Evaluate

• Eyesenck's criminal personality


  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