Differential Association Theory (AQA A Level Psychology)

Offending as a learned behaviour

• Differential association theory (DAT) assumes that individuals learn criminality and offending behaviour via their contact and experience with others (who are criminals)

• Sutherland developed his DAT a century ago (1924) as a way of understanding how crime is transmitted and generated between people

• DAT is based on 9 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

  • Criminality is an expression of needs, norms and values which apply to both the person’s criminal and non-criminal behaviours (i.e. criminals may seek power in both their personal and their criminal domains)

• 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, a tendency to see any law-abiding behaviour as ‘foolish’, the 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 mere exposure to criminal attitudes is enough to turn a person into a criminal as long as these criminal attitudes outweigh any law-abiding attitudes that the person may also be exposed to

What did you learn today? Membership of a criminal gang provides lessons (but not any that are taught in school)...

Research which investigates differential association theory

• Farrington et al. (2006) - this groundbreaking longitudinal study into familial transmission of crime used a sample of boys from South London and found that key risk factors to them turning to crime included having a convicted parent, coming from a large family living in poverty and having low educational attainment

• Reiss & Rhodes (1964) found that boys in close friendship triads (groups of three) were more likely to behave criminally if other members of the triad also behaved criminally 

Evaluation of differential association theory

Strengths

• Sutherland’s theory is still relevant 100 years later: it can explain how and why some (particularly younger) people seek membership of criminal gangs (e.g. to gain a sense of belonging) and how criminals may become ‘better’ (i.e. more skilled) at what they do via contact with more experienced criminals (both outside of and in prison)

• DAT advanced the debate around criminality from the biological and the moral/religious to the social-psychological which provided some explanation as to how upbringing and environment are risk factors in the onset of criminality

Weaknesses

• DAT is over-simplistic in its assertion that criminality will follow if an individual is merely exposed to more criminal than non-criminal attitudes and behaviours: people are more complex than this idea suggests

• The theory cannot explain why some people may be surrounded by criminal influences and yet never actually turn to crime themselves 

Link to Issues & Debates:

The DAT is firmly on the side of nurture in the nature/nurture debate with its emphasis on environmental factors as being key to an explanation of criminality.

The emphasis on learning means that the DAT can also be viewed via the prism of environmental determinism due to Sutherland’s insistence that an individual will inevitably turn to crime if they are exposed to more criminal than non-criminal influences.