Eysencks theory

• Potential biological reasons for offending behavior include inherited personality type, brain structure, and neurotransmitter levels.
• Eisnik suggests that criminals have a certain personality type, which is due to the type of nervous system they have, which is inherited.
• Kolberg believes that criminals have underdeveloped moral reasoning.
• Sutherland suggests that socialization is a key factor in offended behavior.
• Freud's ideas suggest that child experience leads to criminality.
• The criminal personality type is highly extroverted, highly neurotic, and highly psychotic.
• Modern personality theorists also think that only free personality dimensions is a little too simplistic, and Digman's five factor model adds two more conscientiousness, which is about how much effort you put in to make sure you carry out your responsibilities properly, and agreeableness, which is how friendly you are.
• Eisenic's theory assumes that nervous systems are inherited, meaning personality will be stable over a lifetime and only one criminal personality type.
• If you're biologically determined to be a criminal if you have a certain personality type, should we take personality into consideration when handing out prison sentences?
• Offending figures are up to 10 times higher in adolescence, which does not match the data with Eisenic's theory.
• The logic behind the criminal personality type is that individuals constantly seek risky, stimulating activities, are easily triggered into the fight or flight response, and are not emotionally worried about other people's pain or suffering.
• A study by McGurk and Dougal provides support for Eisenic's theory, as it found that more people with extrovert, neurotic, and psychotic personality types were in the delinquent group.
• Moffatt provides an alternate personality explanation with a dual taxonomy of offenders, one is a life-course persistent offenders, people who commit crimes across their lives, and another is adolescent limited people who stop anti-social behavior when they reach adulthood.
• There is significant biological evidence that offender behavior is biological, even neural invasives, which supports Isaac's theory.