PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Implicit attitudes are judgments about persons, objects, or actions of which the person forming a judgment is not consciously aware. Due to this lack of awareness, implicit attitudes are assessed with new measurement techniques that measure the strength of associations existing in memory between attitude objects and evaluations. Typically, these indirect methods measure reaction times, and hence make it more difficult for the questioned person to manipulate the results than in interviews or questionnaires. In order to investigate the practicability of indirect methods in criminology, an implicit association test (IAT) was constructed and compared to an explicit risk questionnaire in a sample of offenders in German prisons. It was found that offenders differed in their implicit as well as explicit risk attitudes from the normal population. On both measurements, offenders showed significantly higher risk-attitudes. In addition, offenders who had committed crimes in an automatic, unintentional manner showed significantly higher implicit attitudes in the risk IAT than offenders who had committed planned, reflective crimes. These results demonstrate that for the prediction of criminal offenses it would be helpful to measure both, impulsive behavior with indirect measures and reflective behavior with direct measures.