Correlations between the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles and World‐View Rating Scale in male federal prisoners

Abstract

The lifestyle theory of criminal behaviour maintains that criminal thinking is hierarchically organized and that certain features of an individual's general world view should correspond with specific criminal thinking styles. It was predicted that the eight Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) thinking style scales would correlate with the mechanism, fatalism, inequity and malevolence poles of the four World-View Rating Scale (WVRS) dimensions. A group of 140 male medium security prison inmates rated themselves on the four dimensions of the WVRS and completed the PICTS. All eight PICTS thinking style scales correlated with mechanism, inequity and malevolence, but only six of the eight PICTS scales correlated with fatalism. In addition, two of four correlations specified a priori (i.e. between mollification and inequity and between power orientation and malevolence) proved significant in this study. The present findings suggest that two levels of a cognitive system held to be instrumental in maintaining a criminal lifestyle - criminal thinking styles and global belief systems - may be meaningfully linked.