by CrimePsych | Jul 30, 2019 | Blog
There are a wide range of studies examining the psychology of crime and criminal behaviour. Not all of these relate directly to the criminal. Studies explore a variety of stages in the criminal process, such as: why people commit various crimes; how police may investigate crime; the courts and trial system; imprisonment and reform structures.
To study the psychology of crime, it is important to have a clear idea of what crime is and how it can be studied. Crime is simply a behaviour which is deemed to be against the law. The law is formed within a society and is a generally accepted set of rules that all must follow. Therefore, an act may be considered acceptable in one context but criminal in another. Taking another person’s life is one example. If a soldier were to take a life during warfare it is not a crime; however, if he had an altercation in a bar which resulted in death it is murder.
Criminal psychologists ask questions such as – what types of people do which types of things and how can we prevent or reform their behaviour? To answer questions such as this, it is important to consider the complexity of human behaviour. Humans are complex social beings and numerous factors can influence our behaviour. We may have characteristic ways of dealing with others but there may be small variations based on context and types of interaction.
To examine which factors have an impact on whether people offend, we must first gather a lot of information. Careful consideration must be given to how and where that information is collected from.
Many studies which examine the psychology of crime use data from police sources. This can be arrest or conviction data from various areas. However, is this data representative? Crime may not be reported to police for a variety of reasons. Police may have reports of offences but never arrest a suspect. Even if a person is arrested, they are not always prosecuted or convicted. Therefore, the official statistics do not represent all crimes and criminals. It could be argued that criminal psychologists should use self-report data. However, people are not always willing to participate in such research. Even if they are willing to participate, it cannot be guaranteed they are being truthful. This data may be incomplete or inaccurate.
It must also be noted that when police collect data about a crime or an offender, their primary purpose of gathering that data is to secure a conviction. Police do not generally consider how else such data may be used. Therefore it is best to consider a variety of research methods taken over a longer period.
In summary, numerous stages of crime and criminality are examined by criminal, forensic, and investigative psychologists. It is a vast area of study that explores the process of crime, the actions of the criminal, characteristics of the offender, the judicial and investigation process, incarceration, and rehabilitation.
by CrimePsych | Jul 22, 2019 | Blog
There are many different areas of research within Forensic, Criminal, and Investigative psychology. Each area of research may require a slightly different approach to study and investigate further. However, when we wish to study any aspect of offending behaviour the basic fundamentals will be the same. Every research project begins with a question or set of questions. There may even be some problem which requires a solution. I am going to give you a general overview of how we study one aspect of the psychology of offending.
You may very well have heard the famous saying by Sir Isaac Newton ‘standing on the shoulders of giants.’ What this means for academics that develop theories of behaviour, is that there will already be some evidence of a phenomenon that already exists and is then build upon. I will use the theory that I developed for my PhD as an example. I wanted to investigate which factors increased a person’s propensity to offend, in other words, what would make a person more likely to offend.
Other psychologists before me had discovered that some people followed the norms, laws and rules within society better than others because of their level of morality. A famous psychologist called Piaget had found that morals are learned throughout childhood and influenced a person’s thoughts and behaviour. After this, another psychologist called Kohlberg built upon this theory and suggested that there were 3 stages in the development of morality. Later, other psychologists investigated this further and found that criminals were all within one particular stage of moral development while non-offenders were further developed. And as you can start to see already, over a number of decades a phenomenon is identified, then it is further tested by others who might make small advances and develop the theory a little more.
Today, we understand that the behaviour of human beings in complex societies is can be influenced by a number of factors. A person does not always become a criminal because of any one particular thing. A person’s personality can have an influence on whether or not they offend. And of course, there are different levels and types of crime. Some people might think that it is ok to steal from a shop to feed their family, or ok to beat a rapist for retribution but would never kill a man. Others might think that it is ok to kill someone if they stole from you, or maybe not that bad to sell drugs but they would never rape someone. Every person has a different set of standards, morals, attitude towards different crimes, and different personalities.
Therefore, when I wanted an answer to the question ‘what makes a person more likely to offend’ I needed to look at several areas of psychology that could work together to explain why. After extensive research, one of the things I decided to investigate was attitude towards offending. People’s attitude towards offending is influenced by their upbringing, by their learned behaviours and what they experience and find acceptable on a day to day basis. But as I have just mentioned there are different types of crimes and some people might think one thing is not that bad, and others as abhorrent. That led me to design a questionnaire that had several different types of crime and various justifications for doing them. As we know, whenever anyone gets caught committing a crime they have a reason or justification for doing so. This is commonly thought of as their motive.
There have also been a number of psychologists who have found that an individual’s personality has an impact on whether or not they offend. Therefore, I wanted to find out if personality had an influence on attitude towards offending. That led me to my next problem – which theory of personality should I use? There are multiple theories of personality. I understood that crime occurs within society and is a form of social interaction. There is an interaction between the perpetrator and the victim. Sometimes this is a direct interaction where they come face to face in sometimes violent ways, or it can be an indirect one where the two never see each other such as fraud or burglary. Therefore, I decided that a theory of personality that measured social interactions was most appropriate.
So I was standing on the shoulders of several giants. I had drawn on previous research on morality, thinking styles, learning theories, attitude, and personality theories. I had developed a questionnaire that incorporated several factors. I had a questionnaire to measure interpersonal personality. Then I started thinking about who my participants should be for this study. The most obvious choice for a criminal psychologist is to investigate criminals. However, if I did that, all of the participants would have a favourable attitude towards some types of crimes.
Therefore, I decided to use members of the general public as participants. I also included a questionnaire that asked about any criminal or deviant behaviour they have previously engaged in. I wanted to look at how their previous involvement in these types of acts influenced their attitude towards the various crimes. Overall I was investigating the relationship between attitude, personality, and reported offending. I believed that by examining all three it would give a more accurate representation of the multi-factor influences of offending.
The results showed that members of the general public had been involved in a vast range of criminal and deviant acts. Rather than being involved in specific crimes, it was found that people showed a preference towards offences that were either carried out for some external gain such as money or goods, or an internal gain such as power or enjoyment. Level of involvement was also depended on how serious an offence was. For example, some people were only involved in minor crimes such as petty theft or other deeds that would not normally result in imprisonment. Others were more likely to be involved in more serious crimes that would result in imprisonment such as gang crime, involvement in drugs of stealing cars.
I found that a person’s attitude and personality type was related to the level of crime they reported involvement in. I also found that when a person showed a positive attitude towards crimes that have an external gain and are higher risk and had the type of personality where they felt other people control them, their level of reported offending was highest.
As many of you will have experienced, attitudes can change over time. Therefore, this research shows that it would be possible to reduce the level of offending by changing attitudes. Any programs designed to change attitudes could be delivered to those with the identified personality and be much more effective.
In conclusion then, for a psychological theory to be developed it would start with a question or some kind of problem that needed a solution. Researchers would then look at what evidence exists relating to this question. As our understanding of psychology has grown, researchers often investigate several previous explanations for the phenomenon and combine them. Existing research doesn’t always need to be directly related to offending. We can take various aspects of everyday psychology and build upon them to relate to offending. Within investigative psychology, theories can be taken from clinical psychology, social psychology, criminology, sociology, the psychology of place and how we interact with our surroundings, or even neuropsychology and the study of brain damage.
Large research projects are undertaken which often take years to complete. The way a phenomenon is investigated is crucial for getting applicable results. We can look for patterns in police records, interview offenders at length on their experiences, give them questionnaires to fill in, or even look at members of the general public. People have a tendency to think that an offender is a unique creature who is somehow different from the public. But these offenders are members of the public. They are someone’s Son or Daughter. They are someone’s Mother or Father, Brother or sister. Those individuals who are in jail only represent the ones that have been caught and sent to prison. There are many more who are never caught or who have already served a sentence.
Once we have the background evidence of existing theories and the data in whatever format we have chosen to collect it, complex statistical methods are applied to rigorously test the patterns. The findings of the study are then written in the form of a journal article which is carefully examined by other experts in the field. Usually, other researchers in different areas try to recreate your findings with different populations. These are also published as journal articles. And this is how psychological theories of offending are developed.
