Sociological Theories Explaining Violent Behavior and Serial Murder

Sociology and Violent Behavior

The sociological theories of violent behavior focus in assessing the interaction of and individual their with social environment to yield violent behaviors. The key aspects considered in the theories are personality, the learning process, information processing, intelligence and subsequent behavior (aggressive acts). This paper presents a discussion of the theories associated with violent behaviors and serial murder.

Theories of Violent Behavior

The labeling theory argues that the society plays a significant role in influencing an individual's conceptualization of deviance. Once the society labels and individual as deviant and reinforces the deviant label on a person by way of shunning them out of society, the individual accept the label. Since the society has already labeled the acts and the individual as deviant, the individual will have no reason to disprove the view of many. The labeling influences the individual's self-concept and subsequently drives them deeper into more deviant behaviors and even violent acts.

The psychoanalytic theory advanced by Sigmund Freud looks at the forces exerted on human life to lead to the disintegration of an individual's composure. The disintegrated individual composure polarizes the conceptualization of good and evil leading to violent actions (Fonagy, 2003). According to Freud conflict within oneself and resultant violent behavior can result from hostility and anger feelings. The polarization of consciousness in an individual elevates the death instinct that directs an individual to undertake aggressive acts against the physical or social environment. These actions are taken to relieve one from the current pressures that may lead to self-destruction.

Similar to Freud theory is the recent theory "Strain or Anomine theory advanced by Whitman and Akutagawa in 2004. The theory considers social pressures for individual success as an aspect that leads one to violent behaviors. The strain theory describes the notion that, a person is pushed to deviant, violent acts by, the social pressure for success (Myers et al., 2008). The success pressure society places is a force such that if one does not learn how to release, they are yield to the destruction in the form of violence among other deviant acts.

Bandura (1973) advance the social learning theory where he observes that aggressive acts flow from three aspects. These are; acquisition, prevailing circumstances, and regulating aspects. The three factors must be in existence for violent behavior to result. Violent behaviors may come as a result of trial and error and in some case through observation. Once the learning has occurred, outcomes are modeled as incentives and the combination of the two are encoded as a representation in memory. With this internal processing, the modeled acts can be repeated easily if ideal incentives are present to reinforce learned actions.

Theories Relating to Serial Murderer