OCR GCSE Psychology Paper 1: Guide to Criminal Psychology

Types of Crime

Crimes fall into several key categories that you'll need to recognise. Violent crimes involve harm or death to victims - think murder, knife attacks, or manslaughter where someone dies but it wasn't planned.

Anti-social behaviour covers harassment that causes distress to people outside the perpetrator's household. This includes graffiti, playing loud music, or arson that disrupts communities.

Acquisitive crimes involve illegally taking someone else's belongings through theft, fraud, or shoplifting. Meanwhile, drug-related crimes focus on trading or using illegal substances, and sexual crimes force victims into unwanted sexual acts against their will.

Quick Tip: Remember these categories by thinking about what's being targeted - people (violent), property (acquisitive), or society (anti-social).

Measuring Crime

How do we actually know how much crime is happening? There are three main ways that give us different pieces of the puzzle.

Official statistics come from the government's Home Office and show crimes reported by police. These help track whether crime is increasing or decreasing over time, but only include reported incidents.

Victim surveys use anonymous questionnaires asking the public about crimes committed against them. This captures unreported crimes that never made it to police records.

Offender surveys anonymously question the public or known offenders about crimes they may have committed. This reveals the true scale of criminal activity, including crimes that were never discovered.

Remember: Each method has gaps, so criminologists use all three to get the complete picture of crime rates.

Brain Structure and Behaviour

Your brain controls everything you do, and different areas have specific jobs that might influence behaviour. The brain stem processes information from sensory organs and controls vital functions like heart rate and breathing.

The cerebral cortex handles stimulation and arousal through the RAS (Reticular Activating System). Different lobes specialise in particular functions: the frontal lobe manages thinking, problem-solving, and emotions, while the temporal lobe deals with memory, understanding, and speech.

The parietal lobe handles perception, spelling, and numbers, whilst the occipital lobe processes vision, colour, and identification. Understanding these areas helps explain how brain function might influence criminal behaviour.

Key Point: Brain damage or abnormalities in these areas, especially the frontal lobe, have been linked to increased aggression and poor decision-making.

Social Learning Theory

Bandura's Social Learning Theory suggests we learn criminal behaviour by watching others - it's all about nurture over nature. Children are heavily influenced by what they see around them, especially from role models they identify with.

Direct reinforcement happens when someone commits a crime and gets rewarded, making them likely to continue. Through vicarious reinforcement, children see role models being rewarded for criminal behaviour and want the same rewards.

Observation and imitation create mental representations of criminal acts that children might copy later. Eventually, through internalisation, these behaviours become part of someone's personality and no longer need external rewards to continue.

This theory suggests crime can be reduced through conditioning and providing positive role models instead of criminal ones.

Think About It: If criminal behaviour is learned, it means it can also be "unlearned" through different influences and role models.

Crime as a Social Construct

Crime isn't fixed - it's a social construct that exists because people create it through interactions and agreements about what's acceptable. What's considered criminal varies dramatically between different societies and cultures.

For example, it's illegal in the UK to marry more than one person, but polygamy is acceptable in other countries and societies. This shows how laws differ based on society's values and norms.

Most crimes like stealing are well-established because the majority of society views them as wrong. When behaviours deviate from accepted norms, they get defined as crimes through social consensus rather than natural law.

Culture heavily affects what's considered right or wrong, so different people believe different things are criminal based on their background and society's values.

Reality Check: Understanding crime as socially constructed helps explain why laws change over time and vary between countries.

Eysenck's Criminal Personality Theory

Eysenck believed criminal personality comes from three key traits you're born with: psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism. This is a nature-based theory suggesting criminal traits are assigned at birth.

Psychoticism involves impulsiveness and aggression, linked to excess dopamine in the brain and low empathy levels. Extraversion describes outgoing, risk-seeking people with low arousal in the cerebral cortex who need external stimulation.

Neuroticism refers to anxiety and over-arousal in the nervous system, causing strong emotional reactions. According to Eysenck, high levels of all three traits create a criminal personality.

However, critics argue this theory ignores individual differences, focuses too much on nature over nurture, and is overly deterministic by ignoring free will in decision-making.

Critical Thinking: Remember that correlation doesn't equal causation - having these traits doesn't automatically make someone criminal.

Cooper & Mackie Study

This study examined whether aggressive video games lead to increased aggression in children. The researchers used 84 children aged 9-11 from New Jersey, USA, in a lab experiment with independent measures design.

Children either played or observed games with high aggression (Missile Command), medium aggression (Pac-Man), or a control maze game for 8 minutes. They were then observed in a playroom to see which toys they chose and asked questions about punishment using a buzzer.

Results showed that playing aggressive games increased aggression in boys, whilst playing or watching aggressive games affected girls' behaviour but not boys' buzzer responses. The type of game had no effect on buzzer usage overall.

Critics highlight cultural bias (can't be generalised), poor ecological validity (unrealistic lab setting), and the brief 8-minute exposure period as major limitations.

Study Tip: This research supports social learning theory by showing that observing aggression can influence behaviour, especially in children.

Heaven Study

Heaven's longitudinal study tested whether extraversion, self-esteem, and psychoticism cause delinquency in young people. The research followed 282 students aged 13-15 from Catholic schools in New South Wales, Australia, over two years.

Students completed anonymous questionnaires measuring the three personality traits at the beginning (Time 1) and end (Time 2) of the study period using closed questions about their behaviour.

Results revealed weak overall correlation to delinquency, with psychoticism showing the greatest association. Males were more likely to be delinquent than females, but remember - correlation doesn't prove causation.

Major criticisms include cultural bias (unrepresentative sample), social desirability bias from self-report questionnaires, and high dropout rates at Time 2 affecting the study's reliability.

Key Learning: Longitudinal studies like this provide valuable insights into personality development, but they're not perfect predictors of criminal behaviour.

Rehabilitation Methods

Rehabilitation focuses on training and teaching offenders new behaviours and skills to prevent reoffending rather than just punishing them. This approach aims to address the root causes of criminal behaviour.

Restorative justice brings victims and offenders together to gain mutual understanding. Offenders can see the real consequences of their actions on victims, whilst victims get answers and closure from the experience.

Role model programmes use positive influences to demonstrate good behaviours through vicarious reinforcement. These programmes actively promote pro-social behaviours by showing offenders alternative ways to live and interact with society.

These methods work on the principle that criminal behaviour can be changed through learning, support, and understanding rather than punishment alone.

Think Practically: Rehabilitation costs money upfront but can save society more by reducing reoffending rates long-term.

Punishment Methods

Punishment serves as both justice for victims and a deterrent to prevent future crimes. The main goal is stopping reoffending whilst making criminals pay for their actions.

Prison removes freedom and privileges as the ultimate punishment for serious crimes. Fines make offenders pay financially, losing their earnings or savings as consequences for their behaviour.

Community sentences require unpaid work for the community, like litter picking, to give back for the damage caused. This approach can be particularly humiliating as people see exactly what the offender is doing and why.

Each punishment method aims to balance justice for victims with deterring both the offender and potential criminals from committing future crimes.

Balance Point: Effective criminal justice systems combine punishment with rehabilitation to address both justice and prevention.