Cognitive explanations

• Moral Reasoning


  Level of moral reasoning
• Criminals


  • Have a lower level of moral reasoning than others
  • Do not progress from the pre-conventional level of moral reasoning
  • Seek to avoid punishment and gain rewards
  • Have child-like reasoning
• Non-criminals


  • Tend to reason at higher levels
  • Sympathise with the rights of others
  • Exhibit honesty, generosity and non-violence
  • Exhibit post-conventional moral reasoning
• Levels of Cognitive Moral Development (CMD)

  • Pre-Conventional
  • Conventional
  • Post-Conventional
• Pre-Conventional


  Values based on external events
• Conventional


  Assessing personal consequences
• Post-Conventional


  Shared standards, rights, duties and principles
• Stages of Cognitive Moral Development (CMD)

  • Stage 1: Acting to avoid punishment
  • Stage 2: Acting to further one's own interest
  • Stage 3: Decisions based on the approval of others
  • Stage 4: Judgments based on the relative rules and laws of society
  • Stage 5: Social contract rules & laws of social good
  • Stage 6: Guided by moral principle of justice
• Criminals have less mature, child-like reasoning and cannot progress past the pre-conventional level of cognitive moral development
• Pre-conventional level (stage 1 & 2)


  Criminals are likely to be at this level, where they believe that breaking the law is justified if the reward outweighs the punishment. Adults at this level are associated with less mature, childlike reasoning and commit crime because they think they can get away with it and gain rewards.
• Post-conventional morality (level 3)

  Individual judgment is based on self-chosen principles, and moral reasoning is based on individual rights and justice.
• According to Kohlberg, the post-conventional morality level is as far as most people get
• Only 10-15% are capable of the kind of abstract thinking necessary for stage 5 or 6 (post-conventional morality)
• Kohlberg's theory testing


  1. Creating moral dilemma stories, most famous being 'Heinz Dilemma'

  2. Studying the answers from children of different ages to these questions

  3. Discovering how moral reasoning changed as people grew older
• The 'Heinz Dilemma' story explained a man whose wife was dying, the drug to save her cost more money than he had. Should Heinz let his wife die, steal the drug and accept the punishment, or steal the drug and received no punishment.
• Hostile Attribution Bias


  The tendency to judge ambiguous situations or the actions of others as aggressive and/or threatening when in reality they may not be
• Schonenberg and Justye (2014) found that 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
• Minimalisation


  A type of deception that involves downplaying the significance of an event or emotion. A common strategy when dealing with feelings of guilt
• Barbaree (1991) found that amongst 26 convicted rapists, 54% denied they had committed an offence at all and 40% minimised the harm that they had caused the victim
• Pollock and Hashmall (1991) found that 35% of a sample of child molesters said that the crime they committed was non-sexual. 36% said that the victims had consented
• It is important not to overlook the positive contributions that cognitive theories have made to criminological psychology
• Understanding cognitive distortions has proven beneficial in the treatment of criminal behaviour
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)


  The dominant approach in the rehabilitation of sex offenders, which encourages offenders to 'face up' to what they have done and establish a less distorted view of their actions
• Reduction in minimalization


  Correlates with reduced risk of reoffending
• Kohlberg's theory


  • Based on an all-male sample
  • The stages reflect a male definition of morality (it's androcentric)
  • Findings are not representative of female moral reasoning and therefore cannot be generalised
• Gilligan's argument


  Men's morality is based on abstract principles of law and justice, while women's is based on principles of compassion and care
• Criminality is complex, explanations that reduce offending behaviour to a cognitive explanation may be overly simplistic
• There is evidence that crime runs in families (suggesting an environmental cause), which makes it near impossible to disentangle the effects of cognitive distortions with the role of the environment
• In practice, it seems that reasoning about right and wrong depends more upon the situation than upon general rules
• Individuals do not always progress through the stages of moral development, and one in fourteen actually slipped backward
• The evidence for distinct stages of moral development looks very weak, and some would argue that behind the theory is a culturally biased belief in the superiority of American values over those of other cultures