Psychological explanations: Differential association theory Flashcards
What is differential association theory?
It proposes that individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for offending behaviour through association and interaction with different people.
What is the scientific basis of the differential association theory?
Sutherland set himself the task of developing a set of scientific principles that could explain all types of offending.-
‘the conditions which are said to cause crime should be present when crime is present , and they should be absent when when crime is absent.’
His theory was and is designed to discriminate between individuals who become offenders and those who do not, whatever their social class or ethnic background.
What is offending as a learned behaviour in differential association theory?
Offending behaviour may be acquired in the same way as any other behaviour through the processes of learning.
This learning occurs most often through interactions with significant others who the child values most and spends the most time with, such as the family and peer group.
Offending arises from two factors: Learned attitudes towards offending, and the learning of specific offending acts/ techniques.
What are learning attitudes towards offending?
When a person is socialised into a group they will be exposed to values and attitudes towards the law.
Sutherland argues that if the number of pro-crime attitudes the person comes across outweighs the anti-crime attitudes than they will go on to offend.
What are learning techniques?
The offender may learn techniques for watching people committing offences and being exposed to pro-crime attitudes.
These may include how to break into someone’s house through a locked window.
What is socialisation in prison?
Sutherland’s theory can explain why so many convicts released from prison go on to reoffend. It is reasonable to assume that whilst inside prison inmates will learn specific techniques of offending from each other.
Strength of differential association theory.
It changed the focus of offending explanations.
Sutherland was successful in moving the empathasis away from early biological accounts of offending behaviour such as the atavistic theory.
Differential association theory draws attention to the fact that deviant social circumstances and environments may be more to blame for offending than deviant people.
It is a more realistic solution to the problem.
Limitation of differential association theory.
It is difficult to test the predictions of the theory.
Sutherland aimed to provide a scientific, mathematical framework within which future offending behaviour could be predicted and this means that the predictions must be testable. But the concepts cannot be tested because they cannot be operationalised.
This means that the theory does not have scientific credibility.
