Differential association

Edwin Sutherland (1924) (NB: before Bandura and SLT)

• Being an offender is “learnt” via the accepted learning processes (conditioning and what is now called SLT) - just like any other learning

• It proposes that through an interaction with other people, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for criminal behaviour

• Learning to be a criminal depends on the timing, frequency, intensity, and duration of associations an individual makes with others who have pro-criminal attitudes towards crime.

• Suggests you can mathematically predict probability of someone being a criminal

• If the pro-criminal values, attitudes, techniques, and motives an individual is exposed to outweigh those which are pro-social, then an individual will offend.

Ben application - what people may be influencing him to commit crimes:

• Grandpa’s great escape

• Bad Dad

• Awful Auntie

• Gangsta Granny

  • She stole the crown jewels and didn’t get caught so he might want to replicate the behaviour

• Demon Dentist

• Raj

• Mr Stink

  • Antisocial behaviour - being smelly

• Friends - the Midnight Gang

  • Steal, do drugs

  • Vicarious reinforcement - sees they have nice clothes, wants to copy the behaviour

Learning criminal acts

• Since people spend the most time from a young age being socialised by their close family and they peers, the theory explains how crime ‘breeds’ amongst specific social groups and communities

• Role models that model vicarious reinforcement criminal behaviours would aoso provide opportunities or if they are seen

AO3

Testability - Can this actually be measured?

• Sutherland claimed it would be possible to derive a mathematical formula

• Ended out impossible to measure

  • Cannot therefore work out when the pro-criminal values outnumber the anti-criminal ones

• Undermines scientific credibility, lack of actual predictive power cha