Transcript Sociology as science - Washington State University

Criminology as science
1.
2.
Science
Causality
Course website

http://cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/soc3612/
http://cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/soc3612/
http://cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/soc3612/
Criminology
Sutherland and Cressey (1978)
 ”Criminology is the a body of knowledge
regarding juvenile delinquency and crime.
It includes the process of making laws, of
breaking laws, and of reacting to the
breaking of laws”
 Criminology is the scientific approach to
studying criminal behavior
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What is science?
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Science is derived from
the Latin “scire”, to know
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Science is a social enterprise that
attempts to provide answers to our
questions about state of the world
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Judged on this basis, science is no
different from philosophy, religion, or
even some forms of magic
Science
Science employs scientific
method
 None of the mentioned sources
of knowledge apply scientific
method
 Causality statements
 Determinism
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Elements of Scientific Method
Reliance on the senses (empiricism is a
core element)
 A priori statement of hypothesis
 Replicability (repetition of experiments or
studies utilizing the same methodology)
 Communicability of results
 Institutionalized skepticism
 Potential to falsify any hypothesis
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How do we know
what we know?
World is round
 It’s cold on the dark side of the moon
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(your
physics instructor told this, or maybe you read it on the NASA
Web page)

People speak Chinese in China
(You may have
read National Geographic )

Vitamin C prevents cold
(You may have read Health
magazine)
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We know all these things because
somebody told them to us, and we
believed what we were told
There two ways to know things

Agreement (we cannot learn through
personal experience all you need to know)
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Direct experience-observation
(possible conflict between something
everyone else knows and what you
experience)
Example
Party with excellent food (one meal is
especially zesty)
 Your experience provided you with this
knowledge
 You were told that “you have been eating
breaded, deep-fried worms”
 Your response is dramatic: your stomach
rebels, and you throw up all over the
living room rug
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Point of the story
Both your feelings about the meal are real
 Initial liking was your own experience
 Feeling of disgust was strictly a product of
the agreement with those around you
that worms aren’t fit to eat
 What is wrong with worms?
 “How do you know whether worms are
really good or really bad to eat?”

More scientific example
The particle nature of light dominated the
field
 There was an agreement
 Diffraction (“bending'' of light waves
around obstacles in its path) could not be
explained
 Light is waves
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Agreement vs Experiment
Most of what we know is a matter of
agreement
 Little of it is based on personal
experience and discovery
 Process of learning is to accept what
everybody around you “know” (this is
secondhand knowledge)

Sources of secondhand knowledge
Tradition (can both assist and hinder
human inquire)
 Authority (we trusts in the judgments of
people who have special training,
expertise, and credentials)
 Example: political leader with no
biochemical expertise who declares that
importance and danger of a particular
drug, professors who are trained
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Goal of science
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Combine deductive logic with precise
empirical observations of individuals
behavior in order to discover and confirm
a set of causal laws that can be used to
predict general pattern of human activity
Can criminology be called a science?
When we talk about science we
think of natural sciences
What is different about people?
Criminology studies people
 Human beings are qualitatively different
from the objects of study in the natural
sciences (rocks, stars, chemical
compounds, etc)
 Humans think and learn, have an
awareness of themselves and their past
 These unique human characteristics are
the reason for the debate how criminology
should look like

Determinism and people
August Comte (1798-1857)
 Positivism
 Aimed toward understanding and
elimination of crime through the
systematic application of the scientific
method
 Comte claimed to have invented the new
science of sociology
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Positivistic Criminology
Focus on the actor not the act
 The individual is not responsible for his or
her actions
 The criminal is radically different form the
non-criminal
 The criminal is moved by forces which
s/he is unaware.
 Punishment is inapplicable
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Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)
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Observed the physical characteristics
(head, body, arms, and skin) of Italian
prisoners and compared them to Italian soldiers
Asymmetry of the face or head, large monkeylike ears, large lips, twisted nose, excessive
cheek bones, long arms, excessive skin wrinkles
The male with five or more of these physical
anomalies is marked as a born criminal
Female criminals are also born criminals, but
they may be identified with as dew as three
anomalies
Frontispiece of
Criminal Man
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Lombroso claimed that to
the trained eye, the eye of
the detective, these
people would clearly be
organized into categories
Those in group "A" are all
shoplifters, "B" are
swindlers, "H" are purse
snatchers, "E" are
murderers, etc.
And supposedly you can
see a man's real character
at a glance.
The New Sciences of Detection
By the 1880s, urban police forces began
developing new techniques for keeping
track of criminals, especially new
techniques of record-keeping
 Most of these techniques were heavily
influenced by criminology
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Mug Shots
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The mug shot originated in the
1880s, in studies designed to
explore the relationship
between appearance and
criminal behavior
These men are all forgers. The
New York Police Department
compiled this record in part to
see if all forgers looked alike,
or all murderers looked alike,
or if all burglars had the same
facial features.
Policy implications of Lombroso’s theory
Theories of genetic superiority call for
policy in which whole peoples are to be
eliminated from the genetic stock of the
world in order to prevent crime.
 These theories call for castration of those
said to be habitual criminals in order to
prevent their producing more defective
children who, presumably will be criminals.
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Commitment to Criminology
B. Frankel (1986) about two continuums
on the social science commitment
 Pluralistic approach (Qualitative)
 Singular approach (Quantitative)
 Compromise
 P. Maxim (1999)
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Quantitative
approach
Qualitative
approach
Qualitative vs. Quantitative approach
Qualitative research uses soft data
(observations, pictures, interviews,
newspapers, stories, interpretative
approach)
 Quantitative research uses hard data
(statistics, causality)
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Causality
Controversial issue in criminology
 David Hume (1748) stressed that causality
could never been directly observed
 Causality is an interpretation of
observables (causal statements are always
inferential)
 Rooster and the Sun
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Causality in criminology
Can we be certain making any kind of
causal explanations in criminology?
 Poverty causes crime
 Social class is related to crime
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Example of different causal
explanations
Hirschi (“social bond theory”) stated that
attachment to significant others decreases
chances of criminal behavior
 Empirical research has shown that
attachment to delinquent friends/parents
in reality increases chances of being
involved in crime
 On contrary, social learning theory argues
that association and imitation of the
friends’ behavior is responsible for an
individual’s criminal behavior
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Causality
How do we know if A causes B?
 Time
 Association
 No other factor causes both
(spuriousness)
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Spuriousness
Watching TV
Deviant
behavior
Spuriousness
Lack of
supervision
Watching TV
Deviant
behavior
Causality
Requires some assumptions about the
world
 Reality is real, it exists “out there” and
waits to be discovered
 Kant argued that reality exists
independently of people’s perception
about it
 Flower or tree will not change depending
on what we think of them
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Assumptions for Causality
Reality is ordered (not chaotic)
 Behavior of humans is patterned
 Without this assumption the logic and
predictions would be impossible
 Reality is stable, but knowledge about it is
additive
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Controversy
Not all scholars agree with those
assumptions about reality
 Reality can be changed (delinquency and
supervision)
 People can change the history (reality)
 One person can change a lot (Hitler)
 Interpretative approach
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Interpretative approach states
Social reality is largely what people
perceive it to be
 Reality is fluid and fragile (it is not waiting
“out there”)
 People possess an internal sense of
reality (subjective reality)
 We can only study people’s definitions and
interpretations of reality but not reality
itself
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Examples of subjective realities
Elephant and blind men
 One dollar bill
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Eating dogs
More examples (four temperaments)
The same situation
evokes absolutely
different reactions
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Four models of behavior,
How can we make
predictions?
Thomas’s theorem (1928)
Another argument against causality
 “If people define situation as real, they are
real in their consequences”
 This theorem is related to the subjectivity
of reality
 Examples?...
 What do you think of causality in sociology
now?
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How to solve the problem of causality?
Interpretative approach does not say that
social behavior is chaotic
 There is some pattern in human behavior
 But this pattern is not due to the causal
laws
 It is created out of the system of social
conventions people generate during their
interactions
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Closer view at Causality
Suppose we agreed upon possibility of
causation
 There are two types of causal
relationships: deterministic and
probabilistic
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Causality in Natural Science
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Cause-and-effect model (Deterministic
perspective)
To be a cause, event X must be both a
“necessary condition” and “sufficient condition”
for the event Y
“necessary condition”- in the absence of X, Y will
not occur
“sufficient condition” – Y always occurs in the
presence of X
Example of deterministic relationship
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Gravity causes objects to fall down
Gravity is a necessary and sufficient condition for
something to fall down
Look at the following statement:
“Good grades cause high occupational
attainments”
Are good grades a necessary condition for high
occupational attainment?
Are they a sufficient condition?
Causality in Sociology
Deterministic perspective is not sufficient
for criminology
 Probabilistic perspective is more
appropriate
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Probabilistic perspective
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“The presence of X renders the occurrence of Y
more probable”
The probabilistic concept of causality suggests
that human behavior is neither completely
determined by external forces nor completely
outcome of the unfettered exercise of free will
choices
Behavior is best understood from" softdeterminism” perspective
Soft Determinism
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“Various factors influence and limit actions
but leave room for individuals choices that
cannot be completely predicted”
Why some scholars are
against causation in criminology?
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Humans are not predictable whereas natural
objects are
This view is based complete ignorance of the
substance of the natural sciences
Subatomic particles are governed by relationships
that are inherently stochastic
Indeterminacy is an essential feature of the
subatomic physical world
Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty principle”
Against Causality?

One does not have to accept the
deterministic worldview to do science:
indeed, a deterministic worldview is no
longer tenable
Humans are goal-oriented
 Ironically, this view serves to simplify the
task of finding the pattern in human
behavior
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