Social Learning and Differential Association Theory

Theorists who explain criminal behavior as learned through social interaction rather than as an inherited trait or a rational calculation, beginning with the theory that imitation of others is a basic mechanism of social behavior, continuing through differential association theory's claim that criminal behavior, like any other behavior, is learned through interaction with intimate personal groups who supply definitions favorable or unfavorable to law violation, and social learning theory's extension of that claim to include imitation and differential reinforcement, the rewards and punishments an individual experiences for criminal and conforming behavior alike. This group gathers the small number of theorists who built and extended this specific learning-based account of how criminal behavior is transmitted between people, and it excludes labeling theorists, whose focus is how society's reaction to an act produces further deviance rather than how the act itself was learned, who belong under Labeling Theory and the Sociology of Deviance.