Cognitive Distortions (AQA A Level Psychology): Revision Note

Hostile attribution bias

• Cognitive distortions are errors in people's information processing system characterised by faulty thinking, and we all occasionally show evidence of this in relation to our own behaviour

• Research has linked it to the way in which offenders interpret other people's behaviour and justify their own actions

  • A hostile attribution bias (HAB) is a tendency to misinterpret the actions of other people, assuming others are being confrontational when they are not

• Someone with a HAB is always on the lookout for confrontation and perceived threat from others, which in turn leads to them behaving in confrontational, threatening ways themselves

• Someone with a HAB may ‘read’ an accidental bump (e.g. whilst walking down the street) as an invitation to an argument or fight (often including physical aggression)

• The roots of this behaviour may lie in childhood

  • E.g., Dodge & Frame (1982) showed children a video clip of an 'ambiguous provocation', where the intention was neither clearly hostile nor clearly accidental

    • They found that children who had been identified as aggressive or rejected prior to the study interpreted the situation as more hostile than those classed as non-aggressive and accepted

Minimisation

• Minimisation is an attempt to deny or downplay the seriousness of an offence, and has elsewhere been referred to as the application of a 'euphemistic label' for behaviour (Bandura, 1973)

• Like HAB, minimisation is a cognitive distortion that allows offenders to reduce the guilt, shame and responsibility they feel for an offence

  • E.g., ‘Nobody really suffered; I mean, really, it's not that bad’

• Examples of minimisation are:

  • burglars describing themselves as 'doing a job' or 'supporting my family' as a way of minimising the seriousness of their offences

  • a drug-dealer reasoning that ‘People choose to take this stuff; I’m just supplying what they want; they can stop if they don’t like it’

• Studies suggest that individuals who commit sexual offences are particularly prone to minimisation

  • Barbaree (1991) found that among 26 incarcerated rapists, 54% denied they had committed an offence at all and a further 40% minimised the harm they had caused to the victim

Research which investigates cognitive distortions

• Pollock & Hashmall (1991) reported that 35% of a sample of men who had committed sexual offences against children argued that the crime they had committed was non-sexual, claiming they were 'just being affectionate', and 36% stated that the victim had consented

• Henning et al. (2005) – 1,267 men and 159 women convicted of intimate partner abuse were assessed using scales that measured minimisation, denial, and victim blaming

  • The results suggested that both male and female offenders attribute greater blame for their abuse to their spouse/partner than themselves, and that significant numbers of both genders minimise the severity of the offence

Evaluation of cognitive distortions

Strengths

• Understanding cognitive distortions has proved beneficial in treating offending behaviour, as CBT is the dominant approach in rehabilitating individuals who have committed sexual offences, encouraging them to 'face up' to what they have done and establish a less distorted view of their actions

  • Reduced denial and minimisation in therapy is highly correlated with reduced risk of reoffending, as accepting one's crimes is thought to be an important part of rehabilitation and is a key feature of anger management

• Cognitive explanations of criminality can be used to predict the likelihood of someone reoffending, as they highlight the extent to which an offender has been rehabilitated, e.g., by showing remorse for their offence

Limitations

• Attempting to quantify and measure cognitive distortions is problematic as thoughts are subjective and open to interpretation, plus using self-report methods is rife with bias (e.g., social desirability bias, response bias, self-serving bias)

• Cognitive explanations are descriptive rather than explanatory, as they are essentially 'after the fact' theories which are good at describing the criminal mind but less successful at explaining it

  • They may be useful when predicting reoffending, but tend not to give much insight into why the offender committed the crime in the first place

Issues & Debates

• Attributing crime to distorted thinking (especially in cases like sexual or violent offences) is socially sensitive, as it may oversimplify or excuse serious crimes

  • There's a risk of minimising victim impact or shifting blame away from the offender, which raises concerns about justice and accountability

• Suggesting that offenders inevitably act aggressively due to cognitive biases supports a deterministic view of behaviour

  • This clashes with the legal system’s assumption of free will and personal responsibility, particularly in assigning guilt or deciding on rehabilitation