What would you do in this situation?
Han had a wife, Immi. Han loved Immi very much. Sadly Immi was diagnosed with a rare
type of cancer and did not have long to live.
Luckily, there was a pharmacist who invented a drug called Psychboostium that could cure
her. The pharmacist owned all rights to this medication and decided to sell it at a high
markup in order to make a profit.
While it cost only £200 to make, he sold it for 10 times that amount: £2000. Han did
not have enough money to pay such a high price, so Han tried fundraising to cover the costs.
With time running out, Han had only managed to gather £1000, which was not enough to
buy the medication.
Han begged the pharmacist to sell it at a reduced price but the man refused. Desperate
and running out of time, Han broke into the pharmacy after hours and stole the drug.
Was this the right or wrong thing to do? Why?
What would you have done?
Maybe write down your answer, only a sentence or two and we will see in the video what a
researcher called Kholberg would say about you.
INTRO
In this video we are considering cognitive explanations for offending behaviour, so of
course when its a cognitive explanation for anything its about internal mental processes,
how our brain deals with information from the world. and particularly in this video
how the brain processes moral decisions. Because of course if you are highly moral you are
less likely to be a criminal. Or maybe not…
This is Kohlberg, in 1969 he described his theory of moral reasoning, suggesting that
there are three levels that we can pass through during our mental development. As we progress
through each level our moral reasoning becomes more mature and sophisticated. But not everyone
passes through all three stages. According to Kohlberg most criminals don't ever reach
higher levels of moral reasoning.
They are likely to be stuck at the first pre-conventional level. At this level people only consider
how their actions will affect them. There are two stages to this, in the first punishment
orientation stage people think correct behaviour is whatever they won't get in trouble for.
So they may commit the crime, if they think they can get away with it.
In the second stage, reward orientation, correct behaviour is simply whatever is the most rewarding,
if the reward outweighs any potential punishment. A criminal may feel the financial rewards,
or even status rewards are worth the punishment for the crime.
Now there are two more levels to kohlberg's levels of moral reasoning, but as we are focused
on criminal behaviour, and that is people who are in the first level we can focus a
little less on the second two. But we may want to say criminal behaviour is less likely
if people are at the conventional level when they think about what is best for their own
personal relationships and society before taking action.
And also less likely if they are in the third post conventional level when they actually
consider the moral principles in what is truly right or wrong.
But even though we don't need to focus on the second two levels when writing about offending
behaviour, you may want to know more about the second two stages, and what Kohlberg would
think of your moral reasoning. But if you don't want to understand Kohlberg at a slightly
deeper level and want to skip to the evaluations you can jump to this point.
So let's go back to the scenario.
This is a slightly edited version of one scenario Kholberg used to measure the level of moral
reasoning of his subjects.
Pause the video and consider which of these statements is closest to what you would do?
What I want to show you is actually if you would or you wouldn't steal doesn't make the
biggest difference in the stage you are at, but it's the thought process you go through
to get to your answer.
Well as you can guess “I would steal it as I don't think I would get caught if I was
careful” and “I would steal it as I want to keep my wife around, she makes a great
sandwich” are both pre-conventional. The focus is on how the actions affect you.
Interestingly that means, “I wouldn't steal it as I think they would probably catch me
and I don't want to go to prison” and “I wouldn't steal because I love my wife but
she isn't worth going to prison for” are also pre-conventional moral decisions.
Criminals will likely be in pre-conventional as they may overestimate the rewards, and
underestimate the risk that they will get caught.
At the the conventional level we accept society as an authority, But we can also split into
level two into two stages
So in what is now the third “good intentions” stage you're worried about what others think
of you, so you conform to society's expectations. You may say, “I wouldn't because I don't
want to be thought of as a thief”. The counter argument is “I would steal because I don't
want people to think I would let my wife down when she really needed me”
In stage 4 is social obedience, you're much more likely to just follow the law because
you consider the functioning of society as important. In this stage you are most likely
to say “I won't steal because it's against the law and, If everyone broke the law society
would fall apart”.
Now Kolberg suggests that around 90% of people are not really going to get beyond stage 4,
and most people are generally law abiding. But we do still have one level including two
stages to go.
In the postconventional level, you consider your own personal ethical principles and will
obey or disobey depending on deeply felt beliefs considering some laws to be just and some
to be unjust.
Stage 5 is the social contract view, considering that laws should be in the best interests
of the members of society, In this case you may break the law on principle that the law
isn't functioning. “I will steal as my wife's right to life is greater than his right to
more money”. Or “I won't steal but we will campaign to change the law for access
to drugs for people who can't afford”.
Stage 6 is universal ethics, in this stage before making a decision there is abstract
reasoning on the nature of justice. And people in this stage may consider that true morality
requires disobedience of laws not grounded in justice. Someone may say at this stage,
“A life is more precious than property, and if i'm breaking the law in getting the
medicine then the law is wrong”. Or if they were going to obey the law “A person's right
to their own property is a fundamental right, laws that protect that right are just and
should be obeyed” I mean you may or may not agree with those examples, but hopefully
you can see the logical reasoning.
One example of stage 6 moral reasoning could be seen as Rosa Parks disobeying the segregationist
rules on seating. If you can think of any other examples, pop them in the comments.
Cognitive distortions.
So when we consider cognitive explanations for criminal behaviour we also need to consider
cognitive distortions. This means when our mind fails to accurately perceive the reality
of the world around us.
Because this thinking is fundamentally irrational we totally misunderstand the motivations and
reality of our own and other people's behaviour. Importantly as we are considering offending
behavior, we may respond with criminal acts, and we may feel justified in our response
because of our cognitive distortion.
One example is hostile attribution bias, we all observe other people's behavior and make
assumptions or inferences about their internal mental states. Hostile attribution bias is
when we automatically assume that the other person has negative intentions.
And that's kind of exactly what I mean, for some people just a simple look can be interpreted
as an aggressive act, or maybe accidentally bumping into someone in a crowded room as
a physical attack.
Yeah,,, like that.
The misread of intention escalates into an aggressive and potentially violent response.
A second distortion is minimisation, this is about how we interpret our own behaviour
and the results of that behaviour. When we minimise we see the behaviour as less serious
than it really is. We may say that our actions didn't really harm the victim. Or that the
victim was in some way complicit, or even was completely responsible for what happened
to them. This process is an attempt by the criminal to feel less guilty about what they
did.
Evaluations
Support for Kohlberg's ideas comes from Hollin and Palmer, they compared the moral reasoning
of delinquents and non delinquents using an 11 question interview, all the participants
were between 13 and 22. It was found that the male offenders had lower moral reasoning
on 10 out of the 11 questions, suggesting a moral deficit in criminals.
There is a big problem with Kohlberg's research and the theory he developed, it's based on
responses to hypothetical “dilemma” questions. Social desirability pressures mean it's unlikely
that people would answer honestly, even if they actually knew what they would really
do in the situation, so perhaps generalisation to real instances of offending is limited.
I mean if I asked people if when ordered to by a scientist, would they give what they
thought could be a deadly shock to another person? I think most if not everyone I asked
would say no.
And two thirds of those people would be wrong.
Another problem with Kohlberg is gender bias. He used an all male sample to develop his
theory, assuming it would apply to women. This evaluation keeps coming up doesn't it.
Well minimising potential gender differences is beta-bias. But interestingly when women
were eventually tested they appeared to be less morally developed than men, which really
doesn't match the fact that men make up most of the prison population.
A researcher called Gillian looked at Kohlberg’s work and suggests that Kohlberg’s theory
is focusing on a male ideal of justice, minimising the value of females' focusing on the importance
of caring.
But a positive, if we accept there is a link between cognitive processes like hostile attribution
bias and minimisation and offending behaviour, we can develop cognitive behavioural programs
to challenge irrational thinking, programs like anger management. This could reduce re-offending
and hopefully reduce crime and associated harms to society.
Here is a real forensic exam question on cognitive explanations. Give it a go.
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so you don't miss the videos released right up to your exams, and I will see you in the
next psych boost video, differential association theory.