Personality Explaining Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour Flashcards
Eysenck’s Theory of Criminal Personality
Proposed that everyone’s character is made up of a collection of stable features that direct behaviour in different situations, their personality.
Extraversion - Intraversion
Extraverts crave excitement and stimulation, more prone to engage in dangerous and risky behaviour.
Are not conditioned easily so don’t learn from mistakes, not as affected by strong punishment as an introvert.
Neuroticism - Stability
Neurotic Individuals are nervy and anxious, difficult to predict.
Typical criminal personality
Extravert - Neurotic
Biological Basis
Personality traits we develop are explained by type of nervous system we inherit
Extraverts constant need for excitement is attributed to an underactive nervous system requiring high arousal levels.
People scoring high on neuroticism scales are volatile and react strongly to situations others would find less stressful
Psychotism
This is seen in individuals who are self-centred, cold and lack empathy.
These people score highly on all three dimensions.
The Eysenck Personality Inventory is a questionnaire which places respondents along E, N and P dimensions to determine personality type.
Socialisation Process
Also the socialisation process in childhood that will determine whether a person becomes law-abiding.
But the fact that extraverts are natural reward seekers makes them less receptive to operant conditioning and less receptive to punishment .
Neuroticism interferes with learning which could cause difficulty taking on board social rules
These factors cause the to behave anti-socially.
Strength - Existence of a criminal type: Boduszeck et al.
Investigated prevelance of Eysenck’s personality traites among repeat male offenders in a high security prison (133 violent, 179 non-violent).
He suggested that criminal thinking style is correlated with high levels of the three dimensions.
Suggests Eysenck’s theory has validity as his personality types are associated with repeat offending.
Competing Boduszeck et al.
Evidence for criminal personality is not conclusive.
Farrington et al. 1982 found little evidence that Eysenck’s questionnaire was adequate for predicting offending. Suggesting E’s original ideas about nature of criminal personality type may lack validity.
Weakness
Idea that there is only 1 type of criminal personality.
More recent models like Digman (1990) five-factor model accepts E’s concepts of extraversion and introversion but adds openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness.
Low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness are related to offending.
Researchers like Lipsey and Derzon 1998 claim that impulsivity is a better predictor of antisocial behaviour.
Criminal personality may be more complicates than E suggested.
Strength - Criminal Personality and Nervous System
Raine (1990) took physiological measures from PPs aged 15 and related these to later criminal status.
Those with criminal record 24 years later had recorded more signs of underarousal in NS when 15 like lower resting heart rate than non criminals.
Suggests a link between bio factors and offending, researchers did say likely to be social variable predicting criminal behaviour.
Application
Preventing crime.
Theory argues that criminal tendencies like lack of response to conditioning can be identified in early childhood.
If intervention is early enough it is possible to modify the socialisation experiences to prevent them from becoming offenders, could be done at school or home with support of external agencies.
Suggests that, based on E’s theory, early interventions tackling crime can be beneficial.
