COGNITIVE FACTORS AO3

• Support for cognitive factors is provided by Alvaro and Gibbs (1996) who found that when they measured for cognitive distortions in anti-social young adults there was a strong relationship between the level of anti-social behaviour and minimalisation, indicating that offenders may use minimalisation with negative behaviours. These results clearly demonstrate the presence of a cognitive bias in criminals, and we may be able to look to these biases to understand the cognitive factors that lead to criminality.
• However, cognitive factors have been criticised for being retrospective in its explanation. Maruna and Mann (2006) examined the idea that using minimalisation to downplay crimes serves as a useful strategy to deal with guilt rather than the reason for committing the crime. This suggests that rather than looking to abnormalities in brain structure to explain criminal behaviour, we should be looking into the role that neurotransmitters play and how they affect the regions of the brain that we are assuming lead to criminal behaviour.
• One methodological with cognitive factors is the use of hypothetical situations to measure cognitive biases in offenders means that the measure could be argued to lack predictive validity. This means that the answer given may not be the response that would occur in a real-life situation. The implication of this is that we cannot say for sure that the biases presented during these controlled studies are the contributing factor to criminality in the real world.
• The cognitive explanation is deterministic in that it suggests that having these cognitive biases will determine criminal behaviour. However, not everyone with these certain personality traits or biases will act out on them and offend. Not everyone that commits crimes has criminal personality traits or cognitive biases. These explanations ignore the role of free will on our behaviour and these explanations can be criticised for minimising personal responsibility of

  individuals behaviour.