Individuals inherit a type of nervous system that affects their ability to learn and adapt to environments, and criminal behaviour is learnt in addition to this through conditioning and failure of socialisation
Research on Eyesenck's criminal personality
Dunlop et al. (2012) found extraversion, psychoticism, and lie scales were good predictors of psychopathy in students and their friends
Sinha (2016) found criminals scored low on emotionally less stable, but high on intelligence, impulsivity and self-concept control factors
Eyesenck's criminal personality theory
Provides a basis for linking personality to criminal behaviour
Eyesenck's criminal personality theory can be criticised on scientific grounds as personality is not a consistent and objectively measurable behaviour</b>
Self-report surveys used in Eyesenck's research may have issues of validity due to social desirability bias
Eyesenck's theory is an interactionist theory as it considers both nature and nurture in explaining criminal behaviour
Cognitive factors
Distortions, minimisation, and hostile attribution bias can lead a criminal to justify and rationalise their behaviours
Research on cognitive factors
Schonenberg and Justye (2014) found antisocial violent offenders were more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as aggressive
Kennedy and Grubin found sex offenders would downplay their behaviour and attribute it to the victim's fault
A major issue with cognitive factor theories is gender bias as the research is often conducted on male populations
A strength of cognitive theories is that they can be applied to modifying criminal behaviour, e.g. through anger management courses
Both individual differences of Eyesenck's criminal personality and cognitive factors lack strong scientific empirical evidence that can be tested and measured