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
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
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