Learning to Be Bad: Adverse Social Conditions, Social Schemas, and Crime*

Abstract

In this paper we develop and test a new approach to explain the link between social factors and individual offending. We argue that seemingly disparate family, peer, and community conditions lead to crime because the lessons communicated by these events are similar and promote social schemas involving a hostile view of people and relationships, a preference for immediate rewards, and a cynical view of conventional norms. Further, we posit that these three schemas are interconnected and combine to form a criminogenic knowledge structure that gives rise to situational interpretations legitimating criminal behavior. Structural equation modeling with a sample of roughly 700 hundred African American teens provided strong support for the model. The findings indicated that persistent exposure to adverse conditions such as community crime, discrimination, harsh parenting, deviant peers and low neighborhood collective efficacy increased commitment to the three social schemas. The three schemas were highly intercorrelated and combined to form a latent construct that strongly predicted increases in crime. Further, in large measure the effect of the various adverse conditions on increases in crime was indirect through their impact on this latent construct. We discuss the extent to which the social schematic model presented in the paper might be used to integrate concepts and findings from several of the major theories of criminal behavior.

Factors that Influence Trajectories of Delinquency Throughout Adolescence

“…Coefficient alpha for each wave were as follows: wave 1, .78; wave 2, .59; wave 3, .67; wave 4, .44. This measure has been used in a number of past studies to assess delinquency and crime within this age range (Simons and Burt 2011;Burt et al 2012;Su et al 2011). …”

Interpersonal Racial Discrimination, Ethnic-racial Socialization, and Offending: Risk and Resilience among African American Females

“…At least 13 recent studies document a link between individual experiences with racial discrimination and concurrent or subsequent offending. These studies find that interpersonal racial discrimination is associated with self-reported conduct problems (Brody, et al, 2006;DuBois, Burk-Braxton, Swenson, Tevendale, & Hardesty, 2002;Nyborg & Curry, 2003;Simons & Burt, 2011;Simons et al, 2003), violence (Caldwell, Kohn-Wood, Schmeelk-Cone, Chavous, & Zimmerman, 2004;Simons, Simons, & Burt, 2006;Stewart & Simons, 2006), delinquency (Burt et al, 2012;Martin, et al, 2011;Unnever, Cullen, Mathers, McClure, & Allison, 2009), and official reports of arrest (McCord & Ensminger, 1997. A number of different measures of discrimination are used, but all ask the respondents to report whether they have experienced one or more negative acts because, from their perspective, they are black.…”

“…In doing so, we highlight interpersonal racial discrimination as a potent criminogenic risk factor contributing to racial disparities in crime. To link discrimination experiences to offending, we draw upon a recently developed social schematic perspective, which theorizes the process through which social factors, such as racial discrimination, influence general offending through cognitive knowledge structures (Simons & Burt, 2011). We also explore the protective effects of two forms of ERS-cultural socialization and preparation for bias-building explicitly on a study of African American males (Burt et al, 2012).…”

An Experimental Test of Deviant Modeling

“…The correspondence between the two measures is then calculated (see, for example, Jensen 1972;Matsueda and Anderson 1998;Simons and Burt 2011;Warr and Stafford 1991).…”