9780198811398_Ch1

Chapter 1 Introduction to Personality Psychology 22

appropriate today), (b) criminals, and (c) ‘normal’ people. Lombroso examined psychiatric patients and prison inmates—it should be noted this was without their informed consent. By examining skulls and brains postmortem, Lombroso concluded that some prisoners were prone to crime from birth and were ba sically a reversion to an earlier stage of development. He considered them to be atavistic beings with cruel instincts that characterized primitive humans and ‘in ferior animals’. (The idea that the mind has primitive instincts that must be controlled in ‘civilized society’ is echoed in the work of Sigmund Freud; see Chapter 2.) As Lombroso put it: Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, soli tary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, han dle shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, . . . A different view of crime emerged during the Enlightenment period with thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham, who assumed that humans are capable of rational thought and action. Therefore, the decision to commit a crime or not is made based on a ratio nal calculus: after weighing the costs and benefits. If the costs are judged to be too high, we decide not to commit a crime; otherwise, we commit it. One obvious way to impose high costs is to impose harsh penalties in the event of a trial and conviction—which also fits well with the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ position. Lombroso chal lenged these basic ideas. He attempted to study crime and criminals scientifically.As a result of his efforts,the first school of scientific policing was founded in Rome in 1903 by one of his assistants, Salvatore Ottolenghi. To illustrate his scientific approach to the study of criminality, we will demonstrate some of Lombroso’s studies in which he measured body parts as well as more abstract characteristics such as sensitivity to pain and propensity to lie—eventually developing a rudimentary prototype lie detector. He used a va riety of devices for his studies. One of them was a hydrosphygmograph, with which he measured the dif ference in blood pressure changes between criminals with a long criminal record and the control group, that is, people without a criminal record. For this purpose, the left arm of the subjects was connected to the hydro sphygmograph, while the right arm was connected to a Ruhmkorff induction coil that could deliver electric

shocks to the subjects. In addition to electric shocks, Lombroso also used other unpleasant stimuli in his studies, such as the sound of a gunshot, but also pleas ant ones like food, money, or music. These techniques, albeit in greatly modified form since Lombroso’s time, are still used today in research on the psychophysiol ogy of personality, such as the modulated startle reflex (e.g. Corr et al., 1995). Lombroso’s work has influenced many contempo rary scholars. One of his lasting legacies is the basic assumption that criminal behaviour should be con sidered a medical problem, since he postulated that people are born with this predisposition. This assump tion diminishes the role of free will and the rational decision to commit a crime or not. Furthermore, Lombroso stressed the importance of studying not only the crime but also the people who commit it in order to understand why crime occurs in the first place. His legacy can be found in modern neurocrim inology, which seeks to explore the causes of criminal behaviour, such as brain injuries, clinical disorders, and genetic abnormalities. This ignored the potential environmental and situational factors. The basic idea that bodily characteristics are re lated to personality definitely influenced those who followed (e.g. Hans Eysenck; see Chapter 5) in sug gesting that not only might we be able to describe personality in terms of physiology, but we might use this approach as a way of accounting for how person ality relates to a wide range of life outcomes. Sheldon’s theory encouraged work that resulted in such books as Crime and Personality (Eysenck, 1964; for an over view and personal reflections of Eysenck’s work on personality and criminality, see Gudjonsson, 2016). Although there are intriguing associations between personality and crimes, there are still no clear theo ries that stand up to scientific scrutiny. Perhaps the very notion of criminality and the different types of crimes entailed are too complex—and, also, crime is contextualized within an interwoven fabric of soci ety, economics, history, and politics. Nevertheless, this fact need not prevent us from taking a scientific approach to understanding the psychology of crim inality, its causes, and even possibly its ‘cures’, as this form of antisocial behaviour may reflect systematic individual differences in how people think, feel, and, certainly, behave: personality.

1

© Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press