Assessment for social problem-solving, social information processing, and criminal thinking

There are substantial challenges when undertaking formalized psychological assessments of constructs related to social problem-solving, social information processing (SIP), and criminal thinking with people who have intellectual disabilities. Psychological measurement has been a longstanding and challenging problem with this population because of the potential difficulties with understanding assessment materials and providing responses, much of which requires cognitive and other related skills. The SIP-Moral Decision-Making framework integrated several previous theoretical perspectives into a single framework that attempts to capture variables and constructs that develop over time, whilst also attempting to consider how real time decision making and social problem-solving occurs. Cognition, and in particular, offence-supportive cognitions, have been shown to be related to illegal behaviour, and many psychological intervention programmes aim to reduce offence-supportive cognitions and attitudes. There is evidence that adults with intellectual disabilities who have a history of engaging in illegal behaviour tend to endorse distorted, consistent with biased social information processing.