Differential Association Theory (AQA A Level Psychology): Revision Note

Offending as a learned behaviour

• Differential association theory (DAT) proposes that individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques and motives for criminal behaviour through association and interaction with different people

• Sutherland (1924) set himself the task of developing a set of scientific principles that could explain all types of offending

  • His theory is designed to discriminate between individuals who become offenders and those who do not, whatever their class or ethnic background

• DAT is based on nine principles (in no particular order of importance):

  • Criminal behaviour is learned, not inherited

  • Criminal behaviour is learned via interaction with others

  • The biggest influence comes from the closest, most intimate relationships

  • It is possible to learn criminal ‘tricks of the trade’ from others

  • It is possible to learn a criminal mindset from others

  • Criminality is strengthened by repeated exposure to criminals

  • Contact with criminals will vary and not necessarily be constant

  • People learn criminality in the same way that they learn anything, i.e. by observation, repetition, imitation, internalisation

  • Criminal behaviour is an expression of general needs and values, but is not explained by those needs and values, since non-criminal behaviour is an expression of the same needs and values

• Sutherland understood that crime does not happen in a vacuum; it is observed and learned via the mechanisms of social learning, both the attitudes towards crime and the criminal acts themselves

  • Learned attitudes towards crime might include a

    • disregard for other people’s rights

    • tendency to see any law-abiding behaviour as ‘foolish’

    • view that the police are the ‘enemy’

  • Learned criminal acts might include

    • how to break into a house using specific tools

    • the best spot to sell drugs from

    • how to evade capture

• Sutherland argued that if the number of pro-criminal attitudes a person acquires outweighs the number of anti-criminal attitudes, they will go on to offend

• He suggested it should be possible to mathematically predict how likely it is that an individual will commit crime if we have knowledge of the frequency, intensity and duration of which they have been exposed to deviant and non-deviant norms and values

Research which investigates differential association theory

• Farrington et al. (2006) – the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 males from a deprived inner-city area of South London, aged 8 in 1961 and tracked to age 50

  • 41% were convicted of at least one offence, with the average conviction career running from age 19 to 28, and 7% were 'chronic offenders' accounting for around half of all recorded offences in the study

  • The most important childhood risk factors at ages 8 to 10 were family criminality, daring or risk-taking, low school attainment, poverty and poor parenting

• Mednick et al. (1984) found that boys who had criminal adoptive parents and non-criminal biological parents were more likely to go on to offend than boys whose biological and adoptive parents were both non-criminal (14.7% compared with 13.5%), illustrating the importance of family influence

Evaluation of differential association theory

Strengths

• DAT has explanatory power across all sectors of society, as Sutherland recognised that some types of crime such as burglary may be clustered within certain inner-city, working-class communities, but others are more prevalent amongst more affluent groups

  • He was particularly interested in 'white-collar' or corporate crime and how this may be a feature of middle-class social groups who share deviant norms and values

• Sutherland was successful in moving the emphasis away from early biological accounts of crime, as well as away from those that explained offending as being the product of individual weakness or immorality

  • DAT draws attention to the fact that dysfunctional social circumstances and environments may be more to blame for criminality than dysfunctional people, which offers a more realistic solution to the problem of crime than eugenics (the biological solution) or punishment (the morality solution)

Limitations

• Despite Sutherland's promise of a scientific framework for predicting future offending, DAT is difficult to test

  • Pro-criminal attitudes cannot easily be measured, so it is impossible to know at what point the urge to offend is triggered, which undermines the theory's scientific credibility

• Not everyone exposed to criminal influences goes on to offend, and there is a danger within DAT of stereotyping people from impoverished, crime-ridden backgrounds as 'unavoidably criminal'

  • The theory implies that exposure to pro-criminal values is sufficient to produce offending, ignoring the fact that people may choose not to offend despite such influences

Issues & Debates

• DAT is environmentally deterministic as it assumes that exposure to criminal attitudes and behaviours will inevitably lead to offending, especially when criminal influences outweigh non-criminal ones

  • This reduces the role of free will in decision-making and may undermine personal responsibility for criminal acts

• DAT exemplifies the nurture side of the nature vs nurture debate

  • It proposes that offending is learned through social interactions rather than being biologically inherited

  • It shifts focus away from genetic/neurological explanations of crime, instead highlighting the role of environment, family, and peer influence