Crime is know as any behavior which breaks known laws. This behavior can be learned and usually stems from aggression or anti social behavior. There are various theories for crime and the cause of it but they all fit into 3 main catorgries psychological, social, and biological. One theory of crime is eysnecks personality theory. He has composed a test to measure different aspects of a persons character.
He refers to 3 main characteristics, Neurotosism refers to how emotionally unstable a person is. Extroversion how outgoing you are and psychosism is a measure of criminal tendencies. The following characteristics are associated with each one, neurotosism; emotionally unstable, extroversion; requiring great deal of external stimulation and psychotosism referring to being cold, uncaring and agree dive, highly likely to engage in criminal activity. Eyesneck conducted his own research on prisoners and concluded that being high in any 3 can lead to criminal activity but more so neurotosism and psychosism. He argues there is a mirror neuron in people which enables you to sympathies and feel other peoples feeling, he argues that a lack of it means you find it hard to connect emotionally with others, something he sees could lead to criminal activity. Farmington et al reviewed a number of studies and found that offenders scored higher than a control group on psychotosism and neurotosism but not extroversion.
Eyes neck believed people with high neurotosism scores would have difficulty learning socially appropriate behaviors through normal means of reinforcement and punishment. However Blackburn critiques Eyesneck saying it’s unclear to what psychotosism is measuring it appears to be linked to psychopathic tendencies but not consistently. Questionnaires are also hard way to measure traits as they may not even appear in real life, people may be more stable in real life. Another more biological approach to crime is Mitchell and Blair, they suggest that the underlying…
