n any way radically novel; rather, it takes an ordinary view of the world and makes it more rigorous and so therefore more useful for scholarly purposes.
The importance of learning theory to sociological explanations of crime cannot be overstated. Although the entire concept of learning theory might seem at first to be a part of the study of basic human cognitive processes and so to fall within the realm of psychology, in fact the idea of learning necessarily takes the scholar into sociology, anthropology, and the other sciences that study human behavior as a collective. Learning requires both a teacher and a student and so predicates a dyad, that most elemental form of human group. Sociology takes as a central tenet the idea that human behavior is essentially and deeply social. Whereas classical social theoreticians like Bentham had argued that self-interest is the basis of human nature and human behavior รป with the clear and in many ways commonsensical implication that criminal acts were simply somewhat more extreme examples of self-interest than the kind of acti
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