(Re)Considering Personality in Criminological Research

Abstract

Some individuals resort to crime; others refrain. Why is that? Different answers to this question have been proposed within criminology while paying surprisingly little attention to the concept of personality. On closer inspection, though, concepts akin to personality (e.g., criminal character, criminal propensity, self-control) run like a unifying thread through the field of criminology, including in its most prominent theories, to account for the apparent individual differences in crime. Nonetheless, there is considerable conceptual and empirical heterogeneity relating to these individual differences, and efforts to integrate different perspectives are currently lacking. I argue that the different approaches can usefully be integrated under the umbrella of the personality concept and that the field of criminology would benefit from more explicitly and systematically incorporating personality into its theories and research. Studies linking personality traits to crime, in turn, show that diverse findings can be boiled down to three key criminogenic characteristics—low morality, shortsightedness, and negative affectivity—that provide a parsimonious account of individual differences in crime. Future research should draw on the concept of personality to foster theoretical and empirical integration and eventually solve the puzzle of who engages in crime and why.