Section B: Option 2 Criminal psychology — OCR A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Section B: Option 2 Criminal psychology with OCR A-Level practice questions.
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Section B: Option 2 Criminal psychology explained
Accounts of criminal behaviour divide into physiological explanations (e.g., autonomic underarousal, brain dysfunction) and non-physiological explanations (e.g., differential association, cognitive distortions).
Read the full explanation
Raine et al. (1997) used positron emission tomography (PET) to scan 41 murderers pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, matched to 41 controls (35 healthy, 6 with schizophrenia) on age and sex. During a continuous performance task, offenders showed reduced glucose metabolism in the prefrontal cortex and corpus callosum, alongside abnormal asymmetry in the amygdala and thalamus. Raine cautioned that these findings do not excuse murder or prove biology causes crime. Students must also apply at least one biological strategy for preventing criminal behaviour, such as nutritional supplements.
The collection and processing of forensic evidence (Biological) – Motivating factors and bias in the collection and processing of forensic evidence. Hall and Player (2008) Will the introduction of an emotional context affect fingerprint analysis and decision-making? At least one strategy for reducing bias in the collection and processing of forensic evidence.
A forensic match is a human judgement, vulnerable to role bias and the need for closure. Although the statement includes '(Biological)', the mechanisms of bias are fundamentally cognitive. Hall and Player gave 70 serving fingerprint experts the same poor quality mark on a £50 banknote along with a crime report describing either a forgery (low emotion) or a murder (high emotion). About half of those given the high emotion report said the context had affected them, against a small minority in the low emotion condition, yet the identification judgements themselves did not differ. Dror found that a majority (4 out of 5) changed their decisions when given misleading context. Strategies to reduce bias include linear sequential unmasking.
Collection of evidence (Cognitive) – Collection and use of evidence from witnesses and suspects. Memon, A. and Higham, P. A. (1999) A review of the cognitive interview. Psychology, Crime and Law. 5, (1–2), 177–196. At least one strategy for police interviews.
The cognitive interview rests on encoding specificity and on giving memory several routes back to the event: report everything, mentally reinstate the context, recall in a changed order and describe the scene from another perspective, with the enhanced version adding rapport, open questions and witness-led pacing. Memon and Higham reviewed the literature and set out four reasons the technique is hard to judge, namely separating the contribution of each component, the choice of comparison interview, wide variation in interviewer training, and how outcomes are scored as correct details, errors and confabulations. Their verdict is that the technique reliably yields more correct information than a standard interview, but that extra correct detail can arrive alongside extra incorrect detail.
Psychology and the courtroom (Cognitive) – How juries can be persuaded by the characteristics of witnesses and defendants. Dixon et al. (2002) The Role of Accent and Context in Perceptions of Guilt. At least one strategy to influence jury decision making.
Jurors are meant to weigh evidence, yet characteristics with no evidential value move their judgements, among them attractiveness, confident delivery, race and how a speaker sounds. Dixon and colleagues used a matched guise recording of a police interview in which one actor spoke either with a Birmingham accent or with a standard accent, while the suspect was described as black or white and the alleged offence was armed robbery or cheque fraud. Undergraduates rated how guilty the suspect seemed on a rating scale. The Birmingham guise drew significantly higher guilt ratings than the standard guise, the effect was strongest for a black suspect accused of the blue collar offence, and guilt ratings tracked judgements of the speaker's superiority and social attractiveness.
Crime prevention (Social) – How the features of neighbourhoods and a zero tolerance policy can influence crime. Wilson and Kelling (1982) The police and neighbourhood safety: Broken windows. At least one strategy for crime prevention.
The claim is that visible disorder signals that nobody is in charge: an unrepaired window, graffiti or persistent litter weakens informal social control, residents retreat from public space, and serious offending follows into the vacuum. Wilson and Kelling built the argument on Zimbardo's abandoned car demonstration, in which a car left in the Bronx was stripped within a day while an identical car in Palo Alto went untouched until it was itself damaged, and on the Newark foot patrol experiment, where patrols did not cut recorded crime but did leave residents feeling safer and thinking better of the police. The argument later justified order maintenance and zero tolerance policing in New York, where recorded crime fell steeply, although economists attribute much of that fall to other causes.
Effect of imprisonment (Social) – Punishment and reform as responses to criminal behaviour. Haney et al. (1973) Study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. At least one strategy for reducing reoffending.
Imprisonment serves multiple aims: deterrence, incapacitation, punishment, and reform. Haney et al. (1973) investigated the psychological effects of prison life. They randomly allocated 24 stable male students to prisoner or guard roles in a simulated prison. Prisoners were unexpectedly arrested at home by real police, deloused, and deindividuated; guards wore uniforms and mirrored sunglasses. Guards quickly escalated to authoritarian behaviour. The planned 14-day study was terminated after six days due to acute distress in prisoners. The researchers concluded that situational factors drove the behaviour. Students must also explore at least one strategy for reducing reoffending, such as restorative justice. While the statement includes '(Social)', this topic spans social and criminal psychology.
Your focus
- Outline and compare physiological and non-physiological explanations of criminal behaviour.
- Describe the methodology, including the continuous performance task and matched controls, and findings of Raine et al.'s (1997) PET scan study on brain abnormalities in murderers.
- Suggest and evaluate at least one biological strategy for preventing criminal behaviour, using empirical evidence.
Show all 18 objectives
- Describe the procedure and findings of Hall and Player (2008) regarding emotional context and fingerprint analysis.
- Explain motivating factors and types of bias in the collection and processing of forensic evidence.
- Propose and evaluate at least one strategy for reducing bias in forensic evidence processing.
- Explain the four components of the cognitive interview and their underlying memory principles, alongside at least one other strategy for police interviews.
- Analyse Memon and Higham's (1999) review by detailing the four methodological problems they raised regarding the evaluation of the cognitive interview.
- Evaluate the effectiveness and practical constraints of the cognitive interview, including issues of accuracy, training, and ethical considerations in police questioning.
- Explain how jury decision-making can be influenced by the characteristics of witnesses and defendants, including strategies used to persuade juries such as story order or expert witnesses.
- Analyse the methodology and findings of Dixon et al. (2002), focusing on the matched guise technique, the three manipulated variables, and the interaction effect on perceptions of guilt.
- Evaluate the validity of research into jury persuasion, considering factors such as the artificiality of mock jury audio tasks, sample bias, and the cultural specificity of stereotypes.
- Explain the causal chain proposed by Wilson and Kelling (1982) in their broken windows theory, detailing how neighbourhood features and visible disorder influence serious crime.
- Apply psychological evidence to describe at least one strategy for crime prevention, such as defensible space, improved street lighting, or zero tolerance policing.
- Evaluate the effectiveness and social costs of zero tolerance policies and neighbourhood crime prevention strategies, considering alternative explanations for falling crime rates.
- Evaluate punishment and reform as responses to criminal behaviour, considering their effectiveness and conflicting aims.
- Describe the aims, procedure, and situational conclusions of Haney et al.'s (1973) simulated prison study.
- Explain and assess at least one strategy for reducing reoffending, such as restorative justice or cognitive behavioural anger management.
Section B: Option 2 Criminal psychology exam tips
Marking Points
- Credit for detailing the matched pairs design: 41 murderers pleading NGRI were matched to 41 controls on age and sex, with the six schizophrenic murderers specifically matched to six schizophrenic controls.
- Credit for precise findings: reduced glucose metabolism in the prefrontal cortex and corpus callosum, and abnormal asymmetry in the amygdala and thalamus (lower left, higher right).
- Credit for contrasting explanations: explaining physiological factors like autonomic underarousal against non-physiological factors such as Sutherland's differential association theory.
- Credit for applying a biological prevention strategy: e.g., Gesch et al.'s (2002) study showing that omega-3, vitamin, and mineral supplements reduced disciplinary incidents in young offenders.
- Evaluation credit for methodological points: PET scans provide correlational data, and the NGRI sample limits generalisability to all offenders.
- Credit for discussing the free will versus determinism debate, specifically how biological determinism impacts the legal concept of criminal responsibility.
- Credit for naming the manipulated variable as the emotional context of the crime report (forgery vs murder), with the mark held constant, and the measures as the identification decision and the self-reported effect of the context.
- Credit for the split result: awareness of context rose sharply while final decisions did not differ, so the conclusion is that the experts' conclusions remained objective.
- Credit for named sources of bias, such as confirmation bias, contextual bias, role bias and reconstructive interpretation of an ambiguous mark.
- Credit for a strategy with a stated mechanism, such as linear sequential unmasking so the mark is analysed before the suspect print is seen, blind verification by a second examiner, or a case manager who filters what contextual detail reaches the laboratory.
- Evaluation credit for the strength of using serving experts working to their real procedures, balanced against demand characteristics, since specialists who know they are being studied have every reason to look unbiased.
- Credit for setting the result against Dror's finding that a majority (4 out of 5) of experts reversed identifications when given misleading case context, highlighting the cognitive approach to forensic processing.
- Credit for the four components named and tied to their memory principle, so context reinstatement is explained through encoding specificity and change of order through disruption of schema-driven reconstruction.
- Credit for treating this as a review rather than an experiment, so its evidence is other researchers' data and its contribution is methodological critique.
- Credit for the four problems raised, especially the point that comparing against a structured interview rather than a standard one shrinks the apparent advantage.
- Credit for the accuracy argument: more correct details but also more errors, so the proportion correct may hardly move and is the figure worth checking.
- Credit for a police interview strategy with detail, such as the framework used by forces in England and Wales built around planning, engaging, obtaining an account and evaluating it, or adapting the interview for a child by dropping the change of perspective instruction.
- Evaluation credit for practical constraints, since officers report interviews too short and training too brief for the full technique, and for contrasting ethical interviewing with accusatorial questioning that raises the risk of false confession.
- Credit for explaining the matched guise technique as the control that matters, since one actor and one script mean the content of the speech cannot be responsible for the difference.
- Credit for all three manipulated variables with their levels, and for the interaction, because the accent effect was concentrated in one particular combination.
- Credit for the mediating measure, that guilt ratings moved with ratings of status and social attractiveness, which is the stereotype doing the work.
- Credit for further evidence on defendant and witness characteristics, such as attractive defendants attracting fewer guilty verdicts, or witness confidence predicting believability rather than accuracy.
- Credit for a strategy to influence jury decisions with its rationale, such as presenting evidence in story order, calling an expert witness, or judicial instruction, together with the finding that instructions to disregard often fail.
- Evaluation credit for the artificiality of an audio clip with no evidence, no judge and no deliberation, for a student sample, and for the accent stereotype being specific to one culture.
- Credit for setting out the causal chain in order, from disorder to fear to withdrawal to lost informal control to serious crime, rather than asserting that graffiti causes crime.
- Credit for recognising the source as an argument supported by observation, so its evidence is illustrative rather than experimental.
- Credit for using the Newark result correctly, that foot patrol altered fear and opinion of the police without altering crime rates.
- Credit for experimental support such as the Groningen field studies by Keizer and colleagues, in which graffiti on a wall roughly doubled the proportion of passers-by who littered.
- Credit for one prevention strategy developed properly, for example defensible space and environmental design, improved street lighting with the evaluations by Painter and Farrington, neighbourhood watch, or rapid graffiti removal.
- Evaluation credit for the social costs of zero tolerance, including disproportionate stops of minority groups and damaged relations between police and communities, and for the difficulty of separating the policy from a fall in crime that happened almost everywhere in that period.
- Credit for outlining the aims of imprisonment (punishment, reform, deterrence, incapacitation) and evaluating them using recidivism rates to question the effectiveness of short custodial sentences.
- Credit for detailing the procedure and controls of Haney et al.: screening for psychological stability, random allocation to roles (the independent variable), and deindividuation techniques.
- Credit for describing specific behaviours observed: the prisoner rebellion on day two, guards' use of privilege cells, and the early release of prisoners experiencing emotional breakdowns.
- Credit for explaining a strategy to reduce reoffending: e.g., restorative justice conferencing, which brings offenders and victims together to increase empathy and reduce recidivism.
- Evaluation credit for challenging the situational conclusion using Reicher and Haslam's BBC prison study, which suggests participants do not blindly conform to roles but act based on shared social identity.
- Credit for ethical evaluation: discussing the lack of protection from harm, the compromised right to withdraw, and Zimbardo's dual role as researcher and prison superintendent.
Examiner Tips
- 💡For procedure questions, ensure you include specific controls, such as the 32-minute continuous performance task and the fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) tracer injection.
- 💡When evaluating biological explanations, use the reductionism debate to argue that ignoring social and cognitive factors provides an incomplete picture of criminal behaviour.
- 💡This option likes questions about how psychology explains a failure in the justice system, so keep one named misidentification case ready as supporting context.
- 💡When evaluating the study, the ecological validity point and the demand characteristics point pull against each other; saying so explicitly is what turns description into evaluation.
- 💡Suggest questions here want a procedural fix at the level of laboratory protocol, not advice about individual attitude.
- 💡Because the key research is a review, questions ask for its conclusions and the issues it raises, so prepare the four problems as your description.
- 💡Application stems hand you a witness with a particular difficulty, such as a young child or a distressed adult; name the component you would change and justify the change.
- 💡Discuss questions on this topic usually turn on practical usefulness, so budget a paragraph on time, training and real police conditions.
- 💡The study carries several variables, so a procedure question is straightforward marks if you can state each one with its levels.
- 💡Evaluate questions reward a judgement about generalisation, so decide whether an accent stereotype travels beyond the culture that holds it, and commit to an answer.
- 💡Strategy questions expect the strategy named, the psychology behind it explained, and one limitation given, in that order.
- 💡Questions often describe a neighbourhood in the stem, so map its features onto the chain before recommending anything.
- 💡Evaluate the policing policy separately from the theory, because a theory can be sound while the policy built on it does harm, and saying so earns the judgement mark.
- 💡Extended responses here suit the socially sensitive research issue, so have the discrimination argument prepared.
- 💡When discussing strategies for reducing reoffending, ensure you link the strategy back to how it achieves reform, such as how anger management addresses cognitive deficits.
- 💡Use Zimbardo's dual role as a key evaluation point to explain why the study was allowed to continue despite the severe distress of the participants.
Common Mistakes
- Stating that all 41 controls were healthy. Correction: Six of the murderers had schizophrenia, so they were matched with six controls who also had schizophrenia; only the remaining 35 controls were healthy.
- Stating that the murderers had structurally damaged brains. Correction: The PET scan measured glucose metabolism during a continuous performance task, indicating functional differences, not necessarily structural damage.
- Claiming the study proves brain abnormalities cause murder. Correction: The research is correlational; abnormalities could result from head injury, substance abuse, or environmental factors rather than causing the behaviour.
- Providing a biological prevention strategy without evidence. Correction: Always support the strategy with a concrete example, such as the nutritional supplementation trial by Gesch et al., rather than just stating 'give them drugs'.
- Reporting that emotional context biased the experts' decisions. Correction: It changed what they said they felt, not what they concluded, and writing it the wrong way round forfeits the marks for findings.
- Treating the self-report of feeling affected as proof of bias. Correction: People are poor judges of what influenced them, which is a comment to make about the measure rather than a finding to accept.
- Answering 'train examiners better' when asked for a strategy. Correction: Say which information is withheld, from whom, and at which stage (e.g., linear sequential unmasking), or there is nothing for the examiner to credit.
- Describing the cognitive interview as a way of detecting lies or of questioning suspects. It was designed to enhance recall from a cooperative witness.
- Writing that it improves the accuracy of memory. It increases the quantity recalled, and the proportion that is correct is a separate measure, which is precisely the distinction the review insists on.
- Crediting the review with findings it never collected. Attribute the numbers to the original studies and use this source for the critique.
- Calling the participants jurors. They were students rating guilt alone, whereas a real jury decides together after days of evidence, which is the strongest limitation on offer.
- Reporting that the accent changed the verdict. No verdict was reached; the dependent variable was a rating, so write it accurately.
- Ignoring the interaction and asserting that the accent effect appeared in every condition.
- Treating this as a study with participants and a design. It is a policy argument, and the marks come from evaluating the evidence it leans on.
- Assuming zero tolerance is proven because New York crime fell. Crime also fell in cities that never adopted it, which is the alternative explanation the examiner is waiting for.
- Confusing the theory with target hardening. Broken windows is about social signals and informal control, whereas locks, shutters and bollards work by a different mechanism.
- Claiming the study lacked an independent variable. Correction: The independent variable was the randomly assigned role of either prisoner or guard.
- Concluding that the study proves all prisons brutalise inmates. Correction: The sample consisted of male students in a brief simulation without actual criminal histories or sentences, limiting generalisability to real prisons.
- Stating that participants were fully informed about the arrests. Correction: The arrest at home by real police was a deliberate deception; participants were not told this would happen, which breached informed consent.