Abstract: Learning and imitation exist widely in social lives,and they form the basic driving force of behavior and cultural transmission.Social learning is thenecessity of social education,and almost all direct trial-and-error learning may be replaced by observing learning.As a kind of social learning,crime imitation is a normal cultural phenomenon,and crime spreading happens due to different example types and different intensity of learning motivation.Crime learning may be latent;individual gift,cognitive difference,different dimensions in crime-control learning and crime innovation all support the differential theory in crime learning.Since crime learning does exist,enough attention should be paid to crime spreading based on social learning.

Key words: crime, learning, spreading, difference