PSYC325 - Test 1 (week 7 - 10)

• Understanding how crime comes about can aid crime prevention
• Theories of the development and course of criminal behaviour can help us to predict future behaviour in individuals and can have implications for how we deal with offenders
• Some theories of crime and offending have formed the basis of psychological treatments for offenders
• Classical School of Criminology


  Law-breaking occurs when people, faced with a choice between behaving rightly and wrongly, choose to behave wrongly – weighing up the pros and cons
• Classical School of Criminology


  • Emphasises philosophical concepts such as free will and hedonism
  • Takes the stance that the punishment must fit the crime
• Positivist School of Criminology


  Emphasise factors that determine criminal behaviour, seeking to understand crime through scientific method and analysis of data
• Positivist School of Criminology


  • Factors may include sociological factors, biological factors, psychological factors, and environmental factors
  • Takes the stance that the punishment must fit the criminal
• Validity of criminal theories varies greatly
• No one theory explains all forms of criminality
• Many theories focus exclusively on violent crime
• Many theories focus exclusively on men
• Sociological Theories


  Propose that crime results from social and cultural forces that are external to any specific individual, and exist prior to the criminal act
• Structural Theories


  Dysfunctional social arrangements prevent people from achieving their goals in a legitimate way
• Subcultural Theories


  Criminal behaviour occurs because different behavioural norms are held by different groups
• Social-Psychological Theories


  Attempt to bridge the gap between the environmentalism of sociological theories and the individualism of psychological and biological theories
• Learning Theories


  Propose that people learn to commit crime (i.e., in the absence of this learning, they would not commit crime)
• Learning Theories


  • Social Learning Theory
• Control Theories


  Propose that people have to learn not to commit crime (i.e., in the absence of this learning, they would commit crime)
• Control Theories


  • Operant conditioning: using reward and punishment to modify voluntary behaviours
  • Classical conditioning: In this theory, food = punishment, salvation = negative feelings, tuning fork = crime
• Psychological Theories


  Propose that crime results from personality attributes that are uniquely possessed, or possessed to a special degree, by the potential criminal
• Psychoanalytic theory of crime


  • The id pushes people to act in selfish ways
  • The superego is the ethical component
  • The ego tries to negotiate between the two
  • Crime occurs when the ego can't control the id
• Psychopathy


  • Neurologically unable to experience the level of fear or anxiety normal people do
  • Inability to adequately control impulses for doing inappropriate things
  • Difficult to treat, and no motivation or desire to be rehabilitated
• Antisocial Personality Disorder


  Maladaptive – does not come and go

  
• Sensation seeking


  Amount of stimulation you need so your physiological arousal feels at a normal/tolerable level. Seems to be higher for criminals.
• Biological Theories


  Propose that genetic influences, neuropsychological abnormalities, and biochemical irregularities play a role in criminal behaviour
• Epigenetics


  These biological dispositions are translated into specific criminal behaviour through environments and social interactions
• Twin and adoption studies

  Monozygotic (identical) twins versus dizygotic (fraternal) twins
• Concordance Rate


  Percentage of twins that share the behaviour of interest
• MAOA gene


  Codes for criminal behaviour (if you have low activity MAOA AND have a terrible upbringing, you're likely to have criminal behaviour)
• Constitutional predisposition


  e.g., if you want to be a thug, it helps if you're a bigger person
• Neuropsychological abnormalities


  e.g., higher rate of electrical activity in criminals vs not criminals
• Autonomic nervous system differences


  e.g., people who engage in criminal behaviour tend to have a higher threshold of ANS arousal
• Physiological differences


  Most of the research is about hormones, e.g., testosterone levels
• Personality and temperament differences

  e.g., unfriendliness
• James Fallon


  • Neuroscientist who was a bit of a drinker, studied psychopathy – had all the hormones of a psychopath after seeing his brain scan, under activation of certain parts of the brain
• "Adult antisocial behaviour (behaviour against the norm) virtually requires childhood antisocial behaviour, yet most antisocial youths don't go on to become antisocial adults"
• Prevalence


  A change in the number of people (new people) willing to offend
• Incidence


  A change in the number of crimes (same people) that people are committing

  
• It is prevalence!
• Dunedin Multidisciplinary Study


  All babies born in Dunedin during 1972