Crime and Personality

H. J. Eysenck

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135018696
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychologie
• Categoria: Personnalité en psychologie

When Crime and Personality was first published in 1964, J.A.C. Brown, writing in the New Statesman, commented: 'There can be no doubt of the importance of Professor Eysenck's book on the nature and treatment of criminal behaviour.' This third edition, originally published in 1977, had been completely revised and brought up to date, and although the major theory linking personality and crime has been retained, many of the details have been changed in conformity with recent research of the time.

The book presents a theory concerning the personality of criminals, and offers evidence to show that these personality features characterising criminals are based on genetic foundations. It is argued that criminality as a whole is not exclusively based on environmental factors as has so often been suggested, but has a strong biological basis. A good deal of evidence is reviewed showing that there are many data supporting this view, from studies of identical and fraternal twins, adopted children, and comparisons between criminals and non-criminals both in the Western world and in Communist countries.

Professor Eysenck suggests that important consequences follow from such an attempt to redress the one-sided emphasis on environmental factors which had been so characteristic of the previous fifty years, and some of these consequences are described in detail. He further suggests that only proper understanding of the psychological factors making for antisocial behaviour will help in reversing the increasing burden that criminality places upon society. The book also takes issue with political arguments of the time regarding the origins of criminality, and shows that criminals behind the Iron Curtain show the same personality characteristics as do criminals in Western countries.

1 Is Human Conduct Predictable?

‘How am I to get in ?’ asked Alice again, in a louder tone.

‘Are you to get in at all?’ said the Footman. ‘That’s the first question, you know.’

It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. ‘It’s really dreadful,’ she muttered to herself, ‘the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!’

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

There is much argument about most of the concepts and words used in psychology. Whole volumes have been written about the definition of such terms as ‘instinct’ or ‘intelligence’, or ‘emotion’, and even now there are many different ideas and views and definitions among psychologists. But of all the terms perhaps none can boast so many different definitions as ‘personality’. Almost every writer on the subject has his own definition, his own point of view, his own method of procedure, and his own views as to what the aim of personality research should be. Where there is so much disagreement, it would obviously be unwise to be too dogmatic. Nevertheless, a considerable body of experimental evidence, of empirical findings, and of general theories has been building up in recent years. While this body of evidence can hardly claim the allegiance of all psychologists, we shall give an account of what these major findings are and will not try to go into great detail about the arguments which have surrounded it in the past. The reader must judge for himself whether the point of view taken here is a reasonable one or not.

Let us start with a widely accepted definition of psychology, namely that it is a study of behaviour. Psychologists have given up talking about the ‘science of the soul’ or the ‘science of the mind’, not only because these are difficult to define, but also because actual human or animal conduct, or behaviour is all that we can ever observe. This is our field of study, and if we find it necessary later to introduce ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ as an explanatory hypothesis we may, of course, be free to do so. But to start out by defining our subject matter in these terms is obviously begging the question, and consequently there is now fairly wide agreement that it is with behaviour, or conduct in general, that we are concerned. The term ‘behaviour’ is understood in the widest possible way. We do not now rule out from the general conception of behaviour what a person says. Quite clearly, this is something which can be recorded objectively and which has to be taken into account. We will not necessarily take what he says, that is, the content of his pronouncements, as being invariably true, either as a reflection of fact, or even as a reflection of what he himself is experiencing at the time. But we shall integrate it with the other observations we can make, and try to construct a general theory of behaviour in which verbal behaviour will be a part, but only a part. It will not be, as it used to be for psychologists at the turn of the century, the major source of our information about human behaviour.

When the man in the street looks at behaviour in this general fashion, he immediately makes an assumption which may or may not be true, but which has been very much doubted by many modem psychologists. He assumes that there is some kind of underlying basis for a person’s behaviour, and that it is this underlying basis, enduring for a long period of time and permeating his activities, which we commonly call personality. Commonsense psychology unhesitatingly describes and explains behaviour in terms of traits, such as persistence, suggestibility, courage, punctuality, absent-mindedness, stage-struckness, being one for the girls, or whatever it might be. Alternatively, the man in the street may posit the existence of types, such as the dandy, the intellectual, the quiet, the sporty, or the sociable type. Even if we agree that these terms may be useful descriptively, they do not help us much in terms of explanation. We call a person sociable because we find that, in many different situations, he behaves in a sociable manner. But it does not help us to account for his being sociable that we can ascribe it to some underlying trait of sociability, because we have only adduced this trait from the very fact of his original behaviour. The same kind of error used to be made with respect to instinct. It used to be said that we have an instinct of self-preservation or of gregariousness or of playfulness. The existence of these instincts was deduced from the fact that we were self-preservative or gregarious or playful. Then, in turn, these instincts were used to explain our self-preservative or gregarious or playful activities. There is a vicious circle here. We are not really explaining anything by introducing such terms as instincts or traits into the discussion.

However, even on a descriptive level, the whole notion of traits, of types and of personality altogether has been very much criticized.¹* One critic, for instance, has held that ‘there are no broad, general traits of personality, no general and consistent forms of conduct which, if they existed, would make for consistency of behaviour and stability of personality, but only independent and specific stimulus-response bonds or habits’. This view, which seems so much in contradiction to commonsense psychology, may at first be quite unacceptable but we shall see that there is much evidence to recommend it. Even at the commonsense level we may see that there are certain facts which are difficult to reconcile with a general view of traits or types.

Let us take, as an example, Mr Smith, a young man, twenty-four years old, and let us ask ourselves whether he shows a particular trait, say persistence. We look at his pattern of behaviour in a variety of situations. But do we find, in actual fact, that he is equally persistent or non-persistent in all of these ? The answer will almost certainly be ‘No’. He rather dislikes his monotonous, humdrum job; he works at it only when he is under supervision; normally he shows very little persistence. On the other hand, he is very much involved with a hobby. He likes taking photographs, mounting photographs, and everything connected with photography. Here he shows a great deal of persistence. When it comes to making contacts with girls, going out with them and so on, he is perhaps no different from the average: not particularly persistent and importunate, but also not particularly shy and reticent. He behaves in an average manner. These are just three examples of his behaviour. Should he be called persistent or non-persistent? Is there any point in postulating a trait of persistence and attempting to give him a rating in respect to this trait – either high, low, or intermediate – when quite clearly very little could be predicted from any knowledge of this rating ?

Take another example. Here is Captain Brown, who was decorated with the Victoria Cross for his courage in front of the enemy. Can we therefore conclude that he will be a prime example for the trait of bravery, and that he will be brave under all sorts of other conditions ? We notice that he is not particularly keen to go to the dentist; in fact, he often lets his appointments lapse and goes only when he is in acute pain. In other situations calling for civic bravery, for instance, he may in fact turn out to be little short of a coward. Although he may believe, for example, that coloured people have equal rights, yet in a group where the majority view is opposed to this, he may not dare to stand up and put forward his opinions. Is he brave, or cowardly, or some degree of both? Again it is not altogether clear that the terms have much relevance to his behaviour, or that they help us in predicting how he will behave in different situations. These two examples are brief accounts of the behaviour of actual people. They do not prove anything, of course, but may raise doubts which only experimental evidence can put to rest.

In psychology, this controversy is sometimes known by the names of the two protagonist schools. One is that of specificity, putting forward the view that all actions which are performed by a person are specific, separately learned, and do not combine in such a way as to make possible the postulation of traits or types, thus making it unnecessary to postulate any such notion as personality at all. Another group has pinned its faith to the opposite banner, generality; they believe that different acts and activities do tend to be bound together in certain broad, general categories which give rise to traits and types; and that the notion of personality is quite indispensable in psychology. We shall see that both these views are, in part, correct and, in part, incorrect; that, in other words, human behaviour is neither as completely general as was thought at first by the generality school, nor quite as disintegrated and amorphous as is held by the specificity school. Before discussing some of the experiments which have been performed to test these two theories, let us consider some of the reasons put forward by the specificity theorists in support of their view.

Essentially the specifists argue that human behaviour is learned. Now there is hardly any doubt that this general proposition is true. Without learning, no behaviour of any kind except the most disorganized reflex behaviour – threshing about of legs and arms, and so on – would be possible. All other behaviour is acquired through learning, and this process of learning usually takes a very long time indeed. How does this learning take place? For many years it used to be thought that it was the result of stimulus-response bonds or connexions. In other words, a particular stimulus is followed by a particular response. If the response is rewarded, a bond is established between the stimulus and the response; and the next time the stimulus occurs, the response will tend to follow. If it is rewarded again, there will be a tendency for the bond to grow stronger, until finally a habit is established. We will not, at the moment, go into the particular details of how this happens, but will only note that the bond is between a specific stimulus and a specific response. If all learning proceeds on this basis, it may be asked, how is it possible for more general traits or types to emerge? The answer, as we now know, lies in a phenomenon sometimes known as stimulus generalization.

Let us start with a very simple experiment, which will be familiar to most people. It was originally performed by Pavlov, the great Russian physiologist. The subject of the experiment is a dog. He is standing on a table and is held in place by a harness. Except for this equipment the room in which the dog is standing is completely empty. The experimenter stands outside the room, watching the dog through a one-way screen, manipulating levers to present stimuli to the dog, and also recording automatically the reactions of the dog. In particular, he is interested in the salivary secretion produced by the animal, which is measured in terms of the number of drops falling into a glass container. One type of stimulus presented to the dog is the sound of a bell. This does not produce any kind of salivation and is known as the conditioned stimulus (CS). Another type of stimulus presented to the dog is a plate containing some meat. This evokes very heavy salivation on the part of the hungry dog and is known as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), the stimulus which produces the reaction without having to be connected with any other kind of stimulus. Now the experiment begins. The bell is rung and immediately afterwards the dog is presented with the food. He salivates copiously upon receiving the food and then proceeds to eat it. This pairing of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli is repeated ten, twenty, or more times. Finally, the conditioned stimulus, the bell, is presented on its own; and lo and behold, the dog begins to salivate to the sound of the bell without any meat being presented to him at all. As Pavlov put it, he has become conditioned to salivate to the bell.²

In this particular experiment we have a typical example of the stimulus-response bond being formed. But now we can show that this relationship is not quite as specific as might be thought. The bell has a particular loudness and it vibrates with a particular frequency. What would happen if we now presented the conditioned dog with another bell of a different loudness and pitch? The answer is that the response will still be present. It will perhaps not be quite as strong, but it will be much more pronounced than it could have been without the previous process of conditioning. In other words, the conditioned bond between stimulus and response generalizes to other stimuli which have some degree of resemblance to the original one. The greater the resemblance, the greater will be the amount of conditioned response actually forthcoming, although, of course, the word ‘resemblance’, particularly with human subjects, itself requires experimental investigation and definition.

Here then we might have the basis for a more general personality trait. A person might form a habit of being sociable in relation to one particular person; in other words, he forms a specific stimulus-response bond. But according to the law of generalization, this should generalize from the one person who constitutes a stimulus in this situation to other people, to groups of people, and indeed perhaps to society as a whole. In this way we could imagine the formation of a general trait of sociability on the basis of some form of learning or conditioning. In a similar way, a trait of aggressiveness might arise. We are aggressive in response to one particular stimulus, and this particular response will then generalize to other situations and to other people according to the law of generalization which we have just discussed. There is, therefore, nothing in the literature on learning and conditioning which would necessarily imply that generality was an impossible state of affairs in human behaviour.

However, experimentalists have shown that this generalization is not necessarily very strong or very complete; and it is on some of these findings about what is sometimes called ‘transfer of training’ that the specificist tends to rely. It used to be assumed in education theory that certain specific acts, learning verses by heart, or doing problems in arithmetic, or writing out French irregular verbs, would, in the course of time, lead to improvement in general abilities or faculties, such as memory, will power, logical ability, and so on. Two very famous American psychologists, William James and E. L. Thorndike showed, in a number of investigations, that this easy assumption had little empirical foundation. When two groups of subjects are equated for their ability in a given task such as learning poetry by heart, for instance, and one group is subsequently subjected to a period of training in memorizing material which might even be closely similar to that on which they had been tested, while the other group was not given any training, then the predicted superiority of the former group over the latter on a repetition of the original task was not observed. For instance, the two groups might have been tested originally on learning five hundred lines of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and the one group might then be trained on, say, the poetry of Swinburne, or Keats, or Shakespeare. They would then be tested on another five hundred lines from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and it would be found that the learning on the slightly different task had not benefited the group that had been put through this task at all. Learning is apparently relatively specific. There was no general effect on the hypothetical faculties which such training was supposed to improve. Any transfer effects which might be observed were considered due, not to the action of broad mental faculties, but to the fact that the original and the practised activities had certain elements in common. This theory is known as the ‘theory of identical elements’. In Thorndike’s words:

A change in one function alters any other only in so far as the two functions have as factors common elements. To take a concrete example, improvement in addition will alter one’s ability in multiplication because addition is absolutely identical with a part of multiplication and because certain other processes, e.g. eye movements and the inhibition of all save arithmetical impulses are in part common to the two functions.³

The development of personality no less than of linguistic or numerical skill is, therefore, seen as specific training of individual associations, never as generalized improvement of larger mental units or faculties.

Here too, we now know that this very simplified view of specificity of learning is not justified. It has proved difficult to define the very notion of ‘element’, and it has proved even more difficult to show the alleged ‘identity’ of these elements. Experimental work has frequently failed to show the theoretically predicted correspondence between improvement after practice and a similarity between original tasks and practice tasks. The position is more complex than was thought, and no simple solution seems acceptable at the moment.

Clearly it would be possible to discuss at great length all these theoretical problems, but, obviously, direct experimental study of this particular problem is needed. As it happens, one of the first, one of the most important, and one of the most large-scale of such studies, carried out in a direct attempt to answer problems of generality and specificity, was one which is also highly relevant to the general theme of this book. I refer to the famous ‘Character Education Enquiry’ carried out by two American psychologists, H. Hartshorne and M. A. May, towards the middle of the 1920s, and published in three well-known books, Studies in Deceit, Studies in Service and Self-control, and Studies in the Organization of Character. These volumes are still regarded as a landmark which has not been surpassed by later work. As they all are concerned with the development of moral and social impulses, with dishonesty, stealing, lying and cheating, they will form an excellent introduction to the major part of this book.⁴

Hartshorne and May set themselves the task of discovering any traits of moral or immoral behaviour which might be found in the school children tested in their studies. The first task, of course, was to define the concept of ‘traits’ in such a way that experimental evidence could be collected in order to throw some light on the existence or non-existence of these traits. They followed Gordon Allport, the American psychologist, in the definition of a trait. Allport wrote: ‘Traits are discovered in the individual life – the only place where they can be discovered – only through an inference (or interpretation) made necessary by the demonstrable consistency of the separate observable acts of behaviour.’ And again:

Traits are not observable; they are inferred (as any kind of determining tendency is inferred). Without such an inference the stability and consistency of personal behaviour could not possibly be explained. Any specific action is a product of innumerable determinants, not only of traits, but of momentary pressures and specialized influences. But it is the repeated occurrence of actions having the same significance (equivalence of response) following upon a definable range of stimuli having the same personal significance (equivalence of stimuli) that makes necessary the postulation of traits as states of being. Traits are not at all times active, but they are persistent even when latent, and are distinguished by low thresholds of arousal.⁵

It will be clear from these quotations that the notion of trait is intimately connected with the notion of correlation. Stability, consistency, repeated occurrence of actions – all these terms when translated into more rigorous and operationally definable language refer to covariation of a number of behavioural acts. What does this mean in everyday terms?

When we postulate a trait of sociability, we mean essentially ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Is Human Conduct Predictable?
• 2 The Nature of Personality
• 3 The Mark of Cain
• 4 The Biological Roots of Personality
• 5 Is Conscience a Conditioned Reflex?
• 6 Crime and Conditioning
• 7 Punishment or Cure?
• 8 The Task of Society
• 9 Some Questions Answered
• Epilogue
• References
• Index