COGNITIVE FACTORS AO1

• Cognitive factors and how they may explain offending and reoffending behaviour. Beck (1972) first introduced the idea of cognitive distortions, and for some time these distortions have been considered important in increasing the likelihood in engaging in criminal activity.
• Minimalisation is a type of cognitive distortion that serves to downplay criminal behaviour by the offender. It can be described as self-deception whereby the offender does not accept the full reality of the situation and will attempt to rationalise what they have done. This involves such strategies as downplaying the effects of the crime, trivialising the acts, and maybe even attributing some of the blame to the victim. This helps the offender deal with the guilt they experience.
• For example, in a sample of paedophiles and rapists, Barbaree (1998) found that a substantial number denied their involvement and approximately 40% went onto minimise the seriousness of their offence or the extent of their culpability (guilt). Minimalisation and denial are almost always used interchangeably, and they are commonly used as examples of criminals’ cognitive distortions across a spectrum of crimes, not just sex-related ones.
• A hostile attribution bias is when someone has a leaning towards always thinking the worst, such as if someone smiles at you, you think that the person is actually thinking bad thoughts about you. Such negative interpretations lead to aggressive behaviour. This is where ambiguous (unclear) events/social interactions are interrupted as hostile. At its basic level, it is a bias that the individual uses that infers aggressive intent.