Psychological Explanations

• Eysenck’s Personality Questionaire

  A personality quiz used to test levels of extroversion, neuroticism and psychoticism.
• Eyesenck believes our personality has an innate biological basis and there is a criminal personality.
• Eysenck’s Study

  - 2070 male prisoners

  - 2422 male controls

  - The prisoners scored higher on extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism.
• Holanhock studied Black and Hispanic criminals in America and found them to be less extraverted than non-criminal control groups.

  Suggests Eysenck’s research is culturally biased.
• There validity of measuring personality through a psychometric test is questionable.
• While Eysenck’s research attributes personality to the functioning of the nervous system it could still be seen as biological determinism.
• Cognitive Distortions

  - Hostile Attribution Bias

  - Minimalisation

  - Internal/ External Attribution

  - Fundamental Attribution Error
• Cognitive distortions are faulty, biased or irrational ways of thinking.
• Hostile Attribution Bias

  - When an offender misreads the actions or intentions of another person.

  - Schoenberg and Justye presented 55 violent offenders with emotionally ambiguous faces - they were more likely to perceive the faces as aggressive than the control.
• Internal and External Attribution

  - Connected to Locus of Control

  - Internal Attribution - A person accepts full responsibility for their actions

  - External Attribution - A person sees the cause of their behaviour is external factors
• Minimalisation

  - An attempt to downplay the seriousness of an offence.

  - Barbaree found amongst 26 convicted rapists, 54% denied they had committed an offence and 40% minimised the harm caused.
• Fundamental Attribution Error


  We tend to attribute more situational factors to the causes of our behaviour but more significance to personality when evaluating others.
• Psychological explanations have practical applications, as it suggests criminality may be solved through CBT.
• There are many individual differences between criminals and crimes. Cognitive distortions cannot explain all crime and we never truly know what another person is thinking. This makes it lack reliability and validity.
• The questions on Eysenck’s test were broad and could easily be misinterpreated.
• Eysenck’s test is vulnerable to social desirability. It also lacks temporal validity.
• When was Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire used?


  1952-1982