Thinking about Thinking...

THINKING ERRORS THAT GENERATE CRIMINALS

Mollification: Lifestyle criminals seeks to play down the seriousness of past crimnal conduct and urrent interpersonal conflicts by blaming problems on external circumstances, making excuses for their behavior, pointing out unfairness in the world, or de-valuing their victims.

2. Cutoff: With practice, the lifestyle criminal eliminates normal feelings which deter criminal action through a simple phrase ("forget-it"), image, or musical theme. In some cases the offender will use drugs or alcohol to cutoff fear, anxiety, guilt, or other common deterrents to criminal activity.

3. Entitlement: The lifestyle criminal believes that he is entitled to violate the laws of society and the rights of others by way of anexpressed attitude of ownership ("its mine"), privilege ("I’m above the law"), or by labelling wants as needs ("I needed a new car, expensive clothing, a trip to Vegas, etc.").

4. Power Orientation: Choosing power and external control over self0discipline and internal control, lifestyle criminals attempt to exert power and control over others. Consequently, they feel weak and helpless (zero state) when not in control of a situation. They attempt to alleviate this feeling by manipulating, intimidating, or physically assaulting others (power thrust).

5. Sentimentality: Like most people, the lifestyle criminal have an interest in being viewed as a "Nice guy." However, this creates a serious dilemma, given the level of interpersonally intrustive activity they have engaged in. Consequently, they may perform various "good deeds" with the intent of cultivating a "Heck of guy" or "Robin Hood" image.

6. Super-optimism: Experience has taught the lifestyle criminals that they get away with most of their crimes. This leads to a growing sense of overconfidence inwhich they believe they are invulnerable, indomitable, and unbeatable. Ironically, this belief leads to theif eventual downfall.

7. Cognitive indolence (Mental laziness): As lazy in thought as in behavior, lifestyle criminals take short-cuts which inevitably lead to failure, low self-evaluation, and poor critical reasoning skills.

8. Discontinuity: Lifestyle criminals have difficulty maintaining focus over time because of being easily influenced by events and situation occurring around them. As a result, they have difficulty following through on initially good intentions.

In addition to these thinking errors, specific criminal acts are affected by motives such as fear, anger/rebellion, power/control, excitement/pleasure, and greed/laziness. These motivations sometimes combine with criminal thinking patterns to produce a variety of maladaptive behaviors.