(Just because of his/her know-how)?
This article looks into the assumed “criminal mind” of a law student and tries to shed light on their possible thoughts as follows:
“I let my emotions interfere with my ability to think like a lawyer. In the early years of law school, students are required to think in a new way. Not just a set of ancillary tools, but a framework of alternative tools.”
This new framework requires the lawyer of the future to set aside certain ways of understanding the world, certain notions of right and wrong, and certain notions of relevance and irrelevance. It can even be confusing and dangerous. Students are promised membership in a guild with its own internal strict thinker logic and control metrics in exchange for putting these ideas and concepts aside. Emotions are pushed to the edge, and the costs of doing so are assessed. I emphasize that it is a misunderstanding to “set aside” emotional reactions and moral intuitions in favor of a rigorous, coherent system of thinking that awaits those who successfully remove emotion from legal analysis. I think this is a legal concept, and the idea of pitting emotion against reason is not only inappropriate for the welfare of lawyers but also given the complexity of legal practice. Moreover, this has to do with modern legal, ethical, moral reasoning—indeed legal change and reform—that is taking place. When judges and other legal decision-makers use the words “emotive” and “emotional,” it almost always predicts an adverse ruling or some other negative outcome. In law, these terms are basically catch-all derogatory terms to indicate that an argument is biased or clearly manipulated, thus indicating that a witness is unreliable or untrustworthy.
A more modern and mature view of emotions would allow for subtle differences and precise debate about the roles of emotions in different situations and how to enhance and suppress beneficial emotions against good decision making. In most disciplines that study decision-making, the definition of emotion, its dynamics, its regulation, and its proper role are like any attempt to encompass a complex set of internal phenomena. It can be defined without a fixed, contextual, interdisciplinary definition. However, in short, “movement is the part of the thing that connects humans to each other and the world around them, acting like an invisible lens that colors all our thoughts, actions, cognition, and judgments” (Bandes, 2022).
Criminal thinking in law:
From the perspective of personality and social psychology, attitude toward crime is one of the four most critical risk factors contributing to the “psychological moment” of crime. Assessing attitudes is an emerging approach to identify factors that promote illegal behavior. Despite its importance in criminal-oriented research and practice, the underlying cognitive assessment factors and criminality are rarely studied. A recent development in the empirically validated approach to criminal thinking is the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS), an 80-item self-report measure that assesses eight thinking styles for ideas that promote and sustain a criminal lifestyle. These ways of thinking are: moderation—attributing the cause of a behavior to external factors (e.g., I find myself blaming social and external circumstances (my life) for the problems I encounter, and cutoff—quick elimination of common psychology.
PICTS were originally developed and standardized for male inmates, but Glenn D. Walters later demonstrated that they were also effective for female offenders. A 2002 study by Walters showed that PICTS could detect changes in the psychotherapy assistance of male inmates involved in a 10-week program. After the items designed to change offenders’ thinking, inmates scored significantly lower on the PICTS “current criminal thinking subscale.” In addition, Palmer and Hollin (2004 as cited in McCoy et al. 2022b) reported that PICTS held discriminatory beliefs against British male prisoners based on their age at first offense and the number of their previous convictions. They also examined the validity of the reliability of PICTS in 18-year-old British male offenders and found that the PICTS scale could be used to store sentences that were not significantly related to the participants’ previous numbers.
Reference:
Bandes, S. (2022). Fordham Law Review Fordham Law Review Feeling and Thinking Like a Lawyer: Cognition, Emotion, and the Feeling and Thinking Like a Lawyer: Cognition, Emotion, and the Practice and Progress of Law Practice and Progress of Law. [online] Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5858&context=flr.
[Accessed 29 August 2022].
McCoy, K., Fremouw, W., Tyner, E., Clegg, C., Johansson-Love, J. and Strunk, J. (2022b). Criminal-Thinking Styles and Illegal Behavior among College Students: Validation of the PICTS. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 51(5), pp.1174–1177. doi:10.1111/j.1556-4029.2006.00216.x. [Accessed 30 August 2022].
