AO3 Eysenck’s Explanation

• +Supporting evidence. Eysenck compared 2070 male prisoners' scores on the EPQ with 2422 male controls. On measures of E, N and P (across all the age groups that were sampled) prisoners recorded higher average scores than controls. This agrees with the predictions of the theory that offenders rate higher than average across the three dimensions Eysenck identified.
• -However, Farrington conducted a meta-analysis and reported that offenders tended to score high on measures of P, but not for and N. Also inconsistent evidence of different cortical arousal in extraverts and introverts (Küssner). This means some of the central assumptions of the criminal personality have been challenged.
• -Not all offending can be explained by personality. Moffitt distinguished between offending behaviour that only occurs in adolescence (adolescence-limited) and that which continues into adulthood (life-course-persistent). 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.
• -Cultural factors aren’t taken into account. Bartol and Holanchock studied Hispanic and African-American offenders in a New York maximum security prison, dividing them into six groups based on offending history and offences. All six 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 of the criminal personality - it may be a culturally relative concept.
• Measuring Personality

  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 in this way. The criminal personality is too complex and dynamic to be quantified. This may undermine any claims Eysenck made about being able to identify 'natural' offenders using the EPQ as personality may not be static.