Psychological explanations:Cognitive explanations -A-Level Psychology

Levels of moral reasoning:

-Kohlberg applied moral reasoning to criminal behaviour.He suggested that people’s decisions and judgements on issues of right and wrong can be summarised in a stage theory of moral development.

-The higher the stage,the more sophisticated the reasoning.

-Kohlberg based his theories on people’s responses to a series of dilemmas such as the Heinz dilemma.

-Many studies have shown that criminals tend to have a lower level of moral reasoning than non-criminals.

-Kohlberg et al using his moral dilemma technique found that a group of violent youths were significantly lower in their moral development than non-violent youths-even after controlling for social background.

Kohlberg’s model and criminality:

-criminal offenders are more likely to be classified at the pre-conventional level of Kohlberg’s model(stages 1 and 2).

-non criminals generally progress to the conventional level and beyond

-pre-conventional level consists of a need to avoid punishments and gain rewards.It is associated with less mature,childlike reasoning.

-This is supported by studies that suggest that offenders are often more egocentric and display poorer social perspective-taking skills than non-offender peers (Chandler).

-individuals who reason at higher levels sympathise more with the rights of others and exhibit more conventional behaviours such as honesty and generosity.

Cognitive distortions:

-are errors or biases in people’s information processing system due to faulty thinking.

Hostile attribution bias:Evidence suggests that a propensity for violence is often associated with a tendency to misinterpret other people’s actions.Offenders misread non-aggressive cues and this may trigger a disproportionate ,often violent response.

Schonenberg and Justice presented 55 violent offenders with images of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions.When compared with a non-aggressive matched control group,the violent offenders were significantly more likely to interpret the images as angry and hostile.

The roots of this behaviour may lie in childhood.Dodge and Frame showed children a video clip of an ’ambiguous provocation’.Children who had been identified as aggressive or rejected prior to the study interpreted the situation as more hostile than those classes non-aggressive and accepted.

Minimalisation:is an attempt to deny or downplay the seriousness of an offence and has been referred to as the application of a ‘euphemistic label’ for behaviour (Bandura).

Evaluation:

Level of moral reasoning evidence-Palmer and Hollin compared moral reasoning between 210 female non-offenders,122 male non-offenders and 126 convicted offenders using the SRM-SF which contains 11 moral dilemma-related questions.The delinquent group showed less mature moral reasoning than the non-delinquent group which is consistent with Kohlberg’s predictions.Blackburn suggested that delinquents may show poor moral development due to a lack of role playing opportunities in childhood and such opportunities to develop moral reasoning should therefore be provided.

Alternative theories of moral reasoning-Gibbs made a revised version of Kohlberg’s theory which included two levels of reasoning:mature and immature.In the first level,moral decisions are guided by avoidance of punishment and personal gain,in the second level by empathy,social justice and one’s own conscience.Gibbs argued that Kohlberg’s pre-conventional level should be abandoned as it was culturally biased and did not represent a natural maturational stage of cognitive development which is supported by Paiget’s theory of moral development which suggested that child-like reasoning is self-centred and egocentric which gives way to empathy and a concern for the needs of children as they get older.