Conscience, an integrative theory: Conscience functioning in offenders and non-offenders

Abstract

Summary In this dissertation, conscience was defined as a psychological function, regulating our behaviour and identity by means of self-reflection and (second-order) evaluation, resulting from an interplay of affective and cognitive empathy, self-conscious emotions (such as guilt and shame), and moral reasoning. This psychological function emerges and becomes more refined during the course of a child’s development, initially manifesting itself in a capacity for empathy, followed by a proneness to experience and regulate self-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt or pride and, finally, a capacity for moral reasoning. It is, however, morally neutral, in that is has no inherent content of its own. Conscience is like an empty box that can be filled with any type of moral content, that is, norms and values which we internalise during our development. This integrative definition of conscience has been used in four empirical studies and has been illustrated in a case description. First, offenders and non-offenders were compared on all constituent aspects. Offenders exhibited less affective but not less cognitive empathy, less identification with others, less personal distress in seeing others’ suffering, less shame-proneness, and lower levels of moral reasoning than non-offenders. In coping with shame, offenders showed the same degree of externalising, but fewer internalising coping strategies. Then, group differences between male and female offenders, and the specific conscience functioning of female offenders were studied. Female offenders exhibited comparable levels of moral reasoning, cognitive empathy, fantasy and empathic concern as male offenders, but more personal distress at seeing another’s suffering, more shame and guilt, and more internalising shame-coping. However, when compared to community women, they scored lower on affective empathy, higher on self-centring, and made more use of self-serving cognitive distortions. Finally, the fourth study focused on the interrelatedness and co-dependence of the constituent aspects of conscience, with the expectation that the structure of conscience would be different for delinquents than for non-offenders, as was the case in adolescents. However, contrary to this expectation, network analyses of partial correlations indicated no significant differences in the structure nor density of conscience networks between offenders and non-offenders. This seems to refute the idea that offenders are unscrupulous. However, aspects of their conscience appeared relatively flawed, which hinders adaptive functioning of conscience as a whole. The results of regression analyses indicated, the functioning of conscience depends strongly on the development of the self, on decentralisation, and more on capacities for affective than for cognitive empathy. Due to the interdependence of the constituent aspects, however, failure in one aspect negatively affects the functioning of conscience as a whole. Assessment of conscience functioning must therefore be aimed at all aspects in order to enable the indication of targeted interventions to improve the conscience functioning. Conscience as a psychological function is a necessary, but not complete nor even sufficient, condition for prosocial behaviour. Other (internal and external) factors also affect our behaviour, such as for example the ability for self-control and/or executive functioning, which appears to falter more often in offenders than in non-offenders.