Psychological Explanations of offending behaviour.
Now we have considered potential biological reasons for offending behaviour, over the
next four videos we are now going to take a range of psychological perspectives, meaning
offending behaviour is due to internal mental processes.
Eysenck suggests it's our personality type, Kholberg will say criminals have underdeveloped
moral reasoning. Sutherland will point to socialisation and finally Freud's ideas will
be used to suggest childhood experience leads to criminality.
So starting in this video with Eysenck, criminals just have a certain personality type, well
what personality type is criminal, and do you have it?
So while we are talking about psychological theories of personality here, actually Eysenck’s
theory does have a biological basis. He thinks personality type is a result of the type of
nervous system you have, that depends on your genetic makeup, so inherited.
So if you are asked about biological explanations of offending behaviour, technically you can
include Eysenck because of this cross over, but you would have to really focus on the
biological aspect, and honestly there are more focused biological explanations that
we have covered in the previous video.
So you may be thinking, what does Eysenck mean? your personality is due to your nervous
system. Well if you have already covered biopsychology you know your nervous system is linked to
behaviours, like the fight or flight system.
How easily the nervous system responds to a stimulus, like a threat in the fight or
flight response, is a big influence on our behaviour, potentially making offending behaviour
more likely.
So according to Eyesnck’s theory there are three dimensions to persons personality,
The first one you are likely to have heard before, extrovert to introvert. Extroverts
are of course outgoing, potentially even attention seeking individuals.
Eyesnck explains this behaviour as being due to having a constantly under-aroused nervous
system, and extroverts are trying constantly to boost the activity of their nervous system
with their behaviour. This could be by taking part in exciting, but potentially risky behaviour.
Eyesnck argues Extroverts are much harder to condition, or socialise, this is because
they don't learn from their mistakes.
On the opposite side of the scale are introverts, they have chronically over aroused nervous
systems, so they do what they can to avoid stimulation, not seeking attention.
The next personality dimension is neurotic to stable. Neurotic people have very easily
triggered nervous systems, so they are anxious and are very easy to upset. They will show
obsessive behaviours. On the opposite side of the scale are stable individuals, their
nervous systems are less easily triggered, demonstrating calm behaviour even in stressful
situations.
The final personality dimension is psychoticism, measured on a scale of low to high.This is
about the amount of emotion you feel, a highly psychotic person is emotionally cold, not
feeling empathy for other people's suffering.
This last psychoticism scale was added later on, and while Eysenck thought there would
be a standard distribution on the other two scales, he expected most people to score low
on a rating of psychoticism.
So the criminal personality type is highly extroverted, highly neurotic and highly psychotic.
The logic is you have someone who is constantly seeking risky stimulating activities, not
learning from consequences, is easily triggered into the fight or flight response, emphasis
maybe on the fight aspect, and isn't emotionally worried about other people's pain and suffering.
EVALUATIONS
Well is there any evidence? Well a study by McGurk and McDuggall gives some support to
Eysenck's theory. They gave 100 convicted inmates and 100 students Eysenck's personality
questionnaire. Both the students and offenders were from similar backgrounds, with the students
being part of trade based courses like bricklaying. And all the participants were between 17 and
20.
And it was found as predicted by Eysnck,that in the delinquent group there were more people
with extraverted, neurotic and psychotic personality types.
But a problem with Eysenck's theory is it assumes because nervous systems are inherited
that personality is stable over a lifetime, and just one personality type being criminal.
That doesn't match what we see in offending figures, with the level of offending up to
ten times higher in adolescence.
Moffitt provides an alternate personality explanation with a dual taxonomy of offenders,
one is life course persistent offenders, people who will commit crimes across their lives,
and another is adolescent limited, people who stop anti-social behaviour in adulthood.
This explanation seems to fit the data a little better.
And other modern personality theorists also think only three personality dimensions is
a little too simplistic, Digmans five factor model adds two more, conscientiousness, which
is about how much effort you put in to make sure you carry out your responsibilities properly,
and agreeableness which is how friendly you are. Including these as personality dimensions
may be a more rounded explanation of criminality, as there are many people who are neurotic
and extroverted that are not criminal.
And finally, supporting Eysnick there is significant biological evidence that we have covered that
offending behaviour is biological, even neural in basis. Eysenck’s theory could be the
psychological result of those biological changes. But then we do have all the problems of biological
theories of offending behaviour. Is biology destiny? And if you are biologically determined
to be a criminal if you have a certain personality type, should we take personality into consideration
when handing out prison sentences?
Here is a real forensic exam question on Eysenck’s theory of the criminal.
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so you don't miss the videos released right up to your exams, and I will see you in the
next psych boost video,cognitive explanations of offending behaviour.