Crime and Personality

Abstract

Implicit in our discussion of genetic factors in crime and the relationship between constitution and criminality has been the theory that criminality is closely related to personality. Such a relationship has been posited quite explicitly by H. J. Eysenck (1964) in his book Crime and Personality, the latest edition of which appeared in 1977 (H. J. Eysenck, 1977). The term personality is used in so many different ways that it may be useful to establish the particular definition of it that will be used in this book. Factors related to personality may be divided into those normally subsumed under the term ability and those normally subsumed under the term temperament. Of the former, the most important, and the most widely researched, is general intelligence, or Spearman’s g. Temperamental variables are more numerous but, as Royce and Powell (1983) have shown in a large-scale survey of the existing correlational and factor analytic literature, there are three major higher order factors, which they call emotional stability,emotional independence, and introversion—extraversion. The hierarchical structure of the affective system deduced by them from the existing literature is similar to that suggested by H. J. Eysenck and S. B. G. Eysenck (1976).