Psy Explanations: Eysencks Theory Flashcards
Eysencks theory of criminal personality suggests that personality is biologically based. Three personality dimensions he suggested are extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism. Extroverts are outgoing and have more positive emotions. Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotional states. Psychotics are aggressive impulsive and lack empathy. Each of these dimensions are normally distributed. The Eysenck personality questionnaire was designed to assess an individuals personality.
Eysenck suggested that each trait has a biological basis which is mainly innate. Extroversion is determined by the overall level of arousal in a persons nervous system. A person who is underaroused needs more stimulation. Extroverts seek external stimulation to increase arousal. Neuroticism is determined by the level of stability in the sympathetic nervous system. A neurotic person is someone who is slightly unstable and gets upset easily. Psychoticism has been linked to higher levels of testosterone which means men are likely to be psychotic.
The link between personality and criminal behaviour can be explained in terms of arousal. Extroverts seek more arousal and so engage in dangerous activities. Neurotics are unstable and so overreact to situations of threat and psychotics are aggressive and lack empathy.
Eysenck believed a person has certain personality traits but interaction with the environment is key in the development of criminality. When a person does something wrong they are punished which reduces the likelihood of them doing it again (operant conditioning) Eysenck claimed that people high in extroversion and neuroticism were less easily conditioned and so do not learn to avoid anti social behaviour.
An advantage of eysencks theory is that there is a lot of support from research evidence. A key element of eysencks theory is that personality types have a biological basis. Support for this comes from twin studies. Researchers found a +.52 correlation for neuroticism in MZ twins compare with .24 for DZ twins showing a large genetic component. For extraversion they found +51 and +12 respectively. Zuckerman provided similar data for psychotism. However even though this shows there is a considerable genetic component it is not as high as it seems. A +.50 correlation means that about 40% of the variance in these traits is due to genes. This means 60% is not due to genes which is quite a large number. This highlights the problem with assuming that personality is entirely due to genetics.
A problem with using personality to explain criminal behaviour is that personality is not consistent. People’s personalities change depending on the situation. Someone can be quite relaxed at home but neurotic at work. Researchers have supported this with evidence. Researchers asked family, friends and strangers to rate 63 students in a variety of situations and found no correlations between traits displayed. Any regularity of behaviour is due to the fact that we tend to be in similar situations all the time. This means that the notion of a criminal personality is flawed as people don’t simply have one personality.
Another weakness is that there are problems with the reliability of personality tests. The score or label given to a person depends on the answers they provide on the questionnaire. When someone answers the EPQ they’re responding to the demands of a questionnaire but their responses may not reflect reality. The questionnaire doesn’t allow you to answer with sometimes which is usually the case for most people. For example with the questions are you lively most people would put sometimes but this is not an option. Also people may tend to answer to be seen as more socially desirable and so their answers will not be truthful. This is combatted by using the lie scale. A person who constantly says yes to lie scale items is most likely being dishonest and their answers will be discarded.
Eysencks theory of personality is a good basis as a theory on offending behaviour but may not be able to be applied to the real world. There is merit in the idea that certain traits such as psychoticism can lead to criminality as they are aggressive and tend to lack empathy but it is hard to know what to do with this information. Even though these traits are good predictors of delinquency it is difficult to use it to detect who is likely to be an offender. However the theory has allowed us to understand the importance of conditioning. Greater attention should be paid to conditioning experiences to ensure people with high extroversion and neuroticism learn from their experiences. This is one way it can be applied to the real world.
