Neutralisation techniques were first proposed by David Matza and Gresham Sykes in their work on Edwin Sutherland's differential association in the 1950s.
Thus, they reasoned, when a person did commit illegitimate acts, they must employ some sort of mechanism to silence the urge to follow these moral obligations.
From these, Matza and Sykes created the following methods by which, they believed, delinquents justified their illegitimate actions: These five methods of neutralization generally manifest themselves in the form of arguments, such as: In 2017, Bryant et al. analysed statements made by 27 individuals accused of participation in the Rwanda genocide and found two neutralization techniques that had not been identified before:[4] Kaptein and van Helvoort propose an ‘amoralization alarm clock’ to explain all such amoralizations or neutralizations.
[6] The Neutralization Hypothesis was introduced by Sykes and Matza in 1957, facing the then prevailing criminological wisdom that offenders engage in crime because they adhere to an oppositional subcultural rule set that values law breaking and violence, they rejected this perspective.
Professor Volkan Topalli, at Georgia State University, in his article The Seductive Nature of Autotelic Crime: How Neutralization Theory Serves as a Boundary Condition for Understanding Hardcore Street Offending, explains that for those groups "guilt is not an issue at all because their crimes are not only considered acceptable, but attractive and desirable".