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Summary Individualistic Theories of Criminality
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Individualistic Theories of Criminality for AC2.2 - UNIT 2
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AC 2.2 - Individualistic Theories of CriminalityIntroduction:
Individualistic theories of criminality try to explain the causes of crime by using individual differences
based upon personality types or experiences that people might have. The root of crime is an individual’s
psychological make-up or the development processes that they have experienced.
The individualistic approach seeks to understand what drives people to crime. It seeks to treat and
rehabilitate criminals through understanding what drove them to their behaviour. This has resulted in
treatment programmes, counselling and victim offender mediation where criminals are taught to
understand the results of their actions on others.
List of Theories:
The key theories in this section are:
Albert Bandura: Social Learning Theory
Lawrence Kohlberg: Moral Development
Sigmund Freud: Psychodynamic Theory
John Bowlby: Maternal Deprivation
Hans J Eysenck: Personality theory
Key Terms:
Nature: Nature is defined to be all the genes and hereditary factors which influence who we are.
Nurture: All the environmental variables which impact who we are
Deterministic: To make a prediction about future criminal behaviour based upon little evidence. For
example, suggesting that someone will be a criminal because their father and brother are one, or that if
you are poor, you are likely to commit certain crimes.
Reductionistic: Reducing an explanation of criminal behaviour down to one leaving out other
explanations. For example, suggesting that your upbringing is the cause of criminality and not considering
any biological or individual factors.
Objective Data: Objective data is data which has research which cannot be debated, and is not up for
interpretation
Subjective Data: Subjective data is up for interpretation and can be debated.
, Albert Bandura (1977): Social Learning Theory
Claims: Bandura claims learning new behaviours is via Observational Learning, in which people watch the
behaviour of others. This can be applied to criminals, learning aggression from watching friend family and
media.
If children watch adults gaining pleasure from an activity, or being punished, they will either repeat or
reject behaviours. Aggression can be learned from watching others behave in an aggressive manner and
not be punished/receive negative reinforcement.
Bandura believed there was 4 main criteria:
1. Attention to the role model
Observing a successful criminal role model. For example, seeing a family member shoplift from
Primark multiple times.
2. Retention of the observed behaviour
The individual will retain what they have observed in their memory until a suitable time later
when they have the chance to reproduce the behaviour. For example, when they are in Primark
and want some new clothes.
3. Reproduction of the target behaviour
The individual will reproduce the behaviour of shoplifting when the security staff are not
present.
4. Motivation to imitate the observed behaviour.
The individual’s motivation to reproduce the crime will be affected by vicarious reinforcement,
external motivation and self-reinforcement.
The Bobo Doll Experiment (1963)
Bandura conducted the Bobo Doll experiment to prove his theory, where he used 72 (36 Male, 36
Female) participants all from Stanford University Nursery. He had these participants first enter a room
during Stage 1, and play with some toys, an adult model would enter and began to attack up the Bobo
Doll. This would occur for 10 minutes.
They would then be moved to Stage 2, where they were sent in a room with ‘new’ toys and played with
them. Quickly, the experimenter stated he would like to save these toys for other children. This aimed to
produce aggression arousal.
Finally, during stage 3 they would be left in a room with the Bobo Doll for 20 minutes with recordings at
an interval of 5 seconds.
Bandura found boys were far more physically aggressive than girls were, but little difference in verbal
aggression between males and females.
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