Psychological Factors of Criminal Behavior
Psychological Factors
Psychology is a critical aspect of criminology. It focuses on any individual’s mind, their mental behavior, and how their brain functions to respond to stimuli. The brain can be impacted by numerous outside subjects specifically the mind of a minor with an undeveloped mind. The growing predisposed brain of a child takes situations they have experienced and create connections. These relations can be “…between thoughts, ideas, actions, and consequences, whether they are truly connected or not,” (Courtney Ackerman; Cognitive Distortions). These connections can be faulty and they are known as cognitive distortions and can easily lead to someone more likely to have criminal conduct.
Cognitive Distortions — Thoughts that are inaccurate and bias on reality upon experiences.
Yochelson and Samenow determined that a substantial part of criminal cognitive distortions contains putting blame onto others for own failure, super-optimism, inability to accept mistakes, minimization, and exaggeration of behavior. Self-serving Cognitive Distortions can be apart of Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) which is a disorder that numerous delinquents have been found to have. There is a four-category typological of self-serving cognitive distortions that Gibbs and Potter introduced in 1995.
- Self-Centered — “…individual focuses on his/her own opinions, expectations, needs, and rights to such an extent that the opinions or needs of others hardly ever or never are considered or respected,” (Self-Serving Cognitive Distortions).
- Blaming Others — “…cognitive schemas of misattributing the blame for one’s own behavior to sources outside the individual,” (Self-Serving Cognitive Distortions).
- Minimizing/Mislabeling — “…antisocial behavior is seen as an acceptable, perhaps necessary, way to achieve certain goals,” and “…belittling and dehumanizing way of referring to others,” (Self-Serving Cognitive Distortions).
- Assuming the Worst — “… individual attributes hostile intentions to others, considers the worst-case scenario as inevitable or sees his/her own behavior as beyond improvement,” (Self-Serving Cognitive Distortions).
Additional cognitive distortions are All-or-Nothing, Jumping to Conclusions, and Emotional Reasoning.
A section of Cognitive Distortions is schemas. Schemas are mental structures that fabricate aspects of oneself, others, and their environment. They create a pattern of thought or behavior based on information and encounters. Schemas that can generate criminal behavior are negative schemas. The negativity from such schemas can create psychological issues and illnesses that may severely impact the brain.
There are some main characteristics of schemas:
- “They are mainly formed in early childhood, youth or adolescence
- Majority of schemas run on the unconscious level, you are not even aware of them
- They are beliefs and feelings you accept without question, about yourself, others and future
- The maladaptive schema beliefs are expressed in absolutes (e.g. I’m not lovable)
- They are constantly present and very hard to change (especially without therapy)
- They fight for their own survival — in other words, a negative belief about yourself formed in childhood will persist through adulthood even if you invest a lot of effort into changing it,” (Understanding Schemas, Blaz Kos).
Albert Bandura brought upon the concept of Social Cognitive where personal components, behavior, and environmental components are all correlational together. He brought upon that we learn behaviors from conditioning and observing other people within social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences.
Majority of criminals delinquent behavior is commenced from Reciprocal Determinism.
Reciprocal Determinism — defines that personality is molded by a reciprocal action of behavior, cognitive, and environmental factors.
This occurs because there are multiple ways a child’s developing personality can be meddled with such as growing in a household of an abusive parent or being exposed to members that commit crimes. Children can learn that committing crimes are ordinary, specifically in a home full of crime-committing people. It can give the child a sense of belonging and acceptance from the members around them. This is known as Observational learning.
Observational learning — Learning certain ways to react to stimuli from observing others’ actions and behaviors.
“Such negative parenting practices have been found to mediate the relationship between interparental hostility and children’s externalizing problem,” (Benson et al., 2008) and the abundance of stressful events have been proven to raise hostility. People may even learn to do criminal choices by being rewarded for completing such felonious tasks assigned to them. This is very common within people who join gangs and want to be accommodated with others. This is a type of classical conditioning called Operant Conditioning.
Operant Conditioning — method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishment for behavior — it controls behavior.
There are two types of Operant Conditioning:
Positive reinforcement — something desirable is added to encourage future behavior.
Negative reinforcement — something undesirable is removed to encourage future behavior.
These are apart of the classical conditioning association founded by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist.
Classical conditioning — A response is learned by a certain stimulus because the stimulus was combined for a number of trials with a stimulus which creates a regular response.
“There are several fundamental assumptions, that are common for all the psychological approaches to criminal behavior. These are the following:
There are numerous essential aspects of the psychological approach to criminal behavior. These all include the following:
- “The individual is the primary unit of analysis. (Individual human being is considered to be responsible for acts he/she conducted)
- Personality drives behavior within individuals because it is the major motivational element.
- Crimes can result from abnormal, dysfunctional or inappropriate mental processes within the individual’s personality.
- An individual may have purpose of criminal behavior if it addresses certain felt needs.
- Normality is generally defined by social consensus, that is, what is considered as “typical,” “normal,” or “acceptable” by the majority of individuals in a certain social group.
- Defective or abnormal, mental processes may be caused by a variety of factors such as diseased mind, inappropriate learning or improper conditioning, the emulation of inappropriate role models, and adjustment to inner conflicts.” (E-criminalpsychology).
There are 5 forces of influences that can contribute to criminal behavior.
Motivation — Important role in perceptual sets and how we interpret the world around us.
Expectations — If we expect people to behave in certain ways in certain situations, these expectations can influence how we perceive these people and their roles.
Culture- Influence how we perceive people, objects, and situations.
Emotions- Can have a dramatic impact on how we perceive the world around us
Attitudes- Powerful influence, prejudice could have an influence on how quickly people categorize people of various races.
Psychology is the biggest aspect of determining and showing why a criminal may be a criminal. This is important to prevent crimes in the future and help people who are having criminal behaviors.
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