrible thing has happened". We keep our belief in the just world by convincing ourself that the innocent victim wasn't so innocent, or had done something to bring it on themselves. You can see something like this going on in Piliavin et al.'s famous study on bystander apathy.

Belief in a Just World explains why offenders will tend to blame their victims. The concept of blame was explored by Gisli Gudjonsson (1984) who created the Gudjonsson BLAME ATTRIBUTION INVENTORY (BAI). This is a psychometric test that measures where your natural tendency is to lay blame, either external attribution (EA, blaming other people, circumstances) or mental element attribution (MEA, blaming the crime on mood or states of mind that are "out of character").  The BAI also measures the amount of guilt the offender expresses about the crime. The items are 42 statements, 15 measuring EA, 9 measuring MEA and 18 measuring guilt and the respondent can agree or disagree:

• "Society is to blame for the crimes I committed" (EA)
• "I was very depressed when I committed the crime" (MEA)
• "I feel very ashamed of the crime I committed" (Guilt)

Gudjonsson & Bownes (1991) tested 80 convicts in Northern Irish prisons using the BAI. The first group were 20 violent offenders (mean age 29); the second group was 40 sex offenders (mean age 41 for paedophiles, 28 for others); and the final group was 20 property offenders (mean age 29). Sex offenders showed the most guilt (mean score 12.7) and property offenders the least (5.5). There was little difference in mental element attribution between the groups but when it came to external attribution the violent offenders scored highest (5.8) and sex offenders lowest (2.4). In a comparative study, English prisoners showed similar scores, except for violence, where the Irish prisoners showed lowers guilt and higher external attribution. This shows consistency in the way offenders attribute blame for their crimes, but suggests social factors do influence things - the different scores for violence might be linked to the terrorist troubles in Northern Ireland at that time.

1. The first problem is validity because it's very hard to define some thinking patterns as automatically criminal. In our society, having no respect for property or the law will probably land you in prison but, hundreds of years ago, the same attitudes made Robin Hood a hero! When laws are evil or unjust (like in Nazi Germany or during the Apartheid regime in South Africa) then breaking them is the sign of a healthy mind and conforming is the wrong thing to do!
2. Because of this, there's always the risk that cognitive research into criminal thinking might be ethnocentric. Back in the 19th century, the American doctor Samuel Cartwright diagnosed black slaves who tried to escape as suffering from DRAPETOMANIA - the insane urge to run away! This sort of silliness should make us suspicious when psychologists like Yochelson & Samenow, Kohlberg or Freud claim to be able to define "unhealthy" or "criminal" thought processes.
3. It's also difficult to measure cognitions in an objective and empirical way. Usually self-reports are used, but there are problems with this. Interviews were used by Yochelson & Samenow, Kohlberg and Freud, but there's always a risk of leading questions, socially desirable answers and scoring the interviews in an unreliable way. Psychometric tests (like the Gudjonsson BAI) avoid some of these problems, but end up being more reductionist and don't produce qualitative data.
4. Viewing crime from a cognitive perspective can be a bit limiting. Thought processes and moral values certainly make a difference to whether you turn to crime or not, but they're not the whole picture. Social psychology looks at how people get pressured into crime by friends and family. Biological psychology shows how some people have urges to behave irresponsibly. The psychodynamic perspective looks at how people can have anti-social desires that they're not aware of at all on a conscious level.