Lesson 4.3.9.3

4.3.9.3 Psychological explanations of offending Quiz: AQA Psychology, Unit 3

20 questions

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Lesson 4.3.9.3, Psychological explanations of offending: 20 multiple choice questions for the AQA Psychology (7182), Unit 3: Issues and options in Psychology, written with Revision Ninja.

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The 20 questions

  1. According to Eysenck's theory, which three dimensions make up personality?

    • Extraversion, empathy and impulsivity
    • Extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism
    • Openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness
    • Neuroticism, anxiety and hostility

  2. Which personality profile did Eysenck propose was characteristic of criminals?

    • High scores on openness and low scores on neuroticism
    • High scores on psychoticism, neuroticism and extraversion
    • Low scores on neuroticism and low scores on extraversion
    • Low scores on psychoticism and high scores on agreeableness

  3. Which level of moral reasoning in Kohlberg's theory is most often linked to offending behaviour?

    • The pre-conventional level, in which rules are followed to avoid punishment or gain rewards
    • The post-formal level, in which logic is applied to all moral problems
    • The post-conventional level, in which moral principles are based on universal ethical standards
    • The conventional level, in which the person follows rules to maintain social order

  4. What is hostile attribution bias?

    • A tendency to remember only positive experiences from childhood in detail
    • A tendency to interpret others' ambiguous actions as deliberately hostile
    • A tendency to attribute all of one's own failures to bad luck and never to oneself
    • A tendency to follow the instructions of authority figures without question

  5. What is minimalisation as a cognitive distortion in offending?

    • Making the offence appear much more serious than it actually was in order to gain sympathy
    • Reducing the number of people involved in an offence to a single individual
    • Downplaying the seriousness or harm of an offence to reduce feelings of guilt
    • Failing to notice any details of the offence at all because of distraction

  6. What is differential association theory?

    • Criminal behaviour is learned through interaction with others who hold favourable attitudes towards crime
    • Criminal behaviour is caused by a mismatch between ghrelin and leptin levels
    • Criminal behaviour is caused by fixed action patterns triggered by specific stimuli
    • Criminal behaviour is inherited through genes that code for impulsivity and aggression

  7. A young man who grew up with older peers who regularly broke the law begins offending himself. Which explanation best fits?

    • Taste aversion, since he was made ill by a food that his peers avoided
    • Eysenck's theory, since he has a fixed high level of extraversion in every situation
    • Neophobia, since he feared new environments and so copied the peers
    • Differential association theory, since he learned criminal attitudes from close associates

  8. An offender who repeatedly insists that a victim provoked him shows which cognitive distortion?

    • Minimalisation of the offence
    • Neophobia
    • Hostile attribution bias
    • Taste aversion

  9. Which evaluation point applies to Eysenck's theory of the criminal personality?

    • Personality traits are measured with questionnaires that may not capture offending behaviour directly
    • Personality traits are directly observed in every offender without the need for any questionnaire
    • Personality has been shown to be irrelevant to offending in every study ever conducted
    • Personality traits are only linked to offending in women and never in men

  10. Which evaluation point applies to differential association theory?

    • It only explains crimes committed by people who have never met anyone else, so it cannot account for group offending at all
    • It has been shown to be false in every study that examined criminal groups, so it is no longer used by researchers in the field
    • It explains how criminal behaviour spreads through social groups, but not why some people in such groups resist it
    • It explains all criminal behaviour fully, with no need for any other explanation, so it can be used alone to explain every offence

  11. A researcher argues that offenders often use cognitive distortions to justify their behaviour. Which distortion would be most evident in an offender who says the victim deserved it?

    • Hormonal imbalance, which changes the levels of cortisol in the blood
    • Neophobia, which is a fear of unfamiliar foods that prevents eating
    • Taste aversion, which follows a food being paired with nausea
    • Minimalisation or blaming others, consistent with cognitive distortion in offending

  12. Which statement best describes the cognitive explanation of offending?

    • Offending is caused by the taste of certain foods that trigger aggression in the body
    • Offending is caused by a fixed genetic code that cannot be changed by any thinking pattern
    • Offending is linked to distorted thinking, such as hostile attribution bias and poor moral reasoning
    • Offending is caused by a lack of sunlight that reduces the brain's production of serotonin

  13. Which criticism of Eysenck's theory is most important?

    • It has been shown to predict offending with perfect accuracy in every population studied, so it is accepted without reservation in courts
    • It ignores personality completely and focuses only on the physical body of the offender, which makes it irrelevant to trait theory today
    • It has been tested in large experiments in which people were randomly assigned to offending, and the results were consistent in every case
    • It is difficult to test whether the trait causes offending or whether offending affects how personality is measured

  14. Which best describes the link between moral reasoning and offending?

    • Offenders are more likely to reason at lower levels of moral development, focused on personal consequences
    • Offenders show no difference in moral reasoning from non-offenders in any study
    • Offenders reason only using the physical properties of the crime scene
    • Offenders are more likely to reason at higher levels of moral development, based on universal principles

  15. A person who was rejected by a group feels that everyone is against them and reacts with violence to neutral comments. Which concept best explains this?

    • Minimalisation, which leads to underplaying the seriousness of one's own actions
    • Hostile attribution bias, which leads to ambiguous behaviour being read as threatening
    • Eysenck's extraversion, which leads to seeking out social interactions in all cases
    • Differential association, which leads to learning criminal behaviour from a single model

  16. Which statement best describes an integrated psychological account of offending?

    • Offending depends only on personality, with no role for cognition or social learning at all
    • Personality, cognition and social learning interact to influence the likelihood of offending
    • Offending depends only on chance, so no psychological explanation is needed
    • Offending depends only on hormones, with no role for personality or learning in any way

  17. Which evidence would best support differential association theory?

    • Offenders report that they never had contact with any other people during childhood
    • Offenders show no change in behaviour after spending time with law-abiding peers
    • Offenders have identical personalities to non-offenders in every dimension measured
    • Offenders report learning criminal techniques from peers who had already offended

  18. Why might cognitive explanations of offending be useful for treatment?

    • Distorted thinking cannot be changed, so cognitive explanations have no practical application
    • Distorted thinking can be identified and challenged, which can reduce the likelihood of reoffending
    • Distorted thinking is caused by genes, so only medication can help offenders
    • Distorted thinking only occurs in people who have never committed an offence

  19. Which of the following is a cognitive distortion in offending?

    • Taste aversion
    • Desensitisation to violent media
    • Hostile attribution bias
    • Neophobia

  20. Which study design would best test differential association theory?

    • A correlation between shoe size and the number of offences recorded by police in a region
    • A single case study of one offender's childhood memories recorded in a clinical interview
    • A survey of prison officers' opinions about why offenders join gangs in their area
    • A longitudinal study tracking whether young people who associate with offending peers begin offending themselves

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