Psychological Traits and Characteristics and how they are linked with criminal behavior - Assignment Example

146). Although this is a working definition, it does not adequately tell what personality is and how it relates to crime. However, many psychologists have discovered that there are many personality traits that seem to be associated with crime. Some of these include: “self-assertiveness, narcissism, suspicion, destructiveness, mental instability, hostility [and] poor personal skills” (Siegel, p. 146). Those people who exist within a deviant personality also are seen as having a criminal personality.

The challenge with this idea is that there are no sure ways of defining what a person is like who has a particularly criminal personality. Theories of Personality and Crime There are many theories that suggest that there is a link between personality and crime. Eysenck (1968) was the first psychologist to suggest that sociology theories did not work well when talking about criminal behavior. Instead, he said that biology and the environment came together to create a criminal. He believed that there were four dimensions to the criminal mind and that it was linked to the amount of extroversion and neuroticism that an individual experienced through their environment.

He believed that a simple personality test could tell whether an individual would be a criminal or not. He believed that criminals were somehow “developmentally immature” (Sammons, p. . Cognitive theories are often mentioned in relationship to crime because many experts think that criminals may have skewed cognitive processes. In this case, the individual may not have had a positive opportunity to develop their cognitive senses normally. Instead, they rely on scripts that they were taught in childhood that tell them what they should do in any situation (Siegel, 2009).

In these cases, the individual may have seen many things as children that shaped their attitudes and ideas about how they should relate to others, what their behavior should be in certain situations, and how they should view the world. This type of thinking can lead them into problems later as they explore the world around them. According to Siegel, the perception changes in some people as they grow older and they mature if they are begin to understand reasoning in a different way. Biosocial theories are also important to consider in this discussion because there is evidence that both biology and environment play a part in whether a person turns to criminal activity or not.

The earlier theorists believed that there was only a single aspect of life that was important to criminal behavior. As an example, a person who was feeble or who had less intelligence than someone else may turn to crime. The next set of biological theories suggested that individuals had some influence, but environment had more to do with criminal behavior than biology. Today, these theories suggest that both environment and biology have something to do with criminal behavior (Vito, Maahs, and Holmes, 2007).

The challenge for experts is that no one really knows what will turn a person to crime, but environment and biology do have some say in