Turning to Crime: COGNITION

There's three sections to the Cognition explanation of turning to crime, but they can be illustrated with just two studies:

- Criminal thinking patterns (Yochelson and Samenow)
- Moral development (Palmer and Hollin)
- Social cognition: Attribution theory (Palmer and Hollin)

Criminal thinking patterns
Yochelson and Samenow propose that criminals offend because it's an attribute of their personality. They believe that they have over forty distinct and erroneous thinking errors that distinguish them from non-offenders, characterised by fear and a distorted self-image. They denied that criminals act impulsively, and proposed that they made rational decisions, but that these were biased by the criminal thinking patterns which resulted in their crimes. They also emphasized that personality develops over a lifetime, but that parent-child interaction was an important influential factor on criminality. 

Yochelson and Samenow
255 male offenders judged NGRI who were residing in a psychiatric hospital in the US were interviewed using a Freudian therapeutic style interview. Though attrition was high, Yochelson and Samenow concluded that criminals did display erroneous thought patterns which could explain their criminal behaviour. They separated the thinking errors into three categories. The first was "criminal thinking patterns" which were characterised by fear, which included errors such as a need for power and control. The second was "automatic thinking errors", which included denial of responsibility or guilt. The final error identified was "crime-related thinking errors", such as optimistic fantasies of criminal acts. It was concluded that they act rationally, but their distorted self-image and thinking errors cause distortions in judgement and criminal behaviour. 

Moral development
One theory of why some people turn to crime emphasizes the role of moral development. Kohlberg devised a stage theory of moral development, based on the Piaget's work. It outlined that there are three levels to moral development, each containing two stages. The first level is pre-conventional morality, which is where children tend to be at. Their morality is driven by reward, punishment and self-interest. "Conventional" level is where most people fall into; their morals are driven by society, law and conformity. Post-conventional level is seen as potentially an ideal that many do not reach, consisting of universal laws which supersede actual laws. Some have argued that criminals offend due to only being in stage 1 or 2 and thus driven by self-interest, and avoiding being punished.

Social cognition: Attribution theory
Social cognition refers to how we think about others around us, and a key part of this is attribution theory. Cognitive psychologists believe that we attribute our own behaviour to the situation, but others' behaviour to their disposition, particularly when they are negative or undesirable. For example, if we are in a bad mood, we may blame someone else, or the weather, but if someone else is in a bad mood, we assume they are being hostile or are generally grouchy. Attribution theory might explain criminal behaviour in terms of criminals incorrectly attributing more hostile behaviours to disposition, and thus they feel like they can justify being anti-social and committing offences because they feel victimized or an outcast anyway.

Both of these theories could be used with:

Palmer and Hollin
Palmer and Hollin aimed to investigate the relationships between moral reasoning, attribution theory and other cognitive processes amongst young male offenders and non-offenders. Their sample consisted of 97 convicted male offenders aged between 13 and 21 and 77 non-offenders aged between 12 and 24; all were from the Midlands area. Data was collected psychometric tests. The sociomoral reflection measure tested moral reasoning by asking questions such as to the importance of promises, which gave the participants a level and stage of moral reasoning according to Kohlberg’s theory. Participants were also given scenarios where they were to attribute intent to others' behaviour. The other psychometric tests assessed perceptions of parenting including rejection and an SRD checklist of 46 offences. One of the key findings was that offenders were more likely to have less mature moral reasoning, whilst there was also a common theme of perceiving parental, particularly paternal, rejection, as well as criminals making more incorrect attributions of hostility. The researchers argued the latter two to be significant predictors for SRD scores.