What is a cognitive explanation of offending behaviour?
An explanation that focuses on thought processes, beliefs, interpretations and decision-making that may contribute to offending.
What are Kohlberg’s three levels of moral reasoning?
Pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional morality.
What characterises pre-conventional morality?
Decisions are mainly based on avoiding punishment and gaining rewards or personal benefits.
Why might pre-conventional reasoning increase offending risk?
A person may offend when the expected reward seems greater than the chance or cost of punishment.
What did Palmer and Hollin (1998) find?
Convicted male offenders showed poorer moral reasoning than male non-offenders on 10 of 11 questions and across all five moral values assessed.
What is a cognitive distortion?
A biased or irrational pattern of thinking that changes how a person interprets events and can support or justify offending.
What is hostile attribution bias?
The tendency to interpret ambiguous social behaviour as deliberately hostile or threatening.
What did Schönenberg and Jusyte (2014) find?
Violent offenders were more likely than matched controls to interpret emotionally ambiguous facial cues containing anger as hostile.
What is minimalisation?
Downplaying the seriousness, harm or personal responsibility associated with an offence.
Give one major criticism of cognitive explanations of offending.
Much evidence is correlational, so researchers cannot be certain that distorted cognition causes offending rather than developing after it.