Differential Association Theory

Differential association theory, proposed by Edwin Sutherland, explains that criminal behavior is learned through interaction with others. It suggests that people become criminals not because of who they are, but because of the values, attitudes, and techniques they pick up from the people around them. In short, crime isn’t inherited — it’s taught through social relationships and everyday communication.

Key Takeaways

Learning: Differential association theory proposes that criminal behavior is learned through social interaction, not inherited or biologically determined. People adopt the attitudes, motives, and skills for crime from those they associate with.
Influence: The likelihood of offending depends on the balance of messages a person receives—if they hear more pro-crime than anti-crime attitudes, they’re more likely to offend.
Environment: Family, peers, and close communities play a key role in shaping behavior, as individuals are most influenced by groups they spend the most time with.
Variation: The learning process differs in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity, meaning not all associations have equal impact on shaping criminal behavior.
Criticism: Critics argue the theory overlooks individual choice and biological or psychological factors, making it difficult to explain crimes committed without clear social influence.

Sutherland’s theory of differential association

Differential association theory (DAT), developed by Edwin H. Sutherland, explains that criminal behaviour is learned through social interaction and communication within close, personal groups. The focus is on how people learn to commit crime – not on their background, income, or social class.

Challenging Class-Based Theories

Before Sutherland, many sociological theories linked crime mainly to poverty and social disadvantage.

For example:

Functionalist strain theories suggested that people in lower social classes commit crime because they can’t achieve success through legitimate means.
Social disorganization theory connected high crime rates to poverty, instability, and lack of community control.

Sutherland challenged this idea. He argued that focusing only on lower-class crime ignored the fact that people in all social classes commit offences.

According to DAT, crime is not caused by poverty or lack of opportunity – it’s caused by social learning.

Anyone, regardless of class, can learn to break the law if they’re surrounded by people who define such behaviour as acceptable.

The Social Context: Learning Through Interaction

Sutherland’s differential association theory (DAT) is rooted in the symbolic interactionist perspective in sociology.

Symbolic interactionism focuses on how people learn meanings and behaviours through social interaction. It emphasizes that how people define a situation shapes how they behave in it.

Within this framework, DAT explains crime and deviance as learned behaviour – not something people are born with.

We learn how to behave (whether law-abiding or deviant) from the people closest to us, such as family members and friends.

Sutherland was influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, which explored how social environments shape behaviour.

His ideas drew from several traditions, including cultural transmission theory (how culture and values are passed on), ecological theory (how neighbourhoods affect behaviour), and culture conflict theory (how competing values between groups can lead to crime).

Learning Attitudes Toward the Law

Through social interaction, people learn:

When people spend time with those who break the rules, they begin to learn two key things:

Techniques and motives: They learn how to commit crimes (like how to steal or cheat) and develop the motives and justifications that make those acts feel acceptable.
Definitions favourable to law violation: People learn beliefs that support or excuse breaking the law. For example, thinking “Everyone cheats a little” or “It’s not really stealing if the company is rich”.

When someone has more definitions in favour of breaking the law than against it, they’re more likely to engage in criminal behaviour.

This balance – called an “excess of definitions favourable to violation of law” – is the heart of differential association theory.

How Peers and Groups Influence Delinquency

A key strength of DAT is how well it explains the role of peer groups in shaping behaviour.

Gangs and Friendship Groups: Early studies found that delinquent behaviour often spreads through play groups and gangs. Young people in these groups not only learn how to commit crimes but also why they might see those acts as acceptable.
Neighbourhood Culture: In some communities, new residents may learn delinquent behaviour from existing neighbours, passing on a local culture of crime.
Peer Pressure and Drugs: Teenagers are especially influenced by friends. If a young person’s peer group uses drugs, shoplifts, or is sexually active, they are likely to learn that these behaviours are “normal” or acceptable.
Rule-Breaking in Everyday Settings: The same process applies outside street crime. For instance, an athlete who uses steroids might persuade teammates to start “doping,” or a student who cheats might influence classmates to plagiarize. In both cases, deviance spreads through social learning.

Factors That Influence Learning

The strength of these influences depends on four key factors:

Frequency – How often you are exposed to criminal ideas or behaviour.
Duration – How long these influences last.
Priority – How early in life you are exposed to them (early experiences matter most).
Intensity – How emotionally close or important the people teaching you are.

For example, learning deviant behaviour from a close friend you admire has a stronger impact than hearing it from a casual acquaintance.

Factors That Strengthen the Learning Process

Not all social influences are equal. Sutherland identified several factors that affect how strongly someone learns criminal behaviour:

Ratio of deviant to non-deviant people: The more a person interacts with people who commit crimes, the more likely they are to pick up deviant attitudes.
Significant others: Influence is stronger when the deviant person is emotionally important — like a close friend, romantic partner, or family member.
Age of exposure: Learning criminal behaviour early in life (during childhood or adolescence) tends to have a stronger and longer-lasting impact.

For example, a teenager who spends most of their time with friends who shoplift and look up to them is far more likely to copy that behaviour than someone who occasionally hears about it from a distant acquaintance.

Main Principles

Sutherland first presented DAT as seven main ideas, which he later expanded to nine propositions.

These outline how people learn criminal behaviour.

Criminal behaviour is learned: People aren’t born criminals. They learn to engage in criminal acts just as they learn any other kind of behaviour.
Criminal behaviour is learned through interaction with other people: Learning happens through communication and social interaction — by talking, observing, and participating with others.
The main part of this learning happens within close, personal groups: The most influential learning occurs in intimate relationships — family, close friends, or peers — rather than through media or casual contact.
When criminal behaviour is learned, it includes both techniques and motives: This learning involves: Techniques for committing the act (for example, how to shoplift or hack a system). Motives, drives, attitudes, and rationalizations that make the behaviour seem acceptable.
The direction of motives and drives is learned from definitions of the law as favourable or unfavourable: People learn how to view the law — either as something to respect or something to reject — through others’ opinions and attitudes.
A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to law violation: Crime occurs when a person is exposed to more attitudes supporting crime than attitudes condemning it. This “balance” of learned values determines whether someone will conform or deviate.
Differential associations vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity: Not all influences are equal. The impact of these associations depends on:
- Frequency – how often they occur
- Duration – how long they last
- Priority – how early they begin in life
- Intensity – how emotionally important those relationships are
The earlier and closer the contact with deviant individuals, the stronger the learning effect.
The learning process for criminal behaviour is the same as for any other behaviour: Crime is learned through the same psychological processes as learning language, skills, or habits — such as imitation, reinforcement, and repetition.
Criminal behaviour is not explained by general needs and values: People commit crimes to satisfy needs like money, excitement, or social status — but these needs also motivate non-criminal behaviour. Therefore, the difference lies not in the needs themselves, but in how individuals learn to meet them.

Examples

Peer groups and gangs: Young people who spend time with delinquent peers may learn both the methods and mindset for breaking the law — for instance, learning to shoplift or vandalize while seeing it as acceptable within their group.
Drug use and peer influence: A teenager might start using drugs after watching friends do the same. Through these interactions, they learn the technique (how to use) and the rationale (“It helps me relax” or “Everyone else is doing it”).
White-collar crime: Sutherland originally applied DAT to explain elite or corporate crimes. Businesspeople might learn unethical or illegal practices from colleagues or mentors, adopting justifications like “That’s how everyone gets ahead in this industry.”

White-collar Crimes

Sutherland defined white-collar crime as “crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation.”

His goal was to show that even the wealthy and powerful can learn criminal behaviour through the same processes as anyone else.

Learning in privileged environments:

In these settings, people learn deviant behaviour from others around them, such as coworkers, mentors, or business associates.

They pick up:

Techniques for committing the offence (e.g., how to hide fraudulent transactions)
Motives and justifications that make the behaviour seem acceptable (e.g., “everyone does it,” or “it’s just creative accounting”)

This learning happens through everyday communication and shared workplace culture—not through economic struggle.

Professional Socialization: “Crimes of the Suites”

In corporate or professional environments, people may be socialized into unethical practices. They become surrounded by definitions and values that justify cutting corners or breaking laws for profit.

This exposure can lead to an “excess of definitions favourable to law violation”—the same mechanism that DAT identifies in street crime.

Examples of white-collar crime include:

Insider trading and price fixing
Bribery and embezzlement
Illegal rebates or tax evasion
Producing unsafe or hazardous products
Environmental crimes such as toxic pollution

These offences require specialized knowledge and learned rationalizations, which are often passed on through professional networks or workplace norms.

Intergenerational and Organisational Learning

DAT can also explain how deviance continues across generations or within organizations.

In families or companies where corruption or unethical practices are the norm, younger or newer members learn by observing and imitating those around them.

For example:

A young executive might learn fraudulent tactics from a senior manager.
A politician might copy a relative’s corrupt practices.
A child in a powerful family might inherit not only wealth but also a belief that “rules don’t apply to us.”

In all these cases, deviance is learned through social relationships, not driven by poverty or desperation.

Limitations

While DAT transformed how sociologists think about crime, it also faces criticism for being vague and difficult to test in practice.

1. Conceptual Vagueness and Problems with Testing

One of the most common criticisms is that DAT is too vague to test scientifically.

“Excess of definitions” is unclear: It’s difficult to measure or quantify what counts as an “excess of definitions favourable to law violation.” How many pro-crime messages are “too many”?
General vs. specific definitions: DAT doesn’t clearly specify whether definitions are general (e.g., “laws are unfair”) or specific (e.g., “it’s okay to steal from big corporations but not from individuals”).
Changing attitudes: Critics also note that people’s definitions of right and wrong may change over time, making it hard to use them as stable predictors of criminal behaviour.

Because of these issues, researchers find it challenging to test DAT rigorously or to compare findings across studies.

2. Weak Empirical Support and Unclear Mechanisms

Although many studies support parts of the theory, evidence for its exact learning mechanism is weak.

Attitudes vs. behavior: Research shows that the behaviour of delinquent peers often predicts crime better than their attitudes. In other words, what friends do may influence people more than what they say they believe.
Missing explanation for how learning happens: Sutherland never clearly explained how people internalize deviant definitions. Later theorists, like Akers, filled this gap with Social Learning Theory, which added concepts from psychology such as reinforcement (reward and punishment).
However, by doing so, SLT moved away from the purely sociological roots of symbolic interactionism, blending sociology with behavioural psychology.

3. Limited Scope and Incomplete Explanation

DAT also struggles to explain all types of deviance.

Not all deviance is learned: It doesn’t account for behaviour that isn’t intentional or socially learned, such as that linked to mental illness or biological conditions.
Uneven outcomes: Many people who are exposed to deviant peers don’t become deviant, while others with non-deviant backgrounds do. The theory doesn’t fully explain why.
Missing the role of self and identity: Although DAT is part of the interactionist tradition, it pays little attention to the individual’s self-concept or how identity shapes behaviour. For example, it doesn’t explain how people interpret or resist deviant labels.

This limitation led to the development of Differential Social Control (DSC) Theory by Heimer and Matsueda.

DSC built on DAT by adding ideas about role-taking and reflected appraisals – how individuals internalize others’ views of them – and offered a broader framework linking social structure, identity, and delinquent behaviour.

Their research supported the DAT element (that anti-social attitudes predict delinquency) but provided a more complete model of how deviance develops.

Strengths

1. A Major Shift in Criminological Thinking

Sutherland’s theory marked a turning point in criminology.

Instead of focusing on individual defects or biological causes, DAT showed that crime arises from social processes.

It placed learning and interaction at the centre of understanding deviance.

2. Emphasis on Social Learning

DAT explains that people learn criminal behaviour the same way they learn conforming behaviour – through relationships with family, friends, and peers.

This helped normalize the study of crime, framing it as a result of everyday socialization rather than personal pathology.

3. Supported by Research on Peer Influence

Many studies since Sutherland’s time have shown that peer groups strongly influence delinquency, especially during adolescence.

Young people often learn techniques and attitudes supporting deviance through close friendships -supporting the basic logic of DAT.

4. Foundation for Later Theories

Sutherland’s work inspired later developments, especially Social Learning Theory (SLT) by Ronald Akers.

SLT refined DAT by explaining how learning occurs, incorporating principles from psychology such as reinforcement and imitation.

These ideas have even been applied beyond criminology – for example, in health promotion and behaviour change campaigns.

Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development

The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) is a famous long-term research project that followed a group of boys from childhood into adulthood to understand how criminal and antisocial behaviour develops.

The claim that the CSDD supports Differential Association Theory (DAT) – the idea that crime is learned through interaction – is sometimes made, but this connection isn’t clearly supported by the research evidence.

In fact, the study’s findings are more commonly linked to Self-Control Theory (SCT) than to DAT.

What the CSDD Actually Examined

The CSDD, led by David P. Farrington, began in the early 1960s and tracked hundreds of boys from working-class areas of South London across several decades.

Its data has been widely used to test different criminological theories.

One specific study using this dataset – conducted by Polakowski (1994)—looked at Gottfredson and Hirschi’s Self-Control Theory (SCT) rather than DAT.

Here’s what that research involved:

Data Source: Six waves of information from the CSDD.
Behavioural Indicators: Reports from mothers, teachers, and peers about traits such as clumsiness, restlessness, and short attention span.
Aim: To test whether these early behavioural traits could predict later misbehaviour and criminal convictions.
Findings: The results supported Self-Control Theory, showing that low self-control in childhood was linked to higher levels of delinquency later in life.

It’s worth noting that Polakowski’s study didn’t include measures of social learning or peer influence (key components of DAT), so it couldn’t directly test Sutherland’s theory.

Why the CSDD Is Linked to Self-Control Theory (Not DAT)

The two theories approach crime from very different angles:

Theory	Focus	Key Idea
Differential Association Theory (DAT)	Social learning and interaction	People learn criminal behaviour and justifications from others—especially close friends and family.
Self-Control Theory (SCT)	Individual traits and self-regulation	Crime results from low self-control, often caused by poor parenting in early childhood. People with low self-control act impulsively when tempted.

The CSDD’s findings—especially those showing that early traits like impulsivity and restlessness predict later offending – fit much more closely with Self-Control Theory.

They support the idea that crime stems from internal traits formed early in life, rather than being primarily learned from social groups, as DAT would predict.

Summary

While the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development is one of the most important long-term studies in criminology, there’s no clear evidence that it directly supports Differential Association Theory.

Instead, most of its findings have been used to support Self-Control Theory, which emphasizes personal traits, early socialization, and self-regulation over the social learning processes proposed by Sutherland.

In short:

The CSDD helps us understand how personality and early upbringing shape criminal behaviour — but it doesn’t provide evidence that people learn crime primarily through association, as DAT suggests.

References

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