Turning to Crime

Theories of upbringing, cognition and biology

What makes a criminal?• Ronnie and Reggie Kray were a pair of identical

twins who were famous London gangsters in to 1960’s. They ran a number of nightclubs and socialised with actors, lords and politicians, but were also involved in robberies, arson, torture and murder.

• A dedicated squad of detectives brought them to justice in 1959 and they were both given life sentences.

What makes a criminal?• However, Ronnie suffered from paranoid

schizophrenia, was violent and volatile and provoked most of their crimes.

• Reggie would have liked to go straight and turn their business into an ordinary (or not especially violent), criminal operation, but was dominated by his brother.

• Were the two born into crime, or could things have worked out differently? Discuss

How can we apply the approaches and perspectives to crime?

Think… Pair… Share

•Behaviourist; ???

•Cognitive;???

•Psychodynamic;

•Bio-psychologists;

How can we apply the approaches and perspectives to crime?

• Behaviourist;– Looks at the behaviour of criminals and their environment and

works out what sort of backgrounds or circumstances turn someone towards crime.

• Cognitive;– Tries to study the thought processes of criminals, including how

they weigh up the odds, cope with guilt and think about getting caught, to see what makes them different from everybody else.

• Psychodynamic;– Psychologists argue that the real question isn’t why some people

turn to crime, but why the rest of us turn against it.

• Bio-psychologists;– Interested in the brain structure of criminals and whether this

links with them having certain temperaments, personalities and abilities.

Theories of Upbringing

Farrington, Bandura and Wikstrom and Tafel.

What do psychologists mean by upbringing?

•  What do you think?

What do psychologists mean by upbringing?

• Upbringing is a situational explanation of behaviour; through interacting with people such as friends and family, we learn how to behave (or not to as may be the case!).

• When psychologists refer to upbringing as the cause of crime they are taking a social, developmental and social learning approach.

How is upbringing connected to crime?

• Criminal behaviour is simply behaviour that is against the law; if you start from this point then explaining criminal behaviour is the same as explaining normal behaviour.

• It is widely accepted that parents, siblings and friends are major determining factors in how a person behaves;

• if a person has social interactions and social learning that is criminal, then the individual should develop into a criminal.

• Three significant areas of upbringing that can lead to criminal behaviour are:

- ?- ?- ?

Three significant areas of upbringing that can lead to criminal behaviour are:

• Disrupted families

• Learning from others (peers)

• Poverty

Disrupted families

• A disrupted family is any family that does not stay as a single unit; families can break up through divorce, separation, death in a family, or a member of the family being taken to prison. This is often seen as a key indicator of risk to criminality.

• Maternal deprivation hypothesis (Bowlby, 1944) suggests that if a child does not have constant contact in the first 2 years of life with the mother they will not develop correctly. It is suggested that individuals will have a higher risk of being aggressive, delinquent and becoming an affectionless psychopath.

Learning from others

 •Unlike the disrupted family theory, the learning from others explanation does not distinguish between types of people, it is more involved in the process of learning rather than who is involved.

•This approach is similar to social learning theory. This suggests that behaviour can be learned through vicarious reinforcement [observational learning - repeat behaviours that we see others rewarded for performing]; a person does not need to be directly involved to learn a new behaviour so long as the person they are watching is seen as a model. Imitation is a key concept and was shown to occur in the Bandura study from AS psychology.

Poverty

•The concept of poverty has historically been associated with crime. If an individual lives in a situation where they are disadvantaged then they may have cause to commit crime.

•This is because they are at high risk of being in contact with crime; either as a victim or a criminal.

2012: Top 10 crimes in the UK?

List the most common crimes you would think are linked to the UK and then number them 1 – 10 (1 being the most common).

2012: Top 10 crimes in the UK

• Criminal damage• Theft and handling stolen goods (excluding car theft)• Violence against the person• Car theft (including theft from vehicles)• Burglary (excluding domestic)• Domestic burglary• Fraud and forgery• Drug offences• Robbery• Sexual offences• (murder was not on there but you can consider it for the task)

With a partner mind-map why these people may turn to crime (then categorise them)

• Categories could include:

- Upbringing

- Cognition

- Biology

- How?

Upbringing

• Farrington 2006 - The Cambridge study of delinquent development (1)

• Bandura 1961 - Social learning theory and the transmission of aggression (2)

• Wikstrom and Tafel 2003 – The Peterborough Youth study (3)

Farrington 2006

The Cambridge study of delinquent development

Aim:

• To document the start, beginning and end of offending behaviour from childhood to adulthood in families.

• To investigate the influence of life events and the influence of family background on criminality.

• Longitudinal study.

• Data was gathered through interviewing the participants over 40 years.

• Searches in criminal records gave information about their criminality.

Methodology:

Participants:

• 411 boys aged between 8 and 9 at the start of the study (born in 1953/1954).

• Taken from the registers of 6 state schools in East London.

• Predominantly white and working class.

• 397 different families involved

• 14 pairs of brothers and 5 twins were in the sample.

• At age 48 when the final interview took place, 394 males were still alive and 365 were interviewed.

Findings:

• At age 48, 404 individuals searched in the criminal records and 161 had convictions.

• The number of offences and offenders peaked at age 17, followed by age 18.

• Those who started their criminal careers at age 10-13 were nearly all reconvicted and committed on average 9 crimes.

• Those who started their criminal careers at age 14 – 16 they committed an average of 6 crimes.

Findings:

• 7% of the males were defined as being chronic offenders because they accounted for about half of all the recorded offences.

• 93% admitted to committing at least one crime in their life.

Findings:

• Most of the chronic offenders shared key childhood characteristics;– Convicted before the age of 21

– Had a convicted parent

– High daring

– Had a delinquent sibling

– Young mothers

– Low popularity

– Disrupted families

– Large family sizes.

• As Psychologists what would your conclusions be?

• Work with a partner and feedback in 5 minutes.

Conclusions:

• Offenders tend to be deviant in many aspects of their lives.

• Early prevention that reduces offending could have a wide range of benefits in reducing problems later in life.

• The most important risk factors include poverty, impulsiveness, poor child-rearing and poor school performance.

• What issues are there with this study? Think… Pair… Share!

Issues:

• Generalisability– Cannot be generalised out of cities– All male sample– All from East London– Mostly white and working class– Large sample size

• Ethics– No follow up for the individuals who dropped out– All labelled as criminal children

• High ecological validity Think back to

Rosenhan AS

Issues:

Debates:

• Reductionism vs Holism– Takes into account a variety of factors affecting

criminality

• Ethnocentrism– All boys from East London

• Free will vs Determinism– Your background and upbringing affects criminality

• Individual vs Situational• Nature vs Nurture

Debates:

Bandura 1961

Social learning theory and the transmission of aggression.

Background

• Social learning theory, or SLT, is the theory that people learn new behaviours through observational learning.

• If a person observes a positive, desired outcome from the behaviour observed, they are more likely to model, imitate and thus adopt this behaviour for themselves.

Aim:

• To see if children modelled aggression in a new setting.

• To investigate sex differences based on the principles of social learning theory.

Methodology:

• Lab experiment.• Independent measures design.

• Three independent variables;– The sex of the child– The sex of the model– The behaviour of the model.

Variables:

•Matched pairs design.

Participants:

• 72 children, 36 male and 36 female.• All from Stanford University Nursery School.• Ranged from 3 years and 1 month to 5 years

and 9 months. • The children were matched on the basis of their

pre-existing aggression levels. These were rated on a 5-point likert scale by their nursery teacher and the experimenter.

Procedure – Stage One:

• The children were exposed to the adult model individually.

• In the aggressive condition the model acted out a series of pre-planned aggressive acts towards the Bobo doll.

• In the non-aggressive condition, the model played quietly.

Procedure- Stage Two:

• This stage was the mild aggression arousal stage.

• The children were briefly sown some attractive toys and then told that they weren’t allowed to play with these.

Procedure- Stage Three:

• Observation of delayed imitation that lasted for 20 minutes.

• Observers watched the children play in a room filled with aggressive and non-aggressive toys, through a one way mirror.

• Three measures of imitation were obtained;– Imitative physical aggression– Imitative verbal aggression– Imitative non-aggressive verbal reponses.

• What findings would you expect to see?... You should know this anyway!

Findings:

• Boys were more physically aggressive than girls.• The children in the aggressive condition made

more aggressive responses.• Girls in the aggressive model condition showed

more physical aggression f the model was male and more verbal aggression if the model was female.

• Boys were more likely to imitate same sex models than girls.

• What conclusions would you make?

Conclusions:

• The findings support Bandura’s Social Learning Theory.

• Applying this to criminality, when a person, especially a child, sees a role model performing a behaviour and then receiving reinforcement this is remembered.

• When given an opportunity to imitate this behaviour, they will do so and of they get reinforcement, will continue to do so.

• With a partner discuss and mind map the main issues of the study…

Issues:• Ethics

– The use of children- Can they really give their permission?

– Protection from harm- were they aggressive in the future?

• Generalisability

– Large sample size

– All from one area

– All from one university nursery- prestigious

• Reliability

– Controlled lab experiment so can be replicated

• Validity

– Low ecological validity due to it being a lab experiment.

Debates:

• Ethnocentrism• Situational vs individual

Wikstrom and Tafel 2003

The Peterborough Youth Study

Aim:

• To investigate why young people offend

Methodology:

• A cross-sectional study (type of observational study that involves the analysis of data collected from a population)

• Carried out on nearly 2000 year 10 students aged 14-15.

• Data was collected from official records.• Students were all interviewed.

Findings:• 44.8% of males and 30.6% of females had

committed at least one crime during the year 2000. These included acts of violence, theft and vandalism.

• 9.8% of males and 3.8% of females had committed one serious act of theft.

• High-frequency offenders committed a wide range of crimes.

• 1 in 8 were reported to or caught by the police for their last offence.

Findings:

• Offenders are victimised more than non-offenders.

• Violent offenders are more likely to become victims of violence.

• Offenders are more likely to abuse drink and drugs.

Explanatory factors:

• Family social position– Social class, ethnicity and family composition

• Individual characteristics– Self-control, morality, family bonds and monitoring

• Social situation– Family and school bonds, opportunity for truancy

• Lifestyle and routine activities• Community context

– Neighbourhood disadvantage and school attended.

Conclusions:

• Wikstrom and Tafel suggested three groups of adolescent offenders:

1. Propensity (natural tendency) induced;• Have an enduring propensity to offend. A small group,

responsible for a disproportionate number of offences. • Risk factors include, weak family and social bonds, low levels

of self control and low levels of shame.

2. Lifestyle dependent• Average in terms of social adjustment. Offend when they have

high-risk lifestyles- drink or drugs.

3. Situationally limited• Occasionally offend. Exposed to high levels of situational risk.

Unlikely to reoffend.

Debates:

• Determinism vs Free will– The influence of others affects criminal behaviours,

however it acknowledges individual differences

• Nature vs Nurture– The environment and people we are associated with

explain why people turn to crime

• Reductionism vs Holism– Looks at a variety of factors influencing criminality.