4.3.9 - Psychological explanations of offending behaviour

Three Routes Into Offending

This lesson explains offending behaviour through psychological factors. That does not mean biology, social context or the law are irrelevant. It means the core explanations in this AQA bullet focus on personality, thinking and learned attitudes.

The updated AQA requirement has three main routes:

The explanation: what to know. AQA does not ask for one single "best" explanation. It asks for several explanations that can be described and evaluated. A good answer makes the mechanism clear: how exactly does the explanation turn a person, situation or attitude into offending?

Applying the explanation: how to apply it. If a scenario says a person is sensation-seeking, emotionally unstable and shows little empathy, Eysenck may fit. If a scenario says a person thinks only about avoiding punishment or downplays harm, cognitive explanations may fit. If a scenario says a young person learns from peers who approve of theft, differential association theory may fit.

Evaluating the explanation: the big caution. These explanations are not interchangeable. Eysenck is more dispositional, cognitive explanations focus on thought processes, and differential association is more social. Strong evaluation often comes from comparing what each explanation can and cannot explain.

Eysenck's Criminal Personality

Hans Eysenck argued that personality has a biological basis and can influence how easily a person is socialised. His theory of offending is built around the idea that some people are harder to condition into a law-abiding conscience.

Eysenck's three personality dimensions are often called PEN. Psychoticism here is a personality dimension, not a diagnosis of psychosis: a high score does not mean someone has a psychotic disorder or will offend.

In the conditioning account, a child takes something, experiences disapproval and anxiety, and comes to associate taking things with that unpleasant response. Eventually, even anticipating the act can produce anxiety that inhibits it: the conscience is learned. Eysenck proposed that low arousal in extraversion makes these associations less readily established, while neurotic reactivity can amplify poorly controlled responses. This is a theoretical mechanism, not a claim that sociable or anxious people are generally offenders.

The theory chain. Eysenck saw criminal behaviour as developmentally immature because it is selfish and focused on immediate gratification. During childhood, most people learn to delay gratification and avoid antisocial behaviour because wrongdoing is paired with punishment or disapproval. This produces a conscience. A person with a criminal personality is harder to condition, so the anxiety response that should inhibit wrongdoing is weaker.

Applying the explanation: applying the theory. Jay enjoys risky dares, reacts angrily when criticised and says he does not care if other people are upset. Eysenck's theory would explain Jay's offending risk through high extraversion, high neuroticism and high psychoticism. His sensation-seeking may push him towards risk, his emotional instability may make him reactive, and his low empathy may reduce guilt.

Strength: testability. Eysenck's theory is more testable than vague claims about "bad character" because it predicts measurable differences on personality questionnaires. Researchers can compare offender and non-offender groups on extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism.

Limitation: mixed evidence. Evidence is not equally strong for all three traits. Later reviews suggest psychoticism is the most consistent discriminator between offenders and controls, while extraversion and neuroticism show more mixed support. This weakens the full PEN profile as a general explanation. It also matters what the questionnaire measures: if psychoticism items already ask about aggression or rule-breaking, their association with offending can partly reflect overlapping definitions rather than independent prediction.

Limitation: offender diversity. Offenders are not one homogeneous group. A fraud offence, impulsive assault, group robbery and politically motivated offence may involve very different motives and personality profiles. A single "criminal personality" can therefore become too broad.

Level Of Moral Reasoning

Cognitive explanations focus on how offenders think. One cognitive explanation is that some offenders show a lower level of moral reasoning.

Lawrence Kohlberg proposed that moral reasoning develops through levels:

The reason for a choice, rather than the choice alone, identifies the level. Two people can both reject theft, one because they fear punishment and the other because they respect another person's rights. Conversely, breaking an unjust law can be justified through principles rather than self-interest. Kohlberg's levels are a framework for assessing justification, not a legal test of guilt or a permanent label for a whole person.

The explanation. Some offender samples show more preconventional reasoning than comparison samples. This means they may focus on immediate self-interest and consequences for themselves, rather than the victim's rights, wider social order or moral principles. The explanation is not simply "offenders have no morals"; it is that the reasoning used to justify behaviour may be less mature.

Applying the explanation: applying moral reasoning. Mira steals from a shop and says, "It was fine because the security guard did not see me." This shows preconventional reasoning because the judgement is based on avoiding punishment. A conventional answer would focus on the law and harm to the shop. A postconventional answer might discuss whether a law is just, but would still need principled reasoning rather than selfish gain.

Evidence: Palmer and Hollin (1998). Palmer and Hollin compared moral reasoning in 126 convicted male offenders aged 13 to 22 with 122 male non-offenders and 210 female non-offenders. Using the Sociomoral Reflection Measure - Short Form, they found that male offenders showed significantly poorer moral reasoning than male non-offenders on 10 of 11 questions and across all five moral values assessed. This supports a link between offending and lower moral reasoning.

Broader evidence. A 2017 meta-analytic review of 72 studies found an association between lower moral reasoning and adolescent offending. It also found substantial variation between studies and evidence of publication bias, so its overall result should not be treated as equally strong in every group or context. This gives the explanation more weight than a single study.

Limitation: cause and effect. Much of the evidence is correlational. Lower moral reasoning may contribute to offending, but offending, peer group membership, school exclusion or institutionalisation may also affect how young people talk about morality.

Limitation: not all offences fit. Planning a sophisticated offence does not itself demonstrate mature moral reasoning: practical cleverness and ethical justification are different. Some people break laws on principled grounds, which also shows why legal conformity and moral maturity must be distinguished. Other offences may be driven by emotion, addiction, coercion or opportunity. Also, a person can reason morally in an interview but still behave differently under pressure. Moral reasoning is therefore part of an explanation, not a full prediction of behaviour.

Cognitive Distortions

A second cognitive explanation is that offenders may use cognitive distortions. These are biased ways of interpreting events, other people or the offence itself.

AQA names two cognitive distortions: hostile attribution bias and minimalisation.