Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2005

Publication Title

Western Criminology Review

Volume

6

Issue

1

First Page

12

Last Page

21

Abstract

Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) A General Theory of Crime, argues individual criminal propensity manifests itself as a general tendency to engage in a variety of criminal and delinquent acts. In contrast, Psychological explanations of aggression assume that the causal processes explaining individual variation in aggression are somehow different from those explaining other forms of crime and deviance. The current work assessed the relative strength of the assumptions of these two positions by testing the relationships among hostile attributional bias, selfcontrol, and three indicators of criminal intent. Hostile attributional bias is an individual characteristic important in psychological research on social information processing models of aggression. As defined by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), self-control represents a general tendency towards a variety of criminal and delinquent acts. Results support the assumptions of both general theories and act-specific explanations of aggression. When demographic control variables and self-control are accounted for, hostile attributional bias is uniquely associated with aggressive intent. However, when compared to hostile attributional bias, self-control explains a larger amount of variation in all intent measures including aggression.

Comments

This article was reused with kind permission from the journal. Please visit the Western Criminology Review homepage here: https://westerncriminology.org/publications/western_criminology_review/

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