Looking at the moral judgments of offenders through new lenses
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JCP-04-2022-0010 |
| Published date | 28 July 2022 |
| Date | 28 July 2022 |
| Pages | 90-110 |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care,Criminology & forensic psychology,Criminal psychology,Sociology,Sociology of crime & law,Deviant behaviour,Public policy & environmental management,Policing,Criminal justice |
| Author | Georgia Zara,Sara Veggi,Francesco Ianì,Monica Bucciarelli |
Looking at the moral judgments of
offenders through new lenses
Georgia Zara, Sara Veggi, Francesco Ianì and Monica Bucciarelli
Abstract
Purpose –Studies on the moral judgment of offendersconducted within a neo-Kolhbergian framework
found that offenders exhibit more primitive thinking about moral issues comparedto nonoffenders. The
purpose of this study is to explore, within the mental model theory, the role of reasoning in moral
judgmentsof offenders, considering both similaritiesand differences with nonoffenders.
Design/methodology/approach –A series of moral scenarios were randomly presented to both
offenders and nonoffenders. Participants were asked to report their reactions for each scenario. Their
reactionswere coded and assessed.
Findings –Findings showthat moral judgments rely on the same reasoning processesin both offenders
and nonoffenders: a moral scenario, in which propositions related to norms and values were
manipulated,led to a scenario that generated a moral conflict(Study 1), but offenders had more intuitions
about immoral scenarios than nonoffenders (Study 2). Moreover, the results partially confirm the
prediction that offenders are more likely to deliberately reason about scenarios that described those
crimessimilar to the ones they committed (Study 3).
Originality/value –This study highlights theimportance of understanding that moral judgments in both
offendersand nonoffenders rely on the same reasoning processes,even though offenders tend to reason
more on scenarios near to the crimesthey committed. This has practical implications for interventionsin
so far as it could have an effectin how prosocial functioning could be promoted.
Keywords Offenders, Moral judgments, Intuitions, Deliberative reasoning, Emotions, Nonoffender
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
What people think and feel about moral issues and how they explain and justify their
behavior is an area that has been studied in the quest for understanding prosocial and
criminal behavior (Greenfield and Valliant, 2007;Palmer, 2003). Moral judgments influence
human decisions and guide how individuals respond to the environment (Baron, 2008;
Evans, 2003), although they are not necessarily predictive of the type of behavior endorsed.
On the one hand, most of the time, people act in accordance with their judgments; on the
other hand, it is not uncommon for people to behave differently, for instance, when they
perform actions that they considerimmoral or against the law. When this happens, however,
people often change their judgments to be consistent with their behavior. For example,
when people act in ways that deviate from social norms and violate the law, cognitive
distortions occur, and individuals use mechanisms of denial (Zara et al., 2020a) and moral
disengagement (Bandura, 1999). Moral disengagement, in turn, influences individuals’
responses to morally problematic opportunities (Moore, 2015). This speaks to the
importance of studying moral judgments in violent offenders.
Moral judgment does not occur in a legal vacuum, and breaking laws is often defined in
moral terms, in so far as many laws are associated with moral principles (Gazzaniga,2016).
However, what is morally and scientifically relevant does not necessarily and always impact
Georgia Zara and
Sara Veggi are both based
at the Department of
Psychology, Universita
`di
Torino, Torino, Italy.
Francesco Ianı
`and
Monica Bucciarelli are both
based at Department of
Phychology, Universita
`di
Torino, Torino, Italy and
Centro di Logica,
Linguaggio, e Cognizione,
Universita
`di Torino, Torino,
Italy.
Received 11 April 2022
Revised 2 June 2022
Accepted 4 July 2022
The authors thank the three
reviewers for their critical and
insightful suggestions that
helped improve the article. The
authors are also very grateful to
Dr Clare Allely for her
professionalism and expertise
as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal
of Criminal Psychology.
Ethics approval: The authors
declare that the present study
complies with the current
Italian laws and with the ethics
principles for research in
psychology. The study was
approved by the Bioethic
Committee of the University of
Turin (Italy) (protocol reference
number 6494/2018). The
research protocol was
organized according to The
Italian Data Protection Authority
Act nr. 9/2016, art. 1 and 2
(application and scientific
research purposes), and to the
recent General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR, 2018), and
it was carried out in line with the
Italian and the EU code of
human research ethics and
conduct in psychology.
PAGE 90 jJOURNAL OF CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY jVOL. 12 NO. 4 2022,pp. 90-110, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2009-3829 DOI 10.1108/JCP-04-2022-0010
upon how criminal justice is administered or how it is recognized and used within the
criminal justice system. Despite experimental results having shown that moral judgments
predict recidivism in offenders (Van Vugt et al.,2011), moral judgments per se cannot be
assessed in court for the purpose of investigating criminal responsibility. Unlike countries
which follow a Common Law System, Italy restricts the use of psychological evaluations to
determine the criminal responsibility of adult defendants in criminal proceedings [1].
Criminal law holds people accountable for their behavior and holds them responsible for a
crime unless they acted under severe external coercion or a severe lack of rationality (e.g.
the incapability of distinguishing between right and wrong). Therefore, only a psychiatric
report is admissible in court to assess insanity in adult defendants (Zara, 2013; Zara and
Freilone, 2018).
Given these limitations in criminal procedure, it is not easy to gain knowledge about the
offender’s self-determination (Ferrua, 2020), free will and moral judgment (Gulotta, 2018).
The literature includes studies primarily concerned with juvenile offenders (Ashkar and
Kenny, 2007) and their moral development (Colby and Kohlberg, 1987) or studies of low
empathy and offending (Jolliffe and Farrington, 2007) or impaired moral judgment due to
mental disorders (de Vel-Palumbo et al.,2021) or psychopathy (Cacace et al.,2022;Luke
et al.,2021
). Other studies have focused onhow offenders and their antisocial behavior are
morally perceived by the general population (Herzog and Einat, 2016). The importance of
understanding moral judgments in offenders, i.e. individuals who commit crimes and are
convicted for them, is demonstrated by studies that follow a tradition going back to Piaget
(1932/1965) and Kohlberg (1984), who focusedon the development of moral judgment from
childhood to adulthood and assigned a predominant role to reasoning. Both authors argue
that moral judgments are based on well-defined principles that result from a complex
interaction between experience, social inferences and logical thought. Kohlberg (1978)
argues that cognitive moral judgment, which develops over an invariant sequence of
stages, is the most influential factor in moral behavior. The stages feature different types of
relationships between the subject,norms and society’s expectations. In the preconventional
morality stages, the individual makes decisions based on external control; in the following
conventional morality stages, the individuals seek the approval of significant others or they
are oriented toward authority and try to maintain an already established social order; in the
postconventional morality stages, individuals define the correct action in terms of the
general rights of the people, which have been agreed upon by society through consensus
and they take conscientious decisions in accordance with self-chosen ethical principles
based on logic, consistency and universality.
Gibbs et al. (2013) developed the socio-moral reflection measure to assess the moral
judgment of individuals based upon Kohlberg’s stage theory. This is a production
measure of moral judgment. Respondents are asked to provide justifications for the
importance of five moral values: contract and truth, affiliation, life, property and law and
legal justice. Questions are posed asking respondents about the importance of
something (e.g. keeping a promise to a friend), after which they are asked to give
reasons for their response. These justifications are then assigned to a moral level.
Spenser et al. (2022) used the socio-moral reflection measure to explore possible
differences in moral reasoning in offenders aged 18 to 55 years of age and matched
nonoffenders. The results revealed that offenders scored lower than nonoffenders on this
measure. In the context of Kohlberg’s theory, these results are interpreted as suggesting
that offenders, on average, reason according to preconventional morality stages,
whereas nonoffenders were found to reason at conventional morality stages. Palmer and
Begum (2006) adopted the same measure to assess the moral level of offenders aged
between 18 and 21 years to find out that moral reasoning was predominately at the
preconventional levels, supporting previous research examining the moral reasoning
level of young offenders (Palmer and Hollin, 1998).
VOL. 12 NO. 4 2022 jJOURNAL OF CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY jPAGE 91
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