Learning Theories

• Differential Association:

  Strengths:

  • The fact that crime often runs in families supports the theory. People with criminal parents are more likely to become criminal themselves, perhaps because they have learned criminal values and techniques in the family
  • Matthews found that juvenile delinquents are more likely to have friends who commit anti-social acts, suggesting they can learn from their behaviour from peer groups.
  • The attitudes of work groups can normalise white collar crime, enabling offenders to justify their behaviour.
• Differential Association:

  Limitations:

  • Not everyone who is influenced to ’criminal influences‘ becomes criminal. They might learn from family or peers how to commit crime bit they never put this into practice.
• Operant Learning:

  Strength:

  • Skinners studies of learning in animals show that they learn from experience through reinforcement. Some human learning is also of this kind.
  • This can be applied to offending. Jeffery states that if crime leads to more rewarding than pushing outcomes for an individual they will be more likely to offend.
• Operant Learning:

  Limitations:

  • Operant learning theory is based on studies of learning in animals. This is not an adequate model of how humans learn criminal behaviour
  • The theory ignores internal mental processes such as thinking, personal values and attitudes. It explain criminal behaviour solely in terms of external rewards and punishments
  • Humans have free will and can choose their course of action. For example we can choose to do something that causes us suffering in order to help someone else.
• Social Learning Theory:

  Strengths:

  • Bandura takes account of the fact that we are social beings. We learn from the experience of others, not just from our own experience
  • Bandura shows that children who observed aggressive behaviour being rewarded, imitated that behaviour. Shows the importance of role models in learning deviant behaviour
• Social Learning Theory:

  Limitations:

  • The theory is based on laboratory studies. Laboratories are artificial settings and findings may not be valid for real-life situations
  • The theory assumes peoples behaviour is completely determines by their learning experience and ignores their freedom of choice. This also conflicts with legal views of crime, which assume that we have free will to commit crime.
  • Not all observed behaviour is easily imitated. We might see a. Film in which a safecracker is rewarded with the ‘loot’, but we lack the skills to imitate the behaviour.