Conformity, Deviance

and Crime
Dr. Liaqat Ali
Assistant Professor
Types of Conformity

 Three types of conformity

1. Normative Conformity- yielding to group pressure because a person wants to
fit in with a group.
following culture and social norms
2. Informational Conformity- occurs when a person lacks knowledge and looks to
a group for guidance.
in society, many people confirm and look to others that how to behave in a social
situation
3. Ingratiational Conformity- a person conforms to impress or gain favor/
acceptance from other people.
Practice in many organizations where we give favor to someone to happy or to
impress
Classification of Deviance and Crime
John Hagan(1994)
 Sociologist John Hagan(1994) classifies various types of deviance and crime
along three dimensions.
 The severity of social response
 Harmfulness of the deviant or criminal act
 Degree of public agreement on if the act is deviant
 For example, people disagree about whether smoking marijuana should be
considered a crime, especially because
 it may have therapeutic value in treating the pain associated with cancer.
 In contrast, virtually everyone agrees that murder is seriously deviant.
Types of Deviance and Crime
John Hagan(1994)

 Social diversions: minor acts of deviance that is generally perceived as

relatively harmless and that evoke at most, a mild societal reaction such as
amusement.
 Minor, harmless acts as well as forms of symbolic or expressive deviance
involving adolescents
 Examples: Particular clothing, hairstyles etc.
 Generally speaking, the more serious the form of deviance, the less likely it is
to occur
 Social deviations: noncriminal departures from norms that are nonetheless
subject to official control.
 Some members of the public regard them is somewhat harmful, whereas
other members of the public do not.
 Norm-violating behavior that is may not illegal but nevertheless may be
subject to social stigma through condemnation.
 Examples: use of Alcohol,
 Conflict crimes: Where members of the community disagree over whether
behaviors in question are harmful, wrong or deserving of severe criminal
sanction
 illegal deviant acts that many people consider harmful to society.
 However many people think they are not harmful. They are punishable by the
state.
 Examples: gambling, drug use, public drunkenness, etc.
 Consensus crimes: Acts deemed very harmful and wrong and for which the
harshest criminal sanctions are reserved
 illegal acts that nearly all people agree are bad and harmful to society
greatly. The state inflicts severe punishment for consensus crimes

 Examples: Homicide, attempted homicide, violent assault with a weapon,

violent sexual assault, armed robbery, kidnapping, & Theft.
General type of crime

 White Collar Crimes

 a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority.
 Crime committed by respectable people of high status in the course of
their occupation.
 Often unreported and difficult to detect.
 Economic, and social costs are far greater than all street crime
combined.
 According to the US Department of Justice, the cost of white-collar
crime is 18 times higher than street crime.
 These crimes are typically nonviolent but can be extremely damaging to
society
General Types of crime

 Blue Collar (Otherwise known as crimes in the streets)

 In criminology, blue-collar crime is any crime committed by an
individual from a lower social class as opposed to white-collar crime
 These are easier to detect, people are more afraid of these crimes.
 Blue-collar crimes are more sensational crimes and thereby put more pressure
on police due to fear.
 blue-collar crime may involve the use of force and, because more people are
injured, there is a greater chance that the victim will report the crime.
 In contrast, in cases of white-collar crime, it shades into corporate crime and
there is less chance that any crime will be reported
 The most common forms is rape, robbery, assault, burglary, and auto theft—
which occur most frequently on urban streets.
 Racial minority citizens account for a disproportionately high number of
arrests for street crimes.
Types of Blue Collar Crimes:

A. Crimes Against Person/Violent crime:

 Crimes against the person involve violence or the threat of violence
against others, violence including:
 Homicide: refers to the killing of one human being by another.

 Rape: Unlawful sexual intercourse without his/her consent with the intent to
rape.
 Aggravated assault: involves attacking a person with the intent to cause
serious bodily injury by using weapons
 Robbery: Robbery, unlike simple theft, also involves force or the threat of
force or putting a victim in fear and is thus considered a violent crime.
 B. Crimes against Property:
 Crimes against property involve the theft of goods belonging to others, including:
 Larceny: is the taking of property with the intent of depriving the owner of its
use
 Larceny or simple theft accounts for more than two-thirds of all property
arrests and is the most common index offense.
 Larceny is a crime involving the unlawful taking or theft of the personal
property of another person or business.
 Burglary: This occurs when a person illegally enters a building or part of a
building to commit an offense.
 Arson: involves the malicious burning of the property of others.
 act of deliberately setting fire to property.
 Embezzlement: this takes place when a person uses funds for a different
purpose than they were intended to be used.
 Embezzlers might create bills and receipts for activities that did not occur and
then use the money paid for personal expenses.
 Embezzlement: refers to the fraudulent conversion of the property of another
by one who is already in lawful possession thereof with the intent to defraud the
victim
C. Victimless Crime/ Crime against public Order
 This category involves a violation of laws in which there are no readily apparent
victims because it is an act that all involved parties choose to be involved in, a
misnomer, including prostitution, gambling, drug abuse, and pornography.
 Criminal sanctions against these activities constitute an unwarranted intrusion into
individual privacy and an indefensible extension of the government’s authority.
 However, some people argue that these crimes are not victimless crimes, because
social norms are violated (Territo 2004).
 Some argue that enforcing laws against these activities overburdens the police,
the courts, and the prisons and increases congestion problems in the criminal
justice system.
 Pornography is the representation of sexual behavior in books, pictures, statues,
motion pictures, and other media that is intended to cause sexual excitement.
Juvenile Delinquency:

 Offenses committed by persons under 16 years of age.

 Juvenile delinquency may be described as a status in a juvenile or a young
person characterized by anti-social behavior, waywardness, and
incorrigibility.
 White-Collar Crimes (Otherwise known as crime in suits)
These crimes are also known as business/economic and political crimes.
These are crimes committed by people of high social position in the course of
their occupations.
 They rarely involve violence, but they involve significant public harm.
 White collar crime victimizes everyone and, economic costs spread over large
population.
Deviance across Cultures

 sociologists use the term “deviant,” they are making a social judgment,
never a moral one.
 If a particular behavior is considered deviant, it means that it violates the
values and norms or a particular group, not that it is inherently wrong.
 Much of the literature on deviance focuses on crime
 How different cultures define very different behaviors as criminal or not and
the vast differences seen in how crimes are punished.

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FUNCTIONALIST VIEW OF DEVIANCE

DURKHEIM
 DEVIANCE OCCURS IN ALL SOCIETIES

 DEVIANCE CLARIFIES RULES

 DEVIANCE PROMOTES SOCIAL CHANGE

 Functionalists argue that deviance serves a positive social function by

clarifying moral boundaries and promoting social cohesion.
CONFLICT VIEW OF DEVIANCE

 The powerful use law to protect their interests

 Law is used to control lower classes
 Affluent not prosecuted as is poor
 The poor and uneducated are more likely to be arrested and prosecuted

 Conflict theorists believe that a society’s inequalities are

reproduced in its definitions of deviance, so the less powerful are more
likely to be criminalized.
INTERACTIONIST VIEW OF DEVIANCE

 DEVIANCE IS LEARNED THROUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION (base of society)

 Symbolic Interactionist theories of deviance focus on how interpersonal

relations and everyday interactions shape definitions of deviance and influence
those who engage in deviant behavior.
Why do we conform?

 One main reason why people conform in society is that we have been taught
all our lives in the form of rules.
 Solomon Asch credits conformity to uncertainty in unfamiliar situations.
 If someone is in a situation where they are unsure of what to do, they
conform to the ways of the people around them.
Merton theory (Strain theory) Robert Merton (1910-2003)

Merton’s structural strain theory argues that the tension or strain between
socially approved goals and an individual’s ability to meet those goals through
socially approved means will lead to deviance as individuals reject either the
goals (achieving success), the means (hard work, education), or both.

 The theory has been further explained in their typology called “Morton
Typology” as mentioned under
Conformity
Innovation
Ritualism

an Employ
Retreatisim

Drug
Rebellion

the individual rejects both the cultural goals and

traditional means of achieving them but actively attempts
to replace both elements of the society with different
goals
Solomon Asch Experiment
 Solomon Asch (1951) conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to
which social pressure from a group could affect a person to conform.
 (Emile Durkhaim E.g Suicide )
 Using the line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with four
to six confederates.
 The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be
when presented with the line task.
 The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other
seven participants were also real participants like themselves.
 Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or
C) was most like the target line.
 The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the
row and gave his or her answer last.
 In some trials, the seven confederates gave the wrong answer.
Solomon Asch Experiment
 There were 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the wrong answer on
12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real
participant would conform to the majority view.
 Results: Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to
the majority view.
 Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least
once and 25% of participants never conformed.
Solomon Asch Experiment

 Asch deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a
'vision' test; the real purpose was to see how the 'naive' participant would
react to the behavior of the confederates.
 Perrin and Spencer (1980) carried out an exact replication of the original
Asch experiment using British engineering, mathematics, and chemistry
students as participants.
 The results were clear cut: on only one out of 396 trials did a participant
conform with the incorrect majority.
 This shows the Asch experiment has poor reliability.
“Broken Windows” Theory (Wilson & Kelling 1982)

 James Q Wilson developed zero-tolerance policies whilst working as an

advisor to President Reagan in the 1980s. his views were also
influential to the British government of that time.

 This policy is based on the idea that if small crimes are allowed to go
unchallenged then this leads to more serious crimes being committed

 High levels of crime occur where informal social control over anti-
social behaviour has broken down (socialization)

 If low-level anti-social behaviour is prevented then this does not

escalate to serious crimes being committed.
Broken Windows Theory
James Wilson and George Kelling

 The analogy of an abandoned building – once one window gets broken –

then all the windows soon get smashed.

 If you leave a broken window unfixed, it’s an indicator of a lack of

social concern and will lead to more significant social and neighborhood
decay

 Paying attention to the details of a neighborhood or community can

impact crime and fear of crime

 The best way to fight more serious crime is to fight the disorder that
precedes it

31
Source: Kelling, G and J. Q. Wilson. (1982) Broken Windows. The Atlantic Monthly. Vol. 249 (3): 29-38.
 Skinner’s Theory
Skinner was one of the most influential of American psychologists and
behaviorist, he developed the theory of operant conditioning –
 the idea that behavior is determined by its consequences, be the
reinforcements or punishments, which make it more or less likely that the
behavior will occur again
“All we need to know in order to describe and explain behavior is this: actions
followed by good outcomes are likely to recur, and actions followed by
bad outcomes are less likely to recur.” (Skinner, 1953)

 It states that an individual’s behavior is a function of its consequences.

 It is based on the “law of effect”, i.e, an individual’s behavior with positive
consequences tends to be repeated,
 but an individual’s behavior with negative consequences tends not to be
repeated.
 LAW OF EFFECT
Behavior Better state Increased
of affairs probability of
behavior occurring again

Behavior Worse state Decreased

of affairs probability of
behavior occurring again
Behavior A
Behavior B
Behavior C Better state Behavior C
Behavior D of affairs emerges as the
Behavior E most probable
Labeling Theory
 the theory of how the self-identity and behavior of individuals may
determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them.
 Concerned with processes by which labels become attached to people and
behaviors.
 Those with power assign labels that stick.
 Labeling various kinds of deviance, with the “sick” label is called the
medicalization of deviance.
 Labeling theory claims that deviance is a consequence of external
judgments, or labels, which both modify the individual’s self-concept and
change the way others respond to the labeled person.
 E.g. 9/10 nurses are female or 87% are engineers are men
 This is how labeling theory disincentive to join a particular job
 Black are criminals in the US, Race, and police intact with black &white
American
Correlates of Crime

 Age. Young adults constitute the great majority of those arrested for street
crime, both in country and around the world.

 Sex. Young males are most often arrested for virtually every category of
crime.
 Social class. Poverty and weak access to jobs and education are certainly
related to crime rates.

 Race. In US African-Americans are disproportionately represented in lineups,

in prisons, and on death row.
Situational Crime Prevention

 Clarke 1992 advocates policies and practices which

make it difficult for crime to be committed.
 People will commit offences when the benefits of
offending outweigh the costs.
 Cost should be greater than the benefit
 Newman 1972 introduced the idea of “defensible
space” – the design of streets and houses could make
them safer.
 “Target Hardening” – improving security, CCTV
Strategies for Reducing Crime

1. Reduce social inequality and poverty.

2. Replace low-wage jobs with jobs that pay a living wage.

4. Increase the social and economic stability of communities.

5. Improve education in all communities.