Cognitive Perspective to Understand the Case of David Berkowitz

Cognitive Approach

By Kimberly Galstaun (1930268)

The roots of Cognitive Psychology can be traced back to the late 1950s when the behaviourist school was slowly sidelined and topics such as attention, problem-solving and memory gained importance. This school of thought, according to Sternberg deals with how people perceive, learn, remember and think about information. Hence, major theorists of cognitive psychology study mental processes that underlie how information is learned by an individual. Instead of focusing on direct observable behaviours, cognitive psychology emphasized unseen knowledge processes which became crucial for bringing a new perspective to criminal behaviour. 

Connecting the cognitive theory with the case of David Berkowitz

Schemas are cognitive frameworks that enable individuals to organise information to represent experiences. One way that it can affect cognition is by affecting our ability to comprehend new information. According to Aaron T Beck, if one has an existing stereotype about a group of people, we use this social schema when processing new information and tend to focus only on information that is consistent with our existing schema (Dixon,2017). David Berkowitz had been given up for adoption by his biological mother and his adoptive mother who was a very close figure in his life passed away due to cancer. In the developmental stages of his life, there was no woman to guide him and hence; his schema of the female population was based on loss and pain. Even as he joined college and later the army, he did not establish any close relationships with women because befriending them would not be consistent with his existing schema. This could explain why a majority of his victims were young women who were brutally murdered with a .44 calibre gun.  

After the death of his adoptive mother and the remarriage of his father, David Berkowitz left home and became relatively anti-social. Along with this, he was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which causes moderate to severe cognitive deficits. The anti-social behaviour became manifest through his aggressive behaviour towards other children, frequent petty thefts and pyromania (Treiber,2015). According to a research study, antisociality has been associated with numerous executive functioning deficits including poor cognitive flexibility. Antisocial symptoms have been significantly linked to attentional problems, abnormalities in decision making and abnormalities in regions of the brain responsible for inhibitory control (Chamberlain,2016). His impulsivity in making decisions shows with how quick he was to kill his victims and flee the scene, break the law and show no remorse even with people in their cars watching nearby. He was not fearful of getting caught and being punished for his crimes, and ironically when he was finally arrested, he smiled and told the officer “Well, you got me. How come it took you such a long time? ”

Aaron. T Becks’ cognitive triad is perhaps the most suitable to explain why David Berkowitz aka Son of Sam indulged in such violent sprees that terrorized the entire city of New york. Beck developed the notion of the cognitive triad to explain how depressed adults tend to think about the world. The triangular triad involves thoughts about self, the world and the future. In all of these spheres, these individuals think in extremely negative terms. This is important for this case because negative emotions are a consequence of processing information with a negative bias.

 David at the age of 14 became completely depressed after his adoptive mother’s death, which acted as a start to the domino effect. Interviews with Son of Sam and letters that he wrote in 1975 show just how negatively he perceived his environment “The world is getting dark now. I can feel it more and more. The people, they are developing a hatred for me. You would not believe how much some people hate me. Many of them want to kill me. I do not even know these people, but still, they hate me. Most of them are young. I walk down the street and they spit and kick at me. The girls call me ugly and they bother me the most. The guys just laugh”( Cook, 2011). In relation to his perception of self, John Douglas an ex-FBI agent stated that Berkowitz had surmised feelings of inadequacy and his killings were out of low self-esteem and extreme resentment( Getlen,2019). Finally, he felt that his future was completely in the hands of Satan who he believed would come and release him of his emotional pain and hence, he would cooperate and carry on killing people till he was caught. Using this approach to study a serial killer like Berkowitz, opens up a wider conversation that in order to prevent such violent criminal acts, children who show signs of mental stability and deviances in behaviour and thought must be helped immediately.

References

Chamberlain, S., Derbyshire, K., & Leppink, E. (2016). Neurocognitive Deficits Associated with Antisocial Personality Disorder in Non-treatment-seeking Young Adults. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 44(2), 218–225. http://jaapl.org/content/44/2/218#:~:text=Antisocial%20symptoms%20have%20been%20significantly,neural%20regions%20governing%20inhibitory%20control.

Cook, B. (2011). Serial Killers: Evolution, Antisocial Personality Disorder and Psychological Interventions. The Faculty of Adler Graduate School. https://alfredadler.edu/sites/default/files/Cook%20MP%202011.pdf

Dixon, T. (2020, July 28). Schema Theory: A Summary. IB Psychology. https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2017/11/29/schema-theory-a-summary/

Getlen, L. (2019, May 9). Ex-FBI agent reveals secrets that made him the real-life “Mindhunter.” New York Post. https://nypost.com/2019/05/08/ex-fbi-agent-reveals-secrets-that-made-him-the-real-life-mindhunter/

News, C. B. S. (0AD). Son of Sam: David Berkowitz. PsycEXTRA Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1037/E528972004-001