Criminology Commons^™

Evaluating The Competing Assumptions Of Gottfredson And Hirschi’S (1990) A General Theory Of Crime And Psychological Explanations Of Agression, Todd A. Armstrong

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

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 …