Eysenck's criminal personality

• What is Eysenck's theory of the criminal personality?

  • Suggested criminal behaviour could be represented along 3 dimensions - extraversion and intraversion, stability and neuroticism, self-control and psychoticism
  • Criminal personality type is neurotic-extravert who will also score high on measures of psychoticism (PEN)
• What are the characteristics of a criminal personality?

  • Extraversion: outgoing, positive emotions, but get bored easily
  • Neuroticism: always in negative emotional states like anger, anxiety and depression
  • Psychoticism: egocentric, impulsive, lacking in empathy, not concerned with the welfare of others
• What is Eysenck's biological basis for the criminal personality?

  • Personality traits are inherited through our nervous system
  • Extroverts: under-aroused nervous system, constantly seeking excitement in risky, thrill-seeking activities
  • Neurotics: over-active response to threat, unstable personality, behaviour is difficult to predict
  • Psychotics: high levels of testosterone leads to aggression and being anti-social
• What is Eysenck's environmental basis for the criminal personality?

  • Criminal behaviour: developmentally immature and concerned with immediate gratification - offenders are impatient and cannot wait for things
  • Children are typically conditioned (socialisation) to become more able to delay gratification and learn self-control
  • E & N children are likely bored of waiting and act impulsively which is why it is hard to teach them delayed gratification
• What is a strength of Eysenck's theory?

  • Research support: Eysenck and Eysenck (1977): compared 2070 male prisoners to 2422 males using the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire
  • Prisoners across all age groups recorded higher average scores on E, N and P, agreeing with Eysenck's predictions and dimensions
• What is a limitation of Eysenck's theory?

  • Too simplistic: Moffitt (1993) pointed out the difference between adolescence-limited behaviour and life-course persistent behaviour e.g. what we do in our adolescence and if it continues into adulthood
  • Personality traits alone were a poor predictor of whether someone is likely to become a 'career offender' - that persistence in offending behaviour is often determined by an interaction between personality and the environment
  • Suggests offending behaviour is more complex than this
• What is another limitation of Eysenck's theory?

  • Cultural factors: Bartol and Holanchok (1979) divided Hispanic and African-American prisoners into 6 groups based off of their offence history
  • Eysenck predicted them to be extraverted however they were all more intraverted, allowing us to question how far the criminal personality can be generalised
  • May be able to assume it is a culturally relative concept