Early socialisation and conditioning

1. Eysenck held that personality is largely inherited, but he still gave upbringing a job to do.
2. Early socialisation is the process by which parents, teachers and other adults teach a young child the rules of society.
3. The lesson that matters here is delayed gratification, meaning waiting for something instead of taking it now.
4. It is taught through conditioning, the repeated pairing of an act with the consequence that follows it.
5. Each time a child does something anti-social they are punished, and the punishment produces anxiety.
6. After enough pairings the anxiety attaches to the act itself rather than to the telling-off.
7. The child then feels that anxiety as soon as they think about doing it, and that feeling is the conscience.
8. The brake works with no adult watching, which is why most children keep to the rules unsupervised.

Why some children condition poorly

1. A child high in extraversion: an under-aroused nervous system that hardly registers the punishment.
   1. A telling-off lifts their arousal only slightly, so it produces too little anxiety to be memorable.
   2. With almost nothing to feel, no link forms between the act and the anxiety.
2. A child high in neuroticism: a nervous system that is anxious most of the time anyway.
   1. The extra anxiety a punishment brings does not stand out against the anxiety they already live with.
   2. So the anxiety never attaches to one particular act, and the lesson stays blurred.
3. A child high in psychoticism: little empathy, so the harm done to someone else carries no weight.
   1. Being asked how the other child felt gives this child nothing to work with.
4. Where conditioning is weak, the link between wrongdoing and anxiety never forms strongly.
5. Impulses then go unchecked, so Eysenck argued that offending becomes more likely.

Strengths of the theory

1. The three dimensions can be measured with the EPQ, so the theory produces predictions that can be tested.
2. It brings inherited biology and learning through socialisation together.
3. Heaven (1996) found psychoticism was the best predictor of self-reported delinquency, which supports part of the theory.
4. It also explains why two people raised in the same street behave differently, which purely social explanations struggle with.

Criticisms

1. The strongest criticism of the theory is the issue of individual differences.
2. Eysenck reduces the whole of personality to three dimensions and leaves out the many other ways people differ.
3. Offenders are a varied group, and plenty of them show no sign of the high extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism pattern.
4. Different crimes suit different people, and a patient, careful fraudster looks nothing like an impulsive sensation-seeker.
5. The theory also plays down social causes such as poverty, poor housing and peer pressure.
6. Heaven (1996) gives it only limited support, because the correlations were modest and self-esteem did not predict delinquency at all.
7. Heaven's design was correlational, so it cannot show that personality causes delinquency rather than sitting alongside it.
8. The EPQ is a self-report measure, so answers can be shaped by social desirability.

Turning this into marks

1. When you are asked what causes the criminal personality, give the inherited biology and the weak childhood conditioning as two separate points rather than one idea twice.
2. Name the mechanism, anxiety becoming attached to the act itself, because writing that the child was punished does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is criticising Eysenck through the nature/nurture debate, when the criticism that belongs to this theory is individual differences.