Who Taught You That? SOC 3333 · Crime Lab · Midwestern State University
Last chapter argued that crime needs no teaching, only a failure of restraint. This chapter argues the opposite: that crime is learned the way everything else is learned, from the people closest to you, and that the pushing is the whole story. Both camps agree on one stubborn fact. People who offend have friends who offend, and that association is one of the strongest correlates in the entire field. They disagree completely about what it means. This page works through that disagreement, then shows you what happened when someone took learning theory seriously enough to build programs on it. The last two tabs are a review aid for the exam.
One fact, two theories, no agreement
Take an ordinary finding: adolescents who report delinquent friends report more delinquency themselves. Nobody disputes it. Here is what the two camps say it means.
Criminologists call this the selection versus socialization problem, and it is the single most important methodological argument in this chapter. Before we get to the answer, commit to a number.
The four components of Akers's theory, tested separately
Pratt, T. C., Cullen, F. T., Sellers, C. S., Winfree, L. T. Jr., Madensen, T. D., Daigle, L. E., Fearn, N. E., and Gau, J. M. (2010). The empirical status of social learning theory: A meta-analysis. Justice Quarterly 27(6), 765 to 802. One hundred thirty-three studies from 1974 to 2003, 704 effect size estimates, 118,403 cases across 85 independent datasets. Retrieved August 2026.
How this compares. Chapter 8 gave you self-control at mean correlations of about .26 attitudinal and .28 behavioral. Differential association sits at .225. A 2019 review of the peer literature put it this way: the effects of delinquent peer associations are at least comparable to, if not larger than, the effects of other well-known correlates of crime such as self-control. Two theories that call each other wrong have produced predictors of roughly the same size, measured by different people over fifty years. That is worth sitting with.
So which is it, selection or socialization
Pick the position you find most defensible before you look at the answer. There is no trick here and the honest answer is not the boring one.
What happens when you take learning theory seriously
Here is a genuine test. If crime is learned in intimate groups through definitions favorable to law-breaking, then deliberately gathering delinquent young people into a group should teach them more crime, not less. That is an uncomfortable prediction, it is unambiguous, and it has been tested many times, because a great deal of juvenile programming does exactly that.
Researchers named the mechanism deviancy training: within a group of high-risk peers, talk about rule-breaking gets laughter, attention, and status, which is textbook differential reinforcement. Take the most famous example, the programs in which young people are brought into a prison to be confronted by incarcerated adults. Guess what the randomized trials found before you look.
Petrosino, A., Turpin-Petrosino, C., Hollis-Peel, M. E., and Lavenberg, J. G., Scared Straight and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency, Campbell Systematic Reviews. The National Institute of Justice rates this practice Ineffective at CrimeSolutions and states that participation increases the odds that youth will commit offenses in the future. Retrieved August 2026.
Be careful about what this does and does not prove. These trials show that the programs made things worse. They do not by themselves prove that deviancy training was the mechanism, because a confrontational prison visit could backfire for several reasons at once. What makes the learning explanation credible is that the same harmful pattern shows up across a wider family of interventions that share one feature: they put high-risk young people in a room together. That is the pattern a 1999 review in American Psychologist called attention to under the heading of when interventions harm.
Dishion, T. J., McCord, J., and Poulin, F. (1999). When interventions harm: Peer groups and problem behavior. American Psychologist 54(9), 755 to 764. Retrieved August 2026.
The five techniques of neutralization
Gresham Sykes and David Matza argued in 1957 that most people who break rules do not reject the rules. They excuse themselves from them, in advance, using a small and surprisingly standard set of moves. Matza called the resulting state drift: not committed to crime, not committed to conformity, floating between them and released episodically by whichever excuse is available.
This is also the exam-relevant bridge back to Sutherland, because these five are what definitions favorable to law-breaking look like when you catch them in the act. Sort each statement into the technique it uses.
Sykes, G. M., and Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review 22(6), 664 to 670.
These are written in the style of the exam. Each one names the chapter it comes from, so if you miss several from the same chapter you know exactly where to spend tonight. Nothing here is recorded and you can be wrong as many times as you like.
Chapters 6 through 9 in one page
The exam asks you to connect a theorist to a theory to a concept. Here is every triple you need, in order. Read down the list and say each one out loud. Anything you cannot finish from memory is where your studying should go.