PSYC 3402: Psychological Theories of Crime

Contents

1. 1. Psychodynamic Theories
   1. 1.1 Freud’s ID, Ego and Superego
   2. 1.2 Bowlby’s Theory of Maternal Deprivation
   3. 1.3 Glueck and Glueck’s Emprical Approach (Not a Theory)
   4. 1.4 Hirshi’s Control Theories
2. 2. Learning Theories
   1. 2.1 Classical Conditionning – Method of Learning
   2. 2.2 Operant Conditionning – Method of Learning
   3. 2.3 Eysenk’s Biosocial Theory
3. 3. Social Learning Theories
   1. 3.1 Bandura’s Vicarious Conditionning
   2. 3.2 Sutherland’s Differential Association
   3. 3.3 Akers’ Social Learning Theory
   4. 3.4 PIC-R (Personal, Interpersonal and Community-reinforcement Theory)

Updated July 21, 2010:
This post contains notes from the book.

1. Psychodynamic Theories

Overview: crime is the result of dynamic internal forces within the individual and the result of early childhood experiences.

1.1 Freud’s ID, Ego and Superego

Most Freudian theories contain elements of early childhood implications, unconscious desires and a predisposition towards aggression and satisfying sexual gratification.

Theory: Freud’s theory involves the interaction between three elements:

• ID – Pleasure Principle: obtain immediate pleasure and ignore reality.
  Ex: young children looking for cookies!
• Ego – Reality Principle: satisfy demands of the ID while also satisfying demands of superego.
• Superego: Socialization process – internalization of rules and restrictions of society which develops primarily due to parenting; and Conscience Process and ego-ideal – morals (right and wrong) and socially accepted standards (i.e. aspirations)

5 Stages of Psychosexual Development:

1. Oral: (0 to 1.5yrs) child seeks gratification through sucking and feeding; primary conflict is weaning.
2. Anal: (1.5 to 2) toilet training stage; primary conflict is control – delayed gratification through bodily expulsion.
3. Phallic – superego development: (2 to 5) unconscious desire for opposite-sex parent and fear of retribution from same-sex parent; primary conflict is sexual: Oedipus Complex (boys) – gradually identify with father through fear of castration; Electra Complex (girls) (penis envy) – girls gradually identify with their mothers.
4. Latent: (5 to puberty) sexual drive is de-emphasized and same-sex friendships are developed.
5. Genital: (adolescence to adulthood) interest in genitals is reborn and individual focuses on intimacy with opposite-sex partners.

Crime and Superego Development: criminals encounter problems with superego development in one of three ways:

1. Harsh Superego – neurotic criminal: leads to pathological levels of unconscious guilt, typically over unresolved infantile desires, and criminal behaviour is meant to subconsciously invite punishment in an attempt to resolve this guilt.
   Ex: David, the guy who needed to feel punished because his father was an ass.
   Discussion: some people (police) believe that many serial killers fall into this category.
2. Weak Superego - egocentric: where the superego fails to regulate the primitive and instinctual needs of the ID; the offender is characterized as psychopathic – impulsive, guiltless and unempathic.
   Discussion: accounts for a large portion of criminals today; violent and serial offenders.
3. Deviant Superego: where the superego has developed standards that reflect a deviant viewpoint; parents advocated antisocial behaviour.

1.2 Bowlby’s Theory of Maternal Deprivation

Theory: where criminal behaviour is a consequence of early separate from caregivers (either before 6 months or before 3 years of age); this separation prevents effective social development from taking place and without effective social development, a person experience long-term problems in positive social relationships (they lack socialization/conscience). They develop antisocial behaviour patterns.

Research: Bowlby studied matched delinquent and non-delinquent children and discovered that 39% of the delinquent children (as opposed to 5% for non-delinquent) had experienced separation from their mother for 6 months or more in their first five years of life.

Evidence: support for the importance of parental involvement but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the mother or within the critical window.

Criticisms: limited empirical support…

• Methodological issues – didn’t necessarily match experimental and control groups for other key variables.
• Children can form attachments with more than one adult.
• Doesn’t account for children who were maternally deprived but didn’t become delinquents.
• How do we measure someone’s conscience? How can we prove it?
• Fallen out of favour but some of the more general concepts are considered more useful, such as Attachment disorder.

1.3 Glueck and Glueck’s Emprical Approach (Not a Theory)

Research – Juvenile Delinquency: the Glueck’s collected data from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies using matched delinquent and non-delinquent boys; they examined social, psychological and biological information for each boy from interviews from the boy, their parents and their teachers. They discovered that the primary cause of delinquency is a lack of proper parenting.

Criticisms: there is reasonable support…

• Causation/Correlation: Causal ordering of variables – what caused what?
• Methodological weaknesses: base rate of delinquency is not 50/50 (half of all children/adults are not involved in crime); they declared they could predict delinquency at a young age before it happened (ethical issues of labelling someone).
• Omission of key variables in their explanation, such as antisocial associates and misconduct in school.
• Good for examining the correlates of delinquency and non-delinquency (not a criticism).

1.4 Hirshi’s Control Theories

Theory: tries to explain why more people don’t get involved in crime; attempts to explain what controls peoples’ behaviour why people choose to conform to conventional norms. The lower you are in one of these 4 social bonds, the more likely you are to engage in crime (BAIC):

1. Belief: if you don’t respect the societal value system, you’re more likely to get involved in crime.
2. Attachment: if you lack attachment to other people (especially parents and teachers), you are more likely to engage in crime because you don’t fear ruining any relationships. (It depends on the quality and depth of attachment.)
3. Involvement: involvement in conventional activities, you have less time to be involved in crime.
4. Commitment: a lack of commitment to conventional values will result in an increased risk of becoming involved in crime (you have nothing to lose).
   Ex: you don’t engage in crime while you’re in University because you don’t want to make your sacrifices count for nothing.

Criticisms: largely supported but...

• Order of causation
• Attachment to peers can lead to crime (doesn’t matter what the attachment is).
  Today: the attachment needs to be to prosocial people.
• Some bonds are more important than others.
• Certain bonds are more important at different times and different genders.

Gottfredson and Hirshi’s General Theory of Crime

Theory: a lack of self-control combined with criminal opportunity explains all criminal and deviant behaviour.
Low-self control also explains root causes of crime in other theories (such as low attachment school and teachers).

Research: The level of self-control is thought to be stable throughout life and relate to the quality of parenting, where you need to:

• Monitor children’s behaviour;
• Recognize deviant behaviour;
• Appropriate discipline.

This leads to the ability to delay gratification; sensitivity to others; and are more willing to place restraints on activities.

Criticisms: largely supported but...

• Self-control is a key issue but not the sole cause of crime;
• Tautological problems (circular theory)
• Social bonds developed in adulthood can redirect offenders into pathway of conformity.

Criminal Opportunity Triangle: motivated offender; suitable victim (person or property); absence of guardianship.

2. Learning Theories

Theories that are based on principles of conditioning; they speculate that criminal behaviour is learned and maintained by its consequences.

2.1 Classical Conditionning – Method of Learning

Theory: where behaviour is learned through conditioned stimuli – when a UCS (unconditioned stimulus) paired with a NS (neutral stimulus) causes a UCR (unconditioned response); eventually the NS becomes a CS (conditioned stimulus) and results in a CR (conditioned response)

Stopping Crime: extinction – break the link between the CS and CR! Deviant sexual behaviour emerges as a result of classical conditioning – aversion therapy is based around this notion of conditioning.

Eysenk’s Biosocial Theory

Theory: suggests that there are individual differences in nervous system functioning, impacts the degree to which people learn from an environment’s stimuli; and NS functioning shapes personality an behaviour (extraverts and neuroticism). Criminals are deficient with respect to classical conditioning (conditionability) a process he believed was important to the socialization or conscience-building process.

Conscious Building Process:

• Child engages in act against or to something (CS).
• Punishment by parent (UCS) elicits a UCR where the child feels uncomfortable. This occurs several times until the UCR turns into a CR.
• The actual CS and thoughts of CS prevent the child from engaging in the original act.

Criticisms: some support for link between crime and conditionability (e.g. psychopaths)...

• Weak evidence for link between your ability to learn through conditioning and the overall process of socialization.
• Mixed support for personality predictions.

2.2 Operant Conditionning – Method of Learning

Theory – B.F. Skinner: where behaviour is learned through rewards and punishment; consequences that follow responses influence whether the response is likely or unlikely to occur; the four ways in which operant conditioning occurs:

1. Two types of consequences: positive (pleasant) or negative (aversive) consequences, which are subjective – depends on the person.
2. Two types of actions can be done with the consequences: add to environment or subtract from environment.

Comparing the Four Conditions of Operant Conditioning

	Added Action	Subtracted Action
Positive (Pleasant) Consequence	Positive Reinforcement: behaviour increases Ex: token economy – in schools, you get stickers when you do something good or not doing something bad	Withholding: behaviour decreases Ex: taking away privileges in prison
Negative (Aversive) Consequence	Punishment: behaviour decreases Ex: prison sentences (though research suggests that offenders reoffend at higher rates)	Negative Reinforcement: behaviour increases Ex: removing parole conditions

The above examples outline the ways in which we can reduce criminal behaviour.

Factors that affect the effectiveness:

• Immediacy: reinforcement (or punishment) must immediate follow the behaviour, otherwise we run the risk of reinforcing (or punishing) some other behaviour.
• Consistency: consequence must consistently follow the behaviour.
• Intensity: strong consequences improve the effectiveness (though you have to be careful not to suppress other desirable behaviour). (Responsivity principle?)

3. Social Learning Theories

This is more currently accepted within the scientific community. They were developed because learning theories give insufficient attention to internal mental processes (hearing and seeing leads to remembering and reasoning) and rarely speak to the role of social context in learning (vicarious conditioning).

3.1 Bandura’s Vicarious Conditionning

Theory: observation learning can occur through three primary contexts – family, peers and media; the more significant and respected the model, the greater their impact on our behaviour.

Research – Bobo the clown: more kids in the assaultive condition imitated the assaultive behaviour.

Results: current meta-analytic research suggests that antisocial behaviour is strongly influenced by both antisocial peers and violence on film, television and video games.

3.2 Sutherland’s Differential Association

Differential Association Theory: people are likely to become deviant if they associate more with people who hold deviant ideas. This is due to 4 major factors: who we associate; length and frequency of association; and how early these interactions develop in our development. People engage in deviant behaviour because of an excess of values and attitudes unfavourable towards the law.

• Differential association may vary in frequency, duration, priority (how early in life you encounter criminal/anti-criminal definitions) and intensity (how much you value that person).
• The message is more important than the associates.

Criticisms: considerable empirical support (especially around antisocial peers)...

• “Favourable” and “unfavourable” definitions (attitudes) are unclear.
• No way to measure these definitions.
• No way to measure frequency, duration and intensity.
• No statement made about how learning occurs.

3.3 Akers’ Social Learning Theory

Differential Association-Reinforcement: deviants are likely to engage in deviant behaviour if they have been rewarded (rather than punished) for their behaviour and if they associate more with people who hold deviant ideas.

Criminal behaviour can be learned through a history of associate learning, by being personally reinforced for criminal behaviour and by watching others be reinforced for their antisocial behaviour (both observational learning and vicarious conditioning).

Primary role models: parents, friends and media

Theory: general theory of crime that focuses on classical, operant and vicarious conditioning (through parents, peers and media) but the major focus is on learning in group interactions; criminal involvement depends on past and present rewards and punishment attached to antisocial behaviour and alternate forms of prosocial behaviour.

Criticisms: consistent support but...

• Causal ordering, especially in relation to delinquent peers.
• Too much weight put on peer associations rather than other group interactions (unfair).
• Aker says – kids hang out with antisocial peers and then criminal behaviour develops.

3.4 PIC-R (Personal, Interpersonal and Community-reinforcement Theory)

Behaviour is assumed to be under the control of both antecedent and consequent events.
These antecedent and consequent events signal various reward and costs for different classes of behaviour (which can be additive or subtractive). (Operant conditioning)

The controlling properties of these events are assumed to be from four major sources:

1. Individual: personally mediated events, such as rewarding yourself for engaging in a criminal act.
2. Other people: interpersonally mediated events, such as approval from your antisocial group.
3. The act itself: non-mediated events, such as getting away with the crime and feeling good about it.
4. Other aspects of the situation: environmental factors

Includes the Big 4; socio-economic class (as what influences behaviour by establishing the fundamental reward/cost contingencies that are in effect within various social settings and communities.

Support and Criticisms: indirect support from offender treatment evaluations that are based on principles derived from the theory. The same issues that apply to the theories this one is based on apply to this theory.