Theories of offending: Cognitive distortions - Forensic Psychology

Hostile attribution bias:

Hostile attribution bias is…the tendency to interpret others’ behaviour as having hostile intent, even when the behaviour is ambiguous or benign.

Schonenberg and Justye (2014) presented 55 violent offenders with images of emotionally-ambiguous facial expressions. It was found that these violent offenders, when compared to a control group, were much more likely to perceive the images as aggressive/hostile. – [can be used as supporting evidence]

However, this theory cannot be used to explain all offending behaviour – research suggests it can be linked to impulsive aggression but not planned aggression and therefore it can be argued that it is a factor in offending behaviour, but it is still and incomplete theory and thus, the validity should be questioned.

Minimalisation:

Minimalisation is...down-playing the significance of an event. The offender doesn’t accept full reality of a situation and will attempt to rationalise what they have done. This often helps the offender to deal with feelings of guilt.

Barbaree (1991) found that amongst 26 convicted rapists, 54% denied they had committed an offence at all, and 40% minimised the harm they had caused the victim.

Pollock and Hashmall (1991) found that 35% of a sample of child molesters said that the crime they committed was non-sexual and 36% said the victims had consented.

[Both can be used as supporting evidence for the use of minimalisation within offenders]

It can be argued that that this is strictly a coping strategy rather than a cause – they may use this as a tool to deal with their guilt, but this might not be related to why the committed the offence in the first place and therefore how valid and credible is it as an explanation for offending?