Cognitive exp - Kohlberg

• Kohlberg's levels of moral reasoning

  • Pre-conventional (punishment orientation)
  • Conventional (maintenance of the social order)
  • Post-conventional (morality of contract and individual rights)
• Criminals have a childlike, immature sense of reasoning

  They reason at the pre-conventional level
• Non-criminals


  Reason at the conventional or post-conventional levels
• Non-criminals


  • Able to display more civilised and empathic behaviours
• Chandler (1973): 'Non-criminals are able to display more civilised and empathic behaviours'
• Cognitive distortions are a major feature of cognitive explanations for offending behaviour. These distortions are examples of dysfunctional thought processing where we show errors in our logic. The two main types of cognitive distortions attributed to criminality are hostile attribution bias (HAB) and minimalisation.
• Hostile attribution bias is the tendency for offenders to view emotionally ambiguous or nonthreatening situations as hostile and threatening, and so is an automatic reaction to novel situations, as suggested by Schönenberg and Justye (2014).
• When 55 violent offenders were exposed to pictures of facial expressions which were neither clearly hostile nor clearly neutral, the overwhelming majority viewed the images as aggressive or hostile. This may be the result of being a ‘rejected’ and ‘aggressive’ child, according to Dodge and Frame (1982).
• Minimalisation is particularly common amongst sex offenders, and is used as a coping mechanism for guilt or regret, where offenders will under-exaggerate the significance of their crimes and the emotional consequences suffered by their victims, as suggested by Pollock and Hasmall (1991).
• . In their sample, an astounding 35% of child molesters attempted to justify their crimes as non-malicious and simply being a way of showing their affection, whilst 36% did not accept committing a crime at all as they perceived the child as consenting!
• Cognitive theories may not be able to explain all examples of offending behaviour, and specifically not all types of crimes. eg, impulsive crimes appear to be carried out by offenders with no reasoning, whilst middle-class financially-driven crimes are more frequently carried out by offender who display pre-conventional reasoning, as suggested by Thornton and R.L.Reid (1982).
• As suggested by Langdon (2010), intelligence may be a more important factor in determining the likelihood of an individual committing a crime, and is a more quantifiable and objective characteristic compared to levels of moral reasoning. Therefore, cognitive explanations are only suited towards explaining specific types of crime.