Eysenck's Theory

• Eysenck's theory

  Personality may have a genetic basis
• Personality is inherited


  Individual is born with a predisposition to crime
• The legal system is based on the idea that a person is in charge of their own actions
• If personality is fixed at birth, it doesn't fit the idea that a person is in charge of their own actions
• Biological determinism


  The idea that all offending behaviour can be explained by a single personality type
• The idea of biological determinism calls to question whether an individual who commits a crime can be held responsible
• The idea of biological determinism has been heavily criticised
• Moffitt's theory


  • There are several distinct types of adult male offender based on the timing of the first offence and how long the offending persisted
• Digman's five-factor model of personality


  • Alongside extraversion and neuroticism, there are additional dimensions of openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness
  • Multiple combinations are available and therefore a high extraversion and neuroticism score doesn't mean offending behaviour is inevitable
• Eysenck compared 2070 male prisoners' scores on the EPI with 2422 male controls, and across all age groups, prisoners recorded higher scores than controls on measures of psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism
• Farrington conducted a meta-analysis and reported offenders tend to score high on psychoticism measures but not extraversion and neuroticism
• There is little evidence of consistent differences in EEG measures (of arousal) in extraverts and introverts, which casts doubt on the biological basis of Eysenck's theory
• Bartol and Holanchock studied Hispanic and African-American offenders in a New York maximum security prison, and all six groups were less extraverted than a non-criminal control group
• Bartol and Holanchock suggested the reason for the difference was because the sample was a different cultural group from that investigated by Eysenck, which questions the generalisability of the criminal personality