Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory by Anthony Walsh

Author:Anthony Walsh [Walsh, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9780429766374
Google: XNNyDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-17T05:13:03+00:00

Conclusion

Traditional social learning theories tend to hold on to the untenable blank slate view of human nature that biology and the neurosciences abandoned decades ago. While the blank slate view must be jettisoned, the social learning tradition in criminology is still valuable; after all, we are designed to be responsive to the situations in which we find ourselves in the social environment. Indeed, the mechanisms enumerated in RST evolved to enable us to do that in an adaptive way. An anomic situation is one in which the delicate balance of approach/avoidance behavior is upset, either temporarily in times of rapid social change (Durkheim) or permanently by the disjunction of cultural goals and social structural impediments to achieving them (Merton).

The social learning theory formulated by Edwin Sutherland has not evolved in the same way as anomie/strain theory has from Durkheim to Agnew and remains content to view criminal and delinquent behavior in terms of only the environmental half of the biosocial whole. Yet it maintains an interest in the age–crime curve, perhaps the most law-like phenomenon in criminology. Social learning theory cannot hope to understand this phenomenon without engaging what the natural sciences have to tell us about what is going on in the adolescent body and brain from puberty to early adulthood. This is a period of anomic itself in the sense that teens experience a temporary imbalance of the approach/avoidance mechanisms; an imbalance that was designed that way for a purposeful function. Adolescence is a period in which, as Durkheim stated, “a moral disciple” provided by society must step in and aid the BIS in controlling overly rambunctious behavior. In this sense, Durkheim’s anomie theory can be viewed as a social control theory; it is to this tradition that we now turn.

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