Eysenck

• AO3:

  • STRENGTH:
  • evidence to support the criminal personality
  • Eysenck and Eysenck (1977) compared 2070 prisoners' scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) with 2422 controls. On measures of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism - across all the age groups that were sampled - prisoners recorded higher average scores than controls.
  • agrees with the predictions of the theory that offenders rate higher than average across the three dimensions Eysenck identified
• AO3:

  LIMITATION:

  • However, Farrington et al (1982) conducted a meta-analysis of relevant studies and reported that offenders tended to score high on measures of psychoticism, but not for extraversion and neuroticism.
  • There is also inconsistent evidence of differences on EEG measures (used to measure cortical arousal) between extraverts and introverts (Küssner 2017) which casts doubt on the physiological basis of Eysenck's theory.
  • means some of the central assumptions of the criminal personality have been challenged.
• X

  • Cultural factors aren't taken into account
  • Criminal personality may vary according to culture
  • Bartol et al studied Hispanic, African-American offenders in a maximum security prison in New York
  • Divided into 6 groups based on their history and the nature of the offences
  • All were less extravert than a non-offender control group whereas Eysenck would expect them to be more extravert
  • Suggested that this was due to the sample was a very different cultural group from investigated by Eysenck

  Questions how far the criminal personality can be generalised may be a culturally relative concept