Direct reinforcement and internalisation

1. By this point the behaviour has been observed, stored and expected to pay off, and the theory now has to explain why it continues.
2. Internalisation is the behaviour becoming part of how the person sees themselves, so it no longer needs an outside prompt.
3. Direct reinforcement is the reward that comes to the person themselves once they have performed the act.

Internalisation

1. Repeated observation of a model you identify with builds up a stored version of the act that you can carry out unaided.
2. At the same time the act stops looking odd or wrong, because the people you take your standards from do it.
3. Once that has happened the behaviour is internalised, meaning it has been taken on as part of your own way of behaving.
4. The test of internalisation is that the behaviour keeps going when the model is absent and nobody is watching.

Direct reinforcement

1. The first time the person performs the act themselves, the outcome falls on them rather than on a model.
2. The reward can be the goods or money kept, the status gained in the group, the excitement of the act, or not being caught at all.
3. Any of those makes a second attempt more likely, which is how a single offence becomes a habit.
4. If the act brings arrest, a fine or a court order instead, the reward is missing and repetition becomes less likely.

The nature/nurture criticism

1. The nature/nurture debate asks how far behaviour comes from inherited biology and how far from experience and environment.
2. Social learning theory sits almost entirely on the nurture side, treating offending as learnt from the people around you.
3. That leaves nature out, so it cannot account for any inherited contribution to temperament, impulsivity or arousal.
4. Offending running in a family is the clearest problem, because shared genes or shared brain dysfunction explain the same pattern as shared models.
5. Eysenck's theory takes the opposite position by starting from the central nervous system, which is why the two are set against each other.
6. Both sides contribute, and a learnt behaviour is more likely in somebody whose biology already inclines them towards it.

Other criticisms and strengths

1. Strengths: why the explanation is still used.
   1. It explains why offending clusters in families, friendship groups and particular areas without treating anybody as born criminal.
   2. It explains persistence rather than only the first offence, because reinforcement keeps the behaviour going.
   3. It leads to practical interventions, since supplying positive role models and rewarding pro-social behaviour follows directly from it.
2. Further weaknesses: where the explanation runs out.
   1. Many people observe offending, and even see it rewarded, without ever offending, which the theory cannot explain on its own.
   2. It cannot explain a first offence that nobody modelled, such as an opportunistic act with no example to copy.
   3. The evidence is mostly laboratory work on aggressive play rather than real offending, so Cooper and Mackie (1986) supports the mechanism at one remove.

Turning this into marks

1. When you evaluate, give one point for nurture and one for nature and keep them genuinely separate rather than one point turned around.
2. Say which reinforcement you mean, direct or vicarious, because writing that the behaviour was rewarded does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. State what the nature/nurture debate is before you use it, so the criticism rests on an explained idea rather than a label, and finish by saying how far learning explains criminality.
4. The mark most often lost is explaining only the first offence, when internalisation and direct reinforcement are what account for the behaviour being repeated.