personality

• Eysenck -> crime is caused by someones personality
• criminality is innate and caused by specific personality traits.
• all personalities are a result of a combination of:

  extraversion

  introversion

  neurotic

  stable
• Eysenck's personality questionnaire - criminals tend to score high on E (extraversion) and high on N (neurotic)

  • EN or PEN
• someone who scores high on the scale for extraversion and low for neuroticism is likley to have an optimistic personality.
• someone who scores low on the extraversion scale and high on the neuroticism scale is likely to have a pessimistic personality.
• Freud later added psychotisism to the list of personality scales. Scoring high for psychotism indicates someone is insensitive, lacks empathy and disregards other people's well fair.
• strengths:

  • one of the first theories that attempted to quantify a criminal personality and used tools such as the EPQ to measure traits in personality that would increase the likelihood of someone becoming and offender and help place interventions to reduce criminality
  • research supporting links between personality and criminality. Rushton and Christjon (1981) compared E, N and P scores with self-reports of delinquency in students. Students who reported higher levels of delinquency also scored higher on E, P and N
• weaknesses:

  • Rushton and Christjon also identified a postive correlation between levels of delinquency and high scores on EPQ. This does not establish cause and eefct, only a relationship, meaning personality might only influence criminality, rather than causes criminality so the true case of crime is still undiscovered.
  • most evidence supporting relies on the use of self-report surverys, such as EPQ. This relies on people's perception of their self, meaning people could be dishonest and subject to social desireability bias, meaning the results may be lacking validity.