Topic 6: Criminological psychology — Edexcel A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Topic 6: Criminological psychology with PEARSON EDEXCEL A-Level practice questions.
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Topic 6: Criminological psychology explained
Start from the awkward fact that what counts as a crime is a legal and social judgement rather than a psychological category, so it shifts across time and place: homosexual acts between consenting men were decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967, and cannabis has been reclassified more than once since. That matters for measurement, because police figures count only what is reported and then recorded, self report surveys pick up admissions nobody was ever charged for, and victim surveys such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales reach the dark figure that never came to official notice. The applied half of the topic is what practitioners do once someone is identified, gathering evidence from witnesses, explaining why this particular person offends and delivering the programmes courts and prisons rely on.
Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about the possible causes of criminal behaviour, such as labelling, self-fulfilling prophecy and social learning.
The two approaches are paired because each supplies half an account. The individual differences half asks why, on one street, one person offends: Eysenck put criminality in high scores for extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism on his personality questionnaire, with cortical under arousal driving sensation seeking and weak conditioning driving a weak conscience. The developmental half asks how a person came to be that way. Bandura's work with the inflatable doll showed children reproducing the specific aggressive acts of an adult model, and the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, which followed several hundred South London boys from childhood, found convictions clustered in families marked by poor parental supervision, low income and a convicted parent. Labelling sits across the join, since a label applied in childhood shapes later identity.
Your focus
- Students must show understanding that criminological psychology is about the definition and causes of crime and anti-social behaviour, and of the identification and treatment of offenders undertaken by forensic investigators.
- Individual differences and developmental psychology must be considered when learning about the possible causes of criminal behaviour, such as labelling, self-fulfilling prophecy and social learning.
Topic 6: Criminological psychology exam tips
Marking Points
- Define a crime as an act that breaks the criminal law and carries a punishment, then add the social dimension, that definitions change across time and culture, which is why psychology cannot treat crime as a fixed natural category.
- Distinguish anti social behaviour from criminal behaviour, since conduct causing harassment, alarm or distress can be dealt with by civil orders without ever becoming a conviction.
- Name the three ways crime is measured and one weakness of each, because markers credit official statistics, self report and victim survey by name rather than a vague reference to figures.
- Set out the applied roles the specification points at, interviewing witnesses and suspects, building an account of an individual offender and treating offenders, so the answer covers causes and practice.
- Say which approach each explanation belongs to, because questions often instruct you to use your knowledge of individual differences or of developmental psychology and credit the framing.
- For social learning name attention, retention, reproduction and motivation, and put vicarious reinforcement to work rather than writing that children copy what they see.
- Report Bandura accurately: children who watched an adult attack the doll imitated particular acts and were more aggressive than children who saw a non aggressive model.
- Take risk factors from longitudinal research rather than intuition, and mark the difference between a factor that predicts offending and a factor that causes it.
Examiner Tips
- 💡This opening material is rarely a question on its own, but it frames essays on explanations and treatments, so keep two sentences of definition and one measurement problem ready to deploy.
- 💡A question using describe wants the scope and the definitions, while one using assess or evaluate usually turns on how well crime can be measured or how far psychology explains it.
- 💡Learn one concrete example of a changed definition, since a named example carries more credit than the general claim that laws change.
- 💡An instruction to use developmental psychology expects developmental language in the answer, so write about childhood, socialisation and learning history rather than adult traits alone.
- 💡This statement is a rich source of evaluation, and nature and nurture, including the interaction between them, is the debate most often rewarded on it.
- 💡Keep one individual differences explanation and one developmental explanation prepared so that a compare question already has two sides.
Common Mistakes
- Reading official crime statistics as a straight measure of how much crime happens, when they also measure how willing the public are to report and how police choose to record.
- Confusing criminological psychology with detective work or with what television calls profiling, and writing about catching criminals rather than about explanation and evidence.
- Defining crime only as breaking the law, and then having nothing to say when a question asks why the definition is difficult to pin down.
- Reducing social learning to copying, with no mention of models, observation, identification or reinforcement, which leaves the marker nothing to credit.
- Presenting the doll studies as studies of crime, when the measured behaviour was aggression towards a toy in a laboratory over a short session.
- Treating longitudinal risk factors as proven causes, when the design is correlational and families that share supervision also share genes and neighbourhoods.