The Psychologist and the Offender (Edexcel A-Level Psychology): Revision Notes
The Psychologist and the Offender
Role of psychologists in understanding offenders
Psychologists frequently work in a consultancy capacity with criminal justice professionals, particularly the police. This consultancy role involves observing and reviewing the working practices of other professionals, drawing on psychological theories to inform decisions and recommendations. In some cases, psychologists may interact directly with offenders, conducting interviews to understand the factors that influenced their behaviour. A thorough grounding in psychological theories and approaches is essential to ensure that the psychologist's work is reliable and evidence-based.
Two Key Areas of Psychological Expertise
Psychologists play a vital role in the criminal justice system through:
- Police interview techniques: Developing and implementing effective methods for gathering accurate information from witnesses and suspects
- Individual psychology formulation: Creating comprehensive assessments of an offender's psychological characteristics and circumstances
These areas combine to provide a holistic understanding of offenders and help ensure justice is served appropriately.
Police interview techniques
The cognitive interview
The cognitive interview is a structured questioning technique designed to enhance the accuracy and completeness of witness accounts during police investigations. It was developed specifically to address the limitations of traditional interview methods. If witnesses provide inaccurate information during police interviews, there is a risk that innocent individuals may be wrongly charged, whilst actual perpetrators evade justice.
The timing of interviews can affect the quality of information obtained, as memories may fade or become distorted in the days or weeks following an incident.
Principles underpinning the cognitive interview
Psychologists have collaborated with police forces to develop the cognitive interview based on research into memory processes and social psychology. Two fundamental principles of cognitive psychology underpin this approach:
Memory Principles Supporting Cognitive Interview
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Multiple retrieval pathways: Memory for an event is based on numerous associations. Therefore, there are multiple routes by which a memory can be accessed and retrieved.
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Context-dependent recall: Memory retrieval is more effective when the context surrounding the original event can be reinstated during recall.
These principles form the scientific foundation for the cognitive interview technique and explain why it is more effective than traditional methods.
Four main techniques of cognitive interview
Geiselman et al. (1985) identified four principal techniques used within the cognitive interview:
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Reinstate the context at the time of the event: Witnesses are encouraged to recall specific environmental and sensory cues, such as their emotional state, weather conditions, smells, and time of day. This technique places the person mentally back in the situation and may enhance recall accuracy by supporting cue-dependent recall.
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Report everything: Witnesses are allowed to freely recall their account of the situation without interruption. The interviewer then has the opportunity to ask follow-up questions to clarify particular moments and obtain additional detail. Witnesses may initially omit details they consider irrelevant or trivial, especially if these details do not fit into their existing schemas for that type of event. However, apparently unimportant details can serve as cues for other key information about the event.
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Change the order in which the event is recalled: People naturally tend to remember situations in the chronological order in which they occurred, which may lead them to reconstruct a narrative based on their existing schemas. This can result in inaccuracies. By recalling events in reverse order, witnesses are encouraged to avoid skipping over information they have taken for granted, interrupting schema activation and helping to prevent the formation of false memories.
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Change perspective: Witnesses are asked to adopt the viewpoint of a different person present during the incident, such as a prominent character. This technique encourages recall of events that might otherwise be omitted by prompting the person to focus specifically on different elements of the situation, thereby increasing the accuracy of recall. However, it must be made clear that the witness should only report what they personally observed, not what they believe the other person would have seen.
Avoiding False Memories
This approach minimises the extent to which witnesses use prior knowledge or expectations to fill gaps in their memory, which can reduce accuracy. To ensure accurate information is obtained, the police officer conducting the interview must avoid asking leading questions that suggest a desired response.
Research evidence: Geiselman et al. (1985)
Research Study: Geiselman, Fisher, MacKinnon and Holland (1985)
Participants: 51 volunteer participants from a diverse demographic background
Aim: To compare the effectiveness of the cognitive interview with a standard interview technique
Procedure: Participants watched two films depicting violent crimes. Forty-eight hours later, they were interviewed by trained police officers using one of three methods: a standard interview, a cognitive interview, or an interview under hypnosis.
Findings: The results demonstrated a notable increase in the number of correct items recalled using the cognitive interview compared to the standard approach. The difference in the number of confabulated items (fabricated details used by participants to complete their narrative) was not statistically significant and remained low across all conditions.
| Average number of items recalled | Hypnosis interview | Cognitive interview | Standard interview |
|---|---|---|---|
| Correct items | 38.77 | 39.46 | 29.56 |
| Incorrect items | 5.90 | 7.30 | 6.10 |
| Confabulated items | 1.00 | 0.70 | 0.40 |
Conclusion: They concluded that the increased retrieval using the cognitive interview was attributable to the structured approach to interviewing, which encouraged participants to remember the crime. Although participants recalled more information, it was not more accurate than the standard interview.
Evaluation of cognitive interview
Strengths:
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The cognitive interview has been demonstrated to be effective in increasing the amount of information obtained from eyewitnesses. Research in more ecologically valid settings, such as investigations into actual crimes, has confirmed its effectiveness. Fisher et al. (1989) found that after training, detectives obtained as much as 47% more useful information from witnesses to genuine crimes compared to when they had been using standard interview techniques.
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The cognitive interview has been shown to be more effective than a standard interview that does not employ the four components when interviewing children as young as 5 years old (Holliday, 2003).
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An enhanced version of the cognitive interview has been developed, which incorporates additional memory-enhancing techniques and questions to validate the knowledge obtained from witnesses. Fisher et al. (1989) reported that the enhanced cognitive interview yielded 45% more accurate witness information than the original cognitive interview when tested with 16 undergraduate participants. Whilst the overall benefits of the enhanced cognitive interview require further validation through reliable research, it does place greater demands on the interviewer than the original cognitive or standard police interview.
Limitations of the Cognitive Interview
Training and Cost Issues:
- Whilst the cognitive interview is useful in enhancing the accuracy of recall, it requires specialist training to be implemented effectively. This training and the expertise it develops can be costly for police divisions that wish to adopt this approach, both in terms of training their staff and employing specialist personnel to conduct these interviews.
Practical Constraints:
- Using this approach is not always practical at the scene of a crime when it is important to obtain immediate information in order to apprehend the perpetrator. The crime scene can be chaotic and busy, which is not always conducive to undertaking a structured interview approach.
Research Limitations:
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The cognitive interview has been proven to be highly effective in increasing the amount of information obtained from witnesses. However, it is possible that other factors, such as individual differences, may have affected the amount of information recalled. It is also possible that asking a witness to consider another perspective may result in speculation, despite instructions not to do so.
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Further research is needed to establish whether all four components are necessary, or whether one component has a greater contribution to success than another.
Ethics in interviewing
Ethical Considerations in Interview Techniques
To ensure the interview process remains ethical, it is important that interviewers remain impartial and open-minded about the information a witness may present. This helps to avoid the interviewer asking leading questions, which often lack realism and may support inaccurate assumptions about the event.
Modern policing has moved away from 'interrogation' techniques, which represent a more aggressive approach using psychological manipulation, towards a more thorough and supportive interview process. The aim is to gather the truth rather than to seek confessions or confirmatory testimony.
Deception or intentionally ambiguous information provided by interviewees in order to elicit confessions are not practices followed within the British legal system. Such behaviour can lead to increased false confessions and wrongful convictions. Any information obtained within interviews needs to be given freely and willingly in order to be considered valid.
Psychological formulations
Definition and purpose
Psychologists are often asked why an individual committed a crime. This may be part of the court process to determine whether the individual was capable of committing the offence and to inform decisions about their risk of reoffending. Similar questions may be asked when working with offenders after they have been convicted, typically to help determine whether the individual is safe to be released into the community or whether they should be given a prison sentence.
Psychologists may also undertake a psychological formulation to assess what influenced an offender's behaviour and to establish ways to ensure the likelihood of future similar offending is minimal. This represents a structured approach to understanding a person's difficulties by examining their relationships, biological and social circumstances, life events, and how they have interpreted the events that have happened to them. It is almost like creating a personal narrative or life story that enables a psychologist to understand how all the elements link to their offending.
Key Features of Psychological Formulations
A formulation draws on all available psychological theories to understand behaviour. Any psychological treatment is based on a formulation, with the treatment aiming to support the offender to develop skills in areas that the formulation shows they need more support. Whenever new information is gained, it can be added to the formulation.
Psychologists will invariably undertake formulations that differ from each other and between offenders. There is no single fixed method of undertaking a formulation. The British Psychological Society (BPS) has issued guidance that helps to reduce the variability and therefore make formulations more reliable. The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) supports this guidance.
Example of a psychological formulation
An example of a partially completed, simplified formulation is shown below. Other formulations may be simpler or more complex than this example, depending on the different factors that are considered to be relevant to the individual and their offending.
Example Formulation: Pub Assault Case
The formulation demonstrates how an individual assaulted someone in a pub, including the thoughts, feelings, and physical symptoms they experienced whilst doing so. The individual received a criminal conviction for assaulting the person in the pub.
The formulation shows some of the background factors that may have influenced the individual's decision to assault the person in that particular situation. This includes the fact that some of their triggers may have been present in the situation, such as being in a crowded place. They may have felt they had little control. The size of the person who threw the drink may have also been a factor.
Their early experiences suggest that this person has been socialised to use violence to deal with situations, rather than discussing them. The situation may have triggered past memories of being bullied when younger. The individual's core beliefs, which are thoughts that drive all of our behaviour, suggest that it is important to them to ensure that people do not take advantage of them. This is likely to be driven by their past experiences, possibly within the family or due to being bullied. This describes someone who believes that violence is a method to resolve situations. All of these thoughts are likely to have influenced the individual's decision to assault the person who threw the drink over them.
Formulation Components:
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Early experiences: Bullied from a young age; used to be laughed at for a speech impediment; youngest sibling, often left out of activities; family dealt with problems by fighting
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Core beliefs (thoughts that are important to me): "If you have a problem with someone, fight it out"; "You can't let people see you get taken advantage of"; "I want to be popular and liked by others"
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Triggers: Feeling out of control in a situation; confrontation with people who are older or bigger than me; being in crowded places; drinking lots of alcohol
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Situation: Someone threw a drink over me in a pub when I was out with friends
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Thoughts: "How dare they"; "They should be more respectful"; "My friends saw that"
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Behaviour: Shouted at him; hit him
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Feelings: Embarrassed; angry
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Physical symptoms: Tense in my arms; heart rate increased
Key Insight: The formulation demonstrates that whilst the offence itself may seem impulsive, spontaneous, or unpremeditated, as we begin to understand the background of the individual, it helps psychologists to identify some of the important factors that may have contributed to and influenced the individual choosing to assault the person in the pub.
Evaluation of psychological formulations
Strengths:
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Formulations, particularly when presented in diagram format, can help to simplify complex information and explain the factors influencing the offender's behaviour to other professionals. This can assist professionals in making decisions about the individual's future.
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Most importantly, it represents a useful method of explaining to the offender themselves what led them to committing the offence. This can help them to understand and manage future situations. Undertaking a formulation with a person can be an important first step in supporting them to make changes to their behaviour.
Limitations of Psychological Formulations
Information Gathering Challenges:
- When undertaking formulations, it can be difficult to obtain all the information about the individual. Such information relies on the offender being able to remember all the events that may be relevant in their lives and being willing to share this information with a psychologist.
Hidden Factors:
- A formulation can include any known medical or mental health diagnosis. However, some individuals might have a disorder that is not known and therefore cannot be reported, which may be influencing their behaviour. For example, they may be unaware that there is a biological factor, such as serotonin levels, that could be contributing to their behaviour. As such, the range of information that the psychologist can access and use within the formulation is limited.
Reductionism in formulations
Warning: The Risk of Reductionism
When understanding the individual as a whole person, it is important not to be reductionist, that is, oversimplifying or fragmenting what is important to an individual to the extent that it does not accurately represent the person. It is easy for a single factor to dominate a person's behaviour without giving consideration to all the other influences that may have contributed.
For example, we may focus extensively on how a person's background or family life has modelled antisocial behaviour, but fail to consider other influences, such as financial motivation or biological factors contributing to the behaviour.
Psychological formulations can be criticised for being reductionist because they can overly simplify or compartmentalise factors that may have contributed to the person's behaviour, and perhaps miss out important factors or underestimate the interconnection between each factor.
Key Points to Remember
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Psychologists work as consultants with police and other criminal justice professionals, using psychological theories to inform their work with offenders.
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The cognitive interview is based on memory principles (multiple retrieval pathways and context-dependent recall) and uses four main techniques: reinstate context, report everything, change order, and change perspective.
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Research by Geiselman et al. (1985) demonstrated that the cognitive interview produces more correct recall than standard interviews, though further studies have shown its effectiveness in real-world settings (Fisher et al., 1989: 47% increase).
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Psychological formulations provide a structured way to understand an offender's behaviour by examining their early experiences, core beliefs, triggers, and how these factors interact to influence offending behaviour.