Conditioning and Crime.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

In one of my psychology courses, we were learning about Operant and Classical conditioning, and I really thought they were interesting. Now, how useful would they be in the criminal justice system in molding the behavior of deviants such as criminals repeat offenders like paedophiles?

I was just wondering if there was some way to get them to stop what they do by taking the response they get from the stimulus and creating some negative association to said unconditioned stimulus-response.

[Faqa]

*points at avatar*

Exhibit A.....

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, rent "A Clockwork Orange"....

[DesertFly]

In the end, conditioning someone to not act a certain way is completely hollow. Sure, it may work, for awhile, and you'll have someone who won't do a certain crime, but it could easily backfire (as "A Clockwork Orange" showed). More likely, it just won't work. Even if it does, you haven't really changed the person, just their reaction to certain situations. If the conditioning ever wears off, they will have no reason to not go back to the same behaviors you were trying to stop, and, in fact, may do even worse things, as a sort of revenge on the society that "screwed them over."

[Trytostaydead]

It is an interesting question. A lot of who we are, or how we behave in society is from a series of (blatant or non) conditioning. Such as how we become house broken is a very curious blend of neural and muscular conditioning.

The data of pedophile conditioning may be very scant as I doubt many people want to test (or can test) it. But I guess something comparable (behavioral wise, not talking moral) in terms of whether sexuality and sexual impulses is conditionable is homosexuality.

Though I think the real question is: What makes a pedophile?

[Gil Hamilton]

Classical condition wouldn't be very useful in molding criminal behavior. I'm not even sure how'd you would realistically do it that would be legal. Remember, classical conditioning is by definition involuntary. It probably could be done, however.

Say you have a paedophile for who is aroused by little boys. As a human being, you can give him a drug that makes him nauseous on delivery. That is your Unconditioned Stimulus (the drug) and Unconditioned Response (nausea and discomfort). You want to condition him on little boys and arousal. You could conceivably show the paedophile little boys or pictures of little boys and wait for an arousal response (conditioned stimulus), then hit him with the drug. He becomes sick to his stomache and spends the next hour worshipping the porcelain god (conditioned response). Eventually, he'll come to associate the sickness and discomfort with arousal and with little boys. The thing about classical conditioning is that the more you do it, the quicker the effect works. With time, the conditioned response, the nausea, will preceed the arousal assuming the conditioning works. Thus, you'll have the paedophile responding with discomfort on sight of a boy, before he has a chance to become aroused. Arousal may be cured.

This, of course, is unethical and no psychologist would administer such a treatment. Furthermore, it runs the risk of conditioning the paedophile against children rather than the arousal associated with children. Furthermore, the paedophile could be conditioned against all children by generalization. If your goal is fixing the paedophile and making him normal, it could backfire and ensure that the paedophile cannot interact in a healthy manner with children.


On the other kind of conditioning, operant, they already us operant conditioning in criminal justice. Ideally, prison is "punishment" in the behavioralist definition of the word. It is a stimulus that is supposed to decrease the likelihood of a certain behavior. Whether that is true or not depends on the person and the effectiveness of the penal system.