Theory of Imitation and Differential Identification

Gabriel Tarde, a French magistrate turned sociologist, rejected Lombroso's biological theory of the born criminal and argued instead, in Les lois de l'imitation (1890), that society itself is a web of imitation. Every act that is not a pure invention is a copy of something someone else did first, so crime spreads through a population the same way fashion, religion, or language does, and needs no separate biological explanation of its own.

The first of the three laws of imitation, the law of close contact, states that imitation is stronger where social contact is dense, whether that density is physical proximity or frequent, meaningful interaction. Tarde used this to explain why cities generated new criminal methods that then radiated outward into surrounding rural areas along roads and trade routes, and he treated the railway and the newspaper as the great accelerants of imitation in his own era.

For objective questions, fix the memorisable point: imitation follows the actual geography and density of contact, not an even, random spread. A crowded prison wing or a tightly knit gang counts as a high-imitation environment on this law, purely because opportunities to observe and copy are more frequent there.

Tarde's second law, the law of insertion, describes what happens once a new imitation meets an existing custom: the two merge into a hybrid, or one displaces the other, because a population tends to resolve the contradiction rather than tolerate both indefinitely.

Applied to crime, a new technique, once introduced, does not simply add to the volume of crime alongside the old method; if it is more effective or harder to detect, it gradually replaces the older method, the way a new counterfeiting technique displaces an older one as forgers converge on whichever works better.

Tarde's third law, imitation of superiors by inferiors, holds that imitation flows downward through the social hierarchy: people copy those they regard as socially superior, and vice follows the same downward path as fashion.

Practices associated with the socially prominent are copied by those of lower status who imitate visible conduct without sharing the resources behind it. This is the law most clearly overtaken by later research, since twentieth-century subcultural and strain traditions documented crime spreading upward and laterally through peer networks as well, not only downward from an elite source.

For NET purposes, keep the three laws distinct by their trigger: close contact is about density, insertion is about one practice displacing another, and imitation of superiors by inferiors is about the direction imitation flows through status.

Edwin Sutherland accepted Tarde's core claim that crime is learned, not inherited, but rejected imitation as too vague a mechanism to predict who becomes criminal and who does not, since imitation in Tarde's broad sense covers almost any instance of one person's conduct influencing another's.

Sutherland replaced it with differential association: a person becomes delinquent when exposed, through intimate personal groups, to an excess of definitions favourable to violating the law over definitions unfavourable to it. This is narrower than imitation because it specifies the content learned, ties learning to communication within intimate groups rather than generalised copying, and adds the idea of a ratio of favourable to unfavourable definitions over time rather than mere contact with a criminal model.

This precision is exactly why differential association, and not imitation, became the sociological baseline taught for a generation. It is also the gap that Daniel Glaser identified when he proposed differential identification in 1956, since tying the mechanism to actual people in intimate groups could not explain offenders with little sustained contact with other criminals.

Daniel Glaser set out differential identification theory in a 1956 article, arguing that a person pursues criminal behaviour to the extent that they identify with real or imaginary persons from whose perspective their criminal behaviour seems acceptable. The operative word is identification, not association or contact: a person need not interact with a criminal model at all, only see themselves through that figure's eyes.

The figure a person identifies with can be a parent, a peer, but equally a person known only by reputation, a historical figure, or a fictional character, and Glaser noted that identification can be strong with one figure and weak with another present in the same environment, which is why two people in similar circumstances can diverge sharply in outcome.

This reframing explains cases association struggles with, such as an offender with no delinquent peers who identifies instead with a distant figure known only through reputation or media.

Because Glaser built the absence of required contact into the theory from the outset, it is the version of this learning tradition examiners most often connect to modern media influence, since identification with a figure encountered only through broadcast or online content works the same way as identification with someone met in person.