The Context of Offending

• Several levels of analysis are applied to sociological and psychological explanations of crime.

• Psychological explanations emphasise the personal experience and personality of the individual, whereas sociological explanations emphasise the social or cultural background of the actor.

• Both approaches are legitimate, but macro-level differentiation is too coarse to be useful. Personality evaluation is more cognitively demanding and necessitates the use of credible models and evaluation techniques.

• It is more favourable to psychological practise in the subject of criminality, where the emphasis is more likely to be on forensic or clinical work.

• Personality: It is defined as a predisposition to behave consistently in a particular way, and certain personality characteristics, particularly those termed personality disorders, may be inferred from enduring pathological or criminal behaviours.

• Psychologists seek to discover pre-existing and stable personality characteristics that may have a causative role in behaviour.

Why Do ‘Antisocial’ Traits Survive?

• The most significant aspects of this are that the majority of people exhibit reasonably consistent patterns of behaviour and that certain qualities and dispositions lead to unpleasant and antisocial behaviour.

• However, the concept of "crime" is socially created throughout time and space and is impacted by local culture and history.

• Humans developed during the Pleistocene and Neolithic epochs to eat, fight, and reproduce when resources were scarce.

• The rise of civilization has tamed but not eradicated these drives through self-domestication, despite the fact that these traits were (and occasionally still are) essential for survival in harsher natural niches.

Approaches to the Study of Personality in Relation to Offending

• The descriptive focus of research on personality and criminal behaviour focuses on the types of personality profiles that appear most frequently in samples of offenders.

• This body of study typically identifies a sample of offenders, measures them using a single or multi-trait psychometric instrument, and compares their scores to those of a control or non-offending group.

• The clinical-descriptive tradition in psychology and psychiatry emerged somewhat independent of structural psychometric models derived from academic studies of general disposition when studying the association between personality traits and criminal behaviour.

• Several personality clinical disorders are rather unambiguous and can be consistently identified.

• DSM-IV personality disorders present relatively different personality 'types,' especially in cluster B 'dramatic' personality disorders such borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

• The personality construct of psychopathy is discussed in this volume's chapter by Cooke.

Types, Categories, Dimensions, and Structural Models of Personality

• A century of academic psychology has established that clinical-descriptive personality "types" are uncommon and that personality is best seen as a constellation of qualities that interact to form behaviour.

• Clinical observations and self-reported personality disorder assessments strongly support this structural approach to personality.

• Dimensional structural models like Eysenck's PEN and Costa and McCrae's five-factor model are academic psychology's most powerful typological schemes (FFM).

• These structural models of personality correlate with DSM-IV personality disorders and psychopathy, suggesting that even clinically observed conditions are underpinned by general dispositional processes and that personality disorders and psychopathy are likely higher-order constructs emerging from lower-level processes.

Can We Trust Self-Report Measures to Assess Antisocial Individuals?

• Self-report questionnaires limit personality-crime research.

• Participants must be self-aware and willing to describe their regular behaviour to the researcher.

• Personality data may have a large inaccuracy because antisocial people are less obedient and honest than a normative sample.

• Many raters, preferably those who know the individual, improve psychometric instrument data integrity.

• Understanding of the person over time and context optimises rating stability, although it is difficult and time-consuming.

• Personality disorder is assessed with self-report scales such the NEO-PI-R, NEO-FFI/NEO-FFI-R, PEN, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and Profiler.

• Screening interviews and case histories assess psychopathy.

• Personality disorder is usually diagnosed through structured clinical interviews like the IPDE.

• A prospective adolescent study by Raine et al. (1996) used psychophysiological measures instead of self-report.

• Sex offender examinations use biosignal methods but do not address personality.

Eysenck’s PEN Model

• Hans Eysenck (1977) defined three major personality traits:

  • extraversion (E)

  • neuroticism (N)

  • psychoticism (P).

• Eysenck believed that extraverts had low cortical arousal and are prone to disinhibition and experience seeking. He added that conscience conditioning protects against antisocial behaviour.

• Neurotics have a reactive autonomic nervous system and are emotionally unstable.

• Psychoticism was introduced to Eysenck's crime and personality model later and is less biologically based.

• High-P people are stern and cold-hearted. Impulsivity was first considered part of the Eysenckian approach to personality, but it was later found to be crucial to P.

  • P may be more sensitive to antisocial behaviour than E and N, but it is less developed.

  • Eysenckian hypotheses support or disprove the core model.

  • Some research is inconclusive and recognises its constraints.

• Two quantitative reviews of personality and criminality indicated that E predictions are less accurate than N and P.

• The PEN model's uncertain position of impulsivity led Blackburn (1993) to reject Eysenck's theory.

• The conditioning mechanism underlying biosocial models of crime could also anticipate a "antisocialisation" situation in which intraverts growing up in a criminal milieu are more likely to be conditioned for crime than extraverts.

Grays’ BIS/BAS Model

• Gray's Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory: It is a biosocial orientation-influenced hypothesis linking personality to criminal behaviour.

• It argues that there are two motivating systems for regulating behaviour:

  • Behavioural Activation System (BAS): This regulates responses to reward and is facilitated at the neuronal level by activation of dopaminergic neural pathways.

  • Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS): This regulates responses to aversive stimuli and is considered a septo-hippocampal system.

• The BIS-BAS model has consequences for behaviour difficulties in children, and research has demonstrated that a strong BAS is connected with externalising problems, whereas a strong BIS predicts internalising problems.

• Haskin (2007) shown that coping methods can reduce the association between reinforcement sensitivity and antisocial behaviour, which may serve as the foundation for intervention work.

The General Theory of Crime: ‘Low Self-Control’?

• Gray and Eysenck's ideas involve impulsivity as a major component of criminal behaviour, but Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) general theory of crime (GTC) is more sociological.

• According to the GTC, the defining characteristic of criminal behaviour is a lack of self-control, which develops early in infancy as a result of parental example and early teaching.

• Pratt and Cullen (2000) did a quantitative analysis of studies on the GTC and concluded that a lack of self-control is an important correlate of criminal behaviour.

The Five-Factor Model and Crime

• Five-Factor Model (FFM): This model postulates that there are five general personality qualities with sufficient explanatory power to interactively account for the vast majority of human behaviour.

• Current scholarly debate in this area centres on which specific traits reliably predict antisocial behaviour, the magnitude and direction of this link, whether it is complicated by other variables, and whether personality is context-dependent.

• Personality theories based on structural traits are highly empirical and more testable than individual-centered theories.

• These are the result of extensive factor-analytic research finding the dimensions underlying the variation for a range of self-report psychometric instruments.

• The hierarchical structural technique may reveal that seemingly dissimilar dimensions such as'self-esteem,' 'locus of control,' and 'generalised self-efficacy' are all significantly influenced by Neuroticism (N).

• Researchers in this field attempt to integrate personality discoveries with data from other disciplines, including as genetics, biology, primatology, and experimental psychology.

• This convergence of data bolsters scientific models so that they are more than simply atheoretic numeric concepts with no real external relevance to reality.

Other Models of Offending and Their Association with Personality

• Antisocial behaviour and maladaptive responses to hard life experiences are believed to be maintained via cognitive schemas.

• Intervention programmes in British prisons utilise structured cognitive-behavioral programming to dismantle schemas and replace them with new perspectives and skills.

• The Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) is believed to measure these perspectives in criminals.

• Impulsivity, mental illness, emotional distress, substance abuse, or diminished intelligence can all contribute to thoughtlessness.

• Callousness is more ominous since it implies that a person is aware of right and wrong but chooses to act antisocially regardless of the harm they may cause to others.

• The PICTS component of thoughtlessness corresponds with high N and low A, while the dimension of callousness connects with low A alone.

• Moral disengagement is associated with antisocial exculpatory cognitions, which explains how individuals can disregard their moral beliefs and behave in heinous ways that they would ordinarily condemn.

• Moral disengagement is related to lower levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, as well as psychopathy and Machiavellian traits of the Dark Triad.

• Impulsivity, which is central to the personality traits of offenders, is the manifestation of thoughtlessness.

• Personality qualities, rather than "maturity gap" teenage antisocial behaviour, are developmentally responsible for offending.

• In economically disadvantaged communities, impulsivity is a more accurate indicator of antisocial behaviour.

• Criminality in general may be mediated by the personality qualities A and N, along with a lack of impulse control.

• Impulsive control is substantially linked in the association between these diseases and criminal behaviour.

The Dark Triad and Tetrad

• The Dark Triad is a strategy that emphasises on the importance of personal integrity and offences against others in relating personality to criminal behaviour.

• The Dark Triad is a phrase coined by Paulhus and Williams (2002) to identify three aspects of malicious personality that they consider to be the core of adversarial behaviour.

• The ability to predict aggression, intimate relationship violence, substance abuse and criminal behaviour, and violent delinquency has been demonstrated by research.

• Nonetheless, the Dark Triad qualities are highly intercorrelated, and this shared variance prompted Vize et al. (2019) to propose that the Dark Triad's common core be termed antagonism.

• Since ancient times, narcissism has been seen as the weakest aspect of the Dark Triad and a poor predictor of antisocial behaviour.

• The Dark Triad paradigm has been expanded to include 'everyday' (non-sexual) subclinical sadism.

• The Dark Tetrad's psychometric validity is favourable, and its association with delinquent behaviour has been demonstrated.

• Yet, correlations between psychopathy and sadism in two independent investigations do not support the notion that sadism captures a substantial amount of original, distinct variance.

• Edwards et al. (2017) differentiate between the Dark Triad and the Vulnerable Dark Triad and propose that this distinction may differentially predict offending behaviour, with the Dark Triad predicting criminal versatility and violence and the Vulnerable Dark Triad predicting impulsive property crimes and drug offences.