AO3 Eysenck's theory of offending behaviour

one strength us research to support the link between personality traits and criminal behaviour

Dunlop et al (2012) found that extraversion and psychoticism as well as lie scales were predictors of delinquency.

However, in this study, pps were all students and friends, and delinquency was categorised as minor assessments such as theft or traffic offenses, at times armed robbery also.

Van Dam et al (2007) found that only a small number if make offenders had high scores on all three Eysenck’s variables to categorise offending behaviour.

This suggests that despite some support for a link between personality traits and criminal behaviour, it is inconsistent and limited. This weakens the validity as there is no clear causation between personality and offending behaviour

one weakness of Eysenck’s explaining offending behaviour is that personality may not be consistent across all situations.

Mischel and Peake (1983) asked family, friends, and strangers to rate 63 students in a variety of situations and found almost no correlation between the traits displayed.

This suggests that a person’s personality is dependent upon the situation they are in.

Therefore, the notion of personality is flawed as people don’t always have ‘one‘ personality. This decreases the validity of Eysenck’s theory of the criminal personality as people’s personality change across different situations

An issue with personality tests is that they may lack validity

The research methodlogy depends on self report techniques which are subject to social desirability bias, lack of honesty and introspection, and a lack of self-awareness.

The score or label given are dependent on their questionnaire answers but may not be representative of ‘reality‘, especially as the questionnaire forces an answer between ‘yes‘ and ‘no‘ rather than providing a scale. Also, pps may tend towards social desirable answers, creating untruthful answers.

This is countered through the use of lie scales in these questionnaires: where there are questions which would indicate dishonest answers if consistently answered with ‘yes‘; this data is then discarded.

Therefore, the lack of validity indicates a need to treat evidence with caution

A strength of Eysenck’s theory is that there is a biological basis that can be supported by research

Zuckerman (1987) found that there is a positive 0.52 correlation for identical twins on neuroticism, compared with positive 0.24 for non-identical twins.

This shows considerable value for the genetic component of Eysenck’s theory. However, a positive 0.5 correlation means there is a 50% variance of traits due to genes. This could be inflated due to identical twins being treated more similarly, meaning there is also an environmental factor in the adoption of their personality traits.

Therefore this indicates that there are some genetic factors involved in these personality traits, but it may not be as high as Eysenck suggested