MotivationWithin Criminology, the analysis of the emergence of criminal behaviour is one of the main challenges [4]. An important mechanism behind this emergence is social learning [3]. To analyse this mechanism, this paper presents an agent-based approach to simulate social learning, which specifically addresses the mutual influence of peers, parents and school, with respect to delinquent behaviour.To formalise and analyse the emergence of criminal behaviour through social learning, an artificial society has been modelled to represent a small school class. The models for the agents have been formally specified by executable temporal/causal logical relationships, using the modelling language TTL [2] and its executable sublanguage LEADSTO [1]. This language allows the modeller to integrate both qualitative, logical aspects as quantitative, numerical aspects. Moreover, since the language has a formal logical semantics, simulation models created in TTL and LEADSTO can be formally analysed by means of logical analysis techniques.
Social LearningAccording to the literature, two types of delinquents can be distinguished: life-course-persistent offenders, who stay criminal throughout their entire life and adolescence-limited offenders, who only show antisocial behaviour during adolescence. The latter, which is the topic of this paper, is caused by the gap between biological maturity and social maturity. It is learned from antisocial models that are easily mimicked, and it is sustained according to the reinforcement principles of learning theory.An influential theory on the emergence of adolescence-limited criminal behaviour is the differential association theory, which was first proposed by [5] and later expanded by [3]. In short, this (informal) theory states that behaviour is learned through interaction with others. We learn most from the people we are in close contact with, like parents and peers. According to [5], the extent to which delinquent behaviour is imitated is influenced by the frequency, duration, and intensity of the contact. Frequent, long and important or prestigious contacts have a larger influence. In addition, the priority of learning influences the social learning process: the earlier behaviour is learned, the more influential it is.
Simulation ModelTo study the influence of social learning on delinquent behaviour, we modelled a school class with 10 pupils. There are three groups that influence the process of social learning, namely parents, school and peers. Therefore, each pupil is represented as an agent; the parents of the pupils and the school are modelled as groups. Each pupil is related to one parent group. The agents have a number of characteristics in our model (determined based on discussions with experts). We restricted our study to the characteristics that are collected in an empirical study [6] that we will use in the future to validate our * The full paper version of this paper was published
