Increasing Honest Responding on Cognitive Distortions in Child Molesters: The Bogus Pipeline Revisited

• NCJ Number: 218191
• Journal: Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment Volume: 19 Issue: 1 Dated: March 2007 Pages: 5-22
• Author(s): Theresa A. Gannon; Kirsten Keown; Devon L.L. Polaschek
• Date Published: March 2007
• Length: 18 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: Victoria University of Wellington
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Test/Measurement
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study used an experimental procedure to assess whether child molesters who target victims outside of the child molesters' families underreported or misrepresented on questionnaires their beliefs that support their offending.

Abstract

The study findings indicate that the child molesters involved in the study consciously minimized both the extent to which they held beliefs that justify their offending and the extent to which they engaged in behaviors they perceived to be unacceptable in mainstream society. Attaching the child molesters to a fake lie detector significantly increased their underreporting and distortion of their answers compared to when the fake lie detector was not used in administering the questionnaire. These findings differ from those reported previously by Gannon, who found that child molesters' underreporting and distortions significantly decreased when they were attached to the fake lie detector, called a "bogus pipeline" (BP). The authors propose that further understanding of child molesters' distortions of and underreporting of their beliefs and feelings should use methods that attempt to tap offense-supportive beliefs unconsciously, for example, with lexical decision tasks, memory recognition paradigms, and reaction time measures. Since one's perceptions may be largely unconscious, this would be a positive direction, particularly if the same data were compared across both questionnaire and experimental tasks. At time one, 41 child molesters who had victimized children outside of the child molesters' families were assessed with a questionnaire under standard conditions, i.e., they were free to manage the impressions of themselves through their answers to the questions. At time two, the child molesters were again assessed with a questionnaire; however, 18 of them were randomly attached to a BP, while the others were again free to answer without any attempt to encourage truthful and complete answers. 5 figures and 41 references