Cognitive

• cognitive explanation

  assumes that criminals think and process information in a different way to non-criminals
• 2 areas of the cognitive explanation

  • level of moral reasoning
  • cognitive distortions
• morals

  our sense of right and wrong within a particular culture
• features of having morals

  • understanding society’s rules
  • learning how to behave according to the rules
  • learning the feelings that accompany behaviour
• 3 levels of moral reasoning

  • pre-conventional morality
  • conventional morality
  • post-conventional morality
• stages of pre-conventional morality 


  • punishment orientation - whether or not the act will lead to punishment
  • reward orientation - what is to be gained / rewarded
• stages of conventional morality

  • good boy / girl orientation - what others expect
  • social order orientation - obedience to authority
• stages of post-conventional morality

  • social contract & individual rights orientation - what is moral rather than legally right
  • conscience orientation - own ethical principles
• Kohlberg (1968)

  • longitudinal study for over 12 years
  • American males
  • Given moral dilemmas
  • Found that participants progressed through the stages of moral reasoning in a fixed order, and never went back to the previous stage
• what level of moral reasoning are offenders most likely to be in?

  pre-conventional
• what is the pre-conventional level characterised by

  a need to avoid punishment and gain rewards - associated with child-like reasoning
• Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson (2007)

  used an offending motivation questionnaire to assess 130 male young offenders in Iceland

  • 38% didn’t consider consequences
  • 36% were confident they wouldn’t get caught

  supports Kohlberg’s theory
• cognitive distortions

  Faulty, biased, irrational ways of thinking, meaning we perceive ourselves and other people in a way that doesn’t match reality
• what do cognitive distortions allow offenders to do

  deny or rationalise their criminal behaviour
• hostile attribution bias

  tendency to misinterpret or misread other people’s actions as aggressive or threatening which may trigger a disproportionate and often violent response
• Schonenberg & Jusyte

  presented violent offenders with images of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions

  • violent offenders were more likely to perceive the expressions as angry and hostile
• Orobio de Castro et al

  meta analysis of 41 attribution studies

  • concluded that hostile attribution bias has a very strong relationship with aggressive behaviour
• minimalisation

  attempt to downplay the seriousness off an offence and say the consequences are less significant

  • common in sex offenders
• Kennedy & Grubin (1992)

  interviewed male sex offenders

  • the majority blamed their victim and minimalised their crime
• Salter (1988) 


  sex offenders use different types of denial to minimalise their crimes

  • denying it took place
  • denying the seriousness
  • denying there is something wrong with them
  • denying responsibility
• positive evaluation of cognitive explanation

  • research support
  • real world applications - suggests we can use therapeutic techniques such as CBT to change how people think and behave
• negative evaluation of cognitive explanation

  • difficult to study cognition so we have to infer from behaviour
  • Gender bias - research was androcentric, Gillian (1982) found that women prioritise ethics of care rather than justice