Dough Boy Psychology

is a movie that takes place in Los Angeles, California and it depicts the difficulties that the three main protagonists have to face. The characters go by Tre, Doughboy, and Ricky and they all have a very close friendship while Doughboy and Ricky are brothers but with different fathers. The movie starts by showing the childhoods of the characters and eventually progressed to their young adult age with Ricky and Tre getting ready to finish high school. Meanwhile Doughboy has been in and out of jail. The boys all face different behavior attitudes towards the circumstances and there are theories that can explain the boys’ behavior and how their lives turned out the way they did. These theories are Burgess’ Concentric Zone Theory, Agnew’s General
Strain Theory, Labeling Theory, Akers’ Theory of Differential Reinforcement, Reckless’ Containment Theory, Sykes and Matza’s Techniques of Neutralization, and Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory.
Burgess’ Concentric Zone Theory is one that instead of describing the person it describes the environment. This theory consists of five zones that range from Zone 1 being business district to Zone 5 being commuters (Bunyi, 2010). The zone that Burgess looked at the most was Zone 2, which is called the Zone of Transition and was named that because it was the area most subject to change (Thompson, Bynum, 2013). This zone was located in between the expanding commercial area and in the more reputable neighborhoods. You usually tend to see bad neighborhoods within these areas which contain cops that hate the area and you see members of the community that do not like each other. You can clearly see this in the movie, the boys live in that type of neighborhood. An example being the cops, when Tre was a child their house was broken into, where then his father Furious fired two rounds at the suspect and proceeded to call the cops, in which they took over an hour to arrive. If that would have occurred in a Zone 4 community, the police response time would have been much faster. The cops also have resentment towards the members of the community. When Tre and Ricky get pulled over the cop abuses his power and threatens Tre and even pulls out his gun and points it at him showing how law enforcement disrespects the people in those neighborhoods. Not only that individuals in Zone 2 do not respect each other, in the movie there were times were they shot at each other and actually killed each other. Ricky and Doughboy were both murdered simply because they were not liked by another gang. This goes to show that those who live in this zone often are at more susceptible to crime, drugs and even death.
The next theory is Agnew’s General Strain Theory is one that tries to explain the delinquent behavior as form of adapting to stress, in which he came up with three major sources of stress that leads to social strain: discrepancy between means and goals, loss of someone positive in one’s life and presence of consistent negative circumstances or events (Thompson, Bynum, 2013). This can be applied in the movie for Doughboy who is constantly getting verbally harassed by his mother at a young age. He has the persistent negative person in his life which could be one of the explanations as to why Doughboy ended up following a life of delinquency and crime. Agnew does state that even thought the juveniles might face these sources, there could be a chance in which the juvenile does not always follow a path of delinquency and just depends what they take to the situation (Thompson, Bynum, 2013).
Labeling Theory is one of the most popular explanations as it is focuses less on deviance and concentrates more on how people perceive the acts of the juveniles.
The micro theory that can be applied to the movie is the self-fulfilling prophecy, which is defined as a catalyst for eliciting future behavior of the prescribed kind (Thompson, Bynum, 2013). Once again going back to Doughboy, you see in a scene that as a child his mother would tell him that he would never amount to anything and that he was useless meanwhile she would adore Ricky and encourage his love for football. Then when they grow up you see Doughboy who has no job, been in and out of jail, become exactly what his mother said and on the other hand you see Ricky who is on his way to getting a scholarship to go play football at USC. Although in some cases individuals sometimes turn the negative label around on the person proving them wrong. However, that was not what happened with Doughboy as shown in the
movie.
The next theory is Akers Theory of Differential Reinforcement which can be explained as negative and positive reinforcement. So behaviors that are rewarded keep happening while behaviors that are punished tend to stop. In the movie there are times when characters shoot and kill each other and not once does law enforcement put their foot in. Since there was nothing done against those people the shootings occur without worry that they may get caught. They do not think about the risk and they only focus on the prize, in this case revenge.
Reckless’ Containment Theory when working properly is supposed to control the individual and protect society and it contains two aspects to it which are inner and outer containment (Thompson,Bynum, 2013).
Inner containment is the capability of being able to control oneself and avoid from participating in deviant acts. Outer containment are the rules and laws set to keep individuals from doing deviant acts and is usually backed up by law enforcement or activities that keep individuals busy and away from deviance. Now to relate this theory to the movie, Tre had some good inner and outer containment, he was raised well by his father and had morals that caused him to not engage in deviant acts, also he was focused on school which also helped him stay out of trouble. Ricky had good outer containment as he was very involved in his football career which helped him stay safe. Doughboy on the other hand did not have good inner containement as he had a very low self esteem which ultimately led him to getting arrested several times throughout his life. One thing that had a negative effect on all the boys was that they lived in a crime-filled neighborhood which brought down both inner and outer containment for them as it lowered their self esteem and since law enforcement was no help to that
neighborhood.
Sykes and Matza’s Techniques of Neutralization explain how delinquents rationalize their actions by five techniques that they use. The methods are Denial of Responsibilty, Denial of Injury, Denialof the Victim, Condemnation of the Condemners, and Appeal to Higher Loyalties.