Eysenck - criminal personality

• Eysenck proposed that personality could be represented along 3 dimensions:

  • introversion-extraversion
  • neuroticism-stability
  • psychoticism-sociability
• Eysenck suggested personality types are innate and based on the nervous system we inherit
• Extraverts have an underactive nervous system which means they seek excitement and engage in risk-taking
• Neurotic individuals have a high level of reactivity in the sympathetic nervous system - they respond quickly to situations of threat (fight or flight). This means they tend to be nervous, jumpy and overanxious so their behaviour is difficult to predict
• Psychotic individuals are suggested to have higher levels of testosterone - they are cold, unemotional and prone to aggression
• The criminal personality is a combination:

  • neurotics are unstable and therefore prone to overreact to situations of threat
  • extraverts seek more arousal and thus engage in dangerous activities
  • psychotics are agressive and lacking empathy
• Eysencl saw offending behaviour as developmentally immature in that it's selfish and concerned with immediate gratification. Offenders are impatient and cannot wait for things
• During the process of socialisation children are taught to become more able to delay gratification and more socially orientated
• Eysenck believed that people with high E and N scores had nervous systems that made it difficult for them to learn (be condition). As a result, they are less likely to learn anxiety responses to antisocial impulses and more likely to act antisocially
• Eyesenck developed the EPQ, a psychological test that locates respondents along the E, N and P dimensions to determine their personality type
• One strength is the evidence supporting Eysenck's theory. Eysenck and Eysenck compared 2070 male prisoners' scores in the EPQ with 2422 mae controls. On measures of E, N and P prisoners recorded higher average scores than controls. This agrees with the predictions of the theory that offenders rate higher than average across the 3 dimensions Eysenck identified
• A counterpoint to Eysencks supporting theory is that Farrington conducted a meta-analysis and reported that offenders tended to score high on measures of P, but not for E and N. Also inconsistent evidence of different cortical arousal in extraverts and introverts (using EEGs). This means that some of the central assumptions of the criminal personality have been challenged
• Another counterpoint to evidence supporting Eysenck's theory is that correlation does not lead to causation and the fact that it does not consider females, so it therefore cannot be generalised
• One limitation is the view that all offending is explained by personality. Moffit distinguished between offending behaviour that only occurs in adolescence and that which continues into adulthood. She considers persistence in offending behaviour to be a reciprocal process between individual personality traits and environmental reactions to those traits. This is a more complex picture than Eysenck suggested that offending behaviour is determined by an interaction between personality and the environment. This shows reciprocal determinism (Nature vs nurture can be brought in)
• One limitation is cultural factors are not taken into account. Bartol and Holanchock studied Hispanic and African-American offenders in a maximum security prison, dividing them into 6 groups based on offending history and offences. All 6 groups were less extravert than a non-offender control group. Bartol and Holanchock suggested this was because the sample was a different cultural group from that investigated by Eysenck. This questions the generalisability
• The usefulness of the EPQ is that we can see how the criminal personality differs from the rest of the population across different dimensions. However, personality type may not be reducible to a score (experimental reductionism). The criminal personality is too complex and dynamic to be quantified. This may underdetermine any claims Eysenck made about being able to identify natural offenders using the EPQ as a personality may not be static