Today I’m going to be focusing on the topic of criminal behaviour in terms of situational and societal aspects. I’m also going to talk about the line between “good” and “evil” and how most people are not “bad” but can be pushed to do bad things depending on the situation. I believe this is an important subject to discuss because for some people it can be an uncomfortable topic. A lot of people have a set opinion on who or why people behave criminally and I believe that if we can deliberate and continue to study/analyze the aspects of criminal psychology we can get a deeper understanding as to what, why, and how individuals can become this way. I hope that by talking about this, I can convey the message that this topic should not be something that people fear and make assumptions about but something that we should work towards understanding and eventually decreasing.
In my opinion, most cases of criminal behaviour comes down to nature vs. nurture. The idea of nature vs nurture is a concept that can give insight for possible societal reasons that lead to criminal activity. The concept of nature vs nurture is supposed to determine whether human behaviour is based on what we inherit in terms of genetics or what we acquire or learn throughout our lives. People generally aren't born criminal. We aren’t born with a set of morals or an idea or what is right or wrong, that is something that is taught to us or picked up by us as we grow up. For that reason, it can be proven that the things we learn as well as the social situations we are put in have a big impact on the decisions we make. Our morals, values, and beliefs are all aspects of each individual’s life that is decided as we grow up. We can choose what to believe in, and what to value and that is the basis of this system we create that determines decision making throughout our lives. In terms of criminal behaviour, social environments and social influences can impact our decision making skills, which can be a societal reason as to why people choose to partake in criminal activity. Social environments consist of our physical surroundings as well as our social relationships. When you think about it these two aspects play a big role when deciding what is right and wrong, how to act, and what to do in the situations we encounter. That’s why I believe that when it comes to criminal behaviour, society itself has to take some responsibility for why some regular people can possibly become criminal.
Just one example is how a lot of people in our society have been victim to or involved in some sort of criminal activity. Some studies have shown that over the past 5 years about 60% of the entire world’s city residents have either directly or indirectly fallen victim to violence, crime, and felony. This shows how the increasing crime rate; violent or non-violent is a serious threat for societies around the world. It proves how society continuously contributes to promoting a social environment that propagates criminal behaviour which then directly relates to the amount of people who are actually committing these crimes. In today’s world we see a lot of violence on the daily, what we don’t realize is how what happens in our society can directly reflect the people growing up in it. If children growing up are seeing violence all around them, it can be really difficult for them follow a different path than what they are seeing, and that is part of the reason why youth crime rates are higher than they should be. In Canada there were 101,000 youth aged from 12 to 17 who were accused of Criminal Code violations in 2014. That makes the youth crime rate 4,322 per 100,000 in the youth population alone. Although youth only make up 7% of Canada’s population, they constitute 13% of people who are accused of a crime. That’s just people accused of crimes; In 2015/2016 there were about 130,000 adult and youth offenders in custody in Canada. See, People always like to blame the individual themselves, saying that they are just bad people, but at some point it has to be more than only the individual’s fault. Those 130,000 people that were/are in prison can’t all come down to just simply being bad people.
This is where that line between “good” and “bad” comes into play. Most people are not bad people but they can be pushed over the line depending on the situation. In my TED talk video; “ The Psychology of Evil” by Philip Zimbardo, he talks about how authority plays a big role when it comes to right and wrong and how often people will find themselves doing something they thought they wouldn't because someone told them to. This gives us insight on why criminals may do the things they do and how by changing the system itself you could possibly decrease the amount of criminal activity. One example of this is the Stanford Prison Experiment which was created by Philip Zimbardo and talked about in my video. The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment that was held to determine the power situations have on shaping individual’s behaviour. It focused on the psychological effect of perceived power by taking volunteers and dividing them into “prisoners” and “guards”. The people chosen for this experiment were “good” people, they had no criminal backgrounds, psychological issues or medical problems so there was no reason to believe that these individuals would do anything bad. Throughout the experiment the prison guards ended up really taking on their roles and sometimes went as far as actually hurting the “prisoners”. The experiment only ended up lasting 6 days of the intended 14 days due to the guard’s brutality and the prisoners suffering. This experiment concluded that the situation that these people were put in as opposed to their individual personalities is what caused their behaviour. This helps further prove my point that people often mold to what either someone or society is telling them to do and that has a very big impact on people. It can often lead people to do things that they ordinarily wouldn’t do and that is a much bigger issue than individual people just being bad.
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Another example that helps prove my point is the Milgram experiment. This experiment was done by picking a 2 volunteers, one was a “teacher” and the other was the “learner”. So the teacher would ask the learner questions and for each wrong answer, a electricity shock that would continuously get more severe would be administered to the learner.
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As you can see in the video, even when the individual knew what he was doing was wrong, he continued because he was told to. This experiment helps prove my point that the circumstances people get put into and the authority that is put over them is really able to shape human behaviour as well as influence the decisions people make. Seemingly normal and good people were able to hurt another good person because they were thought they should.
Although this may seem irrational to people, It gets us thinking if we were put in a situation where we could hurt someone would we show obedience or would we stick to our values and morals? See most of us would say we would never hurt someone because we were told to. You would stick to your morals and your values and wouldn’t think of hurting someone for no reason, but i’m sure the people in the Milgram experiment thought so too. In reality none of us know what we are capable of when we get put in certain situations and that’s why it is important to understand criminal behaviour. Again, it is really easy to blame criminals themselves and say that they are bad people who do bad things but the reality is our society influences criminal behaviour and that is something that is hard to change.
I hope that my presentation helped shed some light on the topic of criminal behaviour in terms of situational influence on individuals in society. This is an important topic to discuss because I feel that criminal activity always gets brushed aside as something we can’t control. And Although crime and criminal activity is something that will most likely always be around, I feel that if we get a better understanding of the situational and societal aspects of criminal behaviour we can take a step towards possibly reducing the amount of people who cross that line from “good” to “bad” and eventually decreasing the amount of criminal activity.