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Advantages
- research support for SLT - series of studies carried out by Bandura et al (1961). This involved children observing aggressive and non-aggressive adult models and then being tested for imitative learning in the absence of the model. Children in the aggression condition reproduced a good deal of physically and verbally aggressive behaviour while none of the children in the non-aggressive group made such remarks.
- SLT applications to cultural differences - SLT can be used to explain the presence of cultural differences in criminal behaviour. eg. aggression is virtually none existent in certain tribal communities, because there is no model or direct reinforcement for it
- large real-life application scope - theories can be applied to every group in society rather than just those in low socioeconomic positions, as is common for many explanations. eg. Sutherland coined the term 'white collar crime' to refer to financially motivated, nonviolent or non directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals.
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Disadvantages
- reductive - SLT does not consider why someone would present criminal behaviours without a model. In a later study, Bandura and Walters’ (1963) found that those in the no-reward no-punishment control group were somewhere in between high/low levels of aggression. Bandura called this type of learning vicarious learning – the children were learning about the likely consequences of actions and then adjusting their subsequent behaviour accordingly
- ethical issues in testing - it is difficult to test DAT and SLT ethically, as the risk of harm in instigating situations for learning criminality is extremely high. to avoid these ethical issues, studies would need to be altered in a ways that would be detrimental for external validity.
- little explanatory power - theories do not explain why some people who are exposed to criminality do not go on to become criminals themselves. This suggests that other factors such as moral reasoning and free will influence the choice of these individuals.
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