Social learning

A child walks into a room. Beside them, an adult beats an inflatable doll —kicks it, insults it, clubs it with a mallet— and leaves. The child is left alone with the doll. What do they do? They kick it, insult it, club it: they repeat even the gestures they have just seen. That experiment, with a doll named Bobo, is the starting point of one of criminology's simplest and most uncomfortable ideas: violence is learned by watching.

// OriginBandura, the Bobo doll and Akers

Albert Bandura designed that experiment in 1961. The children who had seen an adult attack the doll attacked it far more than those who had not; and they did so even more if the model was admired or if the aggression had been rewarded. Bandura called it observational learning (or modeling): we acquire new behaviors by watching others perform them, without needing to rehearse them. And we also learn from others' consequences —vicarious reinforcement—: if things go well for the model, we imitate; if they are punished, we hold back.

A few years later, Robert Burgess and Ronald Akers (1966) took the idea to crime and fused it with Sutherland's differential association: it is not enough to associate with those who offend —you have to explain how that behavior rubs off—. Their answer was Skinner's operant conditioning: we offend according to what pays off. Akers's mature theory brings together four gears —differential association (whom you associate with), definitions (what you are taught to think about crime), differential reinforcement (what your environment rewards and punishes) and imitation (whom you copy)—.

// In fictionApprentices of crime

Crime fiction is, almost always, a story of learning. Zé, in City of God, is the textbook case: a favela boy who learns to kill by imitating the elders he admires —he laughs, he shoots and he notes that here violence is what rules—. Draco gets a different school, that of home: he inherits from his father contempt for the «mudbloods» and sees it rewarded at every dinner and in every Slytherin corridor; prejudice as a subject. Genny, in Gomorrah, is the apprentice: the soft son who hardens by watching his father and the Camorra's soldiers, until he executes the lesson better than the master. And Tetsuo, in Akira, is what the environment manufactures: a kid from a biker gang where violence is the common currency… long before power multiplies it.

ZP

Ciudad de Dios · Film

Zé Pequeño

DM

Harry Potter · Film

Draco Malfoy

GS

Gomorra · Series

Genny Savastano

TS

Akira · Anime

Tetsuo Shima

Four schools of the same trade: the street, the home, the apprenticeship and the gang.

// More than copyingFrom reinforcement to the mind

Over the years, Bandura moved away from pure behaviorism to found social-cognitive theory. Imitating, he insisted, is not an automatic copy: four mental processes mediate —paying attention to the model, retaining what is seen, being able to reproduce it and having the motivation to do so—. He also added two powerful ideas: self-efficacy (believing that one is capable of performing the behavior, which predicts whether one will really attempt it) and reciprocal determinism: person, behavior and environment shape one another mutually, in a loop, and not in a single direction. We are not passive sponges: we choose models, interpret what we see and, by acting, change the very environment that formed us.

// Learning from the environmentFrom the neighborhood to the digital Bobo doll

Akers closed the circle with his model of social structure and social learning (SSSL): the great conditions —class, neighborhood, inequality— do not cause crime directly, but through the learning mechanisms: they define whom you associate with, what you are rewarded for and which models you have at hand. His own studies on adolescent tobacco, alcohol and drug use found that social learning is one of the best predictors of juvenile deviant behavior. And the theory has only gained relevance: today modeling also happens on screens. Radicalization in extremist forums or viral self-harm challenges are the Bobo experiment on a global scale —admired models, behaviors rewarded with «likes» and a community that reinforces—, with the algorithm deciding whom you watch to imitate.

// CriticismsLearning, or choosing your own?

The harshest objection is about causality: do delinquent friends teach you to offend, or do those who already offend seek each other out? «Birds of a feather», the Gluecks replied —selection, not contagion—. The longitudinal evidence suggests there is something of both, in a self-feeding loop. Another open wound: Bandura fueled decades of panic over violence on screens, but the leap from the Bobo doll to real crime is fragile —meta-analyses find small effects on aggressiveness and the field remains divided over its reach—. And there remains the problem of origin: if everything is learned from someone else, who offended first?

// Why it mattersIf it is learned, it can be unlearned

Here lies its strength. Against the «born criminal» marked from birth, social learning holds that behavior is built… and can be rebuilt. From this come cognitive-behavioral programs, mentoring and the modeling of prosocial behaviors: changing someone's models and rewards is, almost literally, reprogramming them. And there is an uncomfortable lesson for society: the models it elevates matter. If crime pays off and the offender is admired, no gene is needed to know whom the child watching from the window will imitate.