Auguste Comte was the founder of positivism, Comte taught the perspective of positivism for the one of the first times in the course positive philosophy, texts that were published in the 1800s. There are 3 different types of positivism that are used to explain why people commit crimes, biological positivism the theory that people were born with genetics that ‘make’ a person commit crimes, the next theory is social positivism which is a theory that the people and the situations around us affect who we are and what we do and the final positivism theory is Psychological positivism. Psychological positivism is the theory that puts a focus’ on a persons psychological makeup, their personality and how they learn. Psychological positivism can include things like little to no love from parents, broken families, feelings of being alone or being separated from peers are a few but not the only factors about what is involved in this theory of positivism and how sometimes due to these factors people are more likely to commit a crime. Whilst there are many outside environment and personal factors that influence the behaviour of criminals/ the people that commit crimes e.g age, poverty, education, low impulse control, psychological well-being and personality the strongest correlation for crime is levels of IQ.
Statistically those with a lower IQ’s tend to do land themselves in more trouble then those with a higher IQ, there is many reasons for this, lower intelligence is often linked to frustration/not being able to control their behaviour, lower intelligence might also lead to poor decision making and or poor judgement. People of higher intelligence tend to be able to better understand the social rules and government laws they also have a better understanding of what exactly they are engaging in and therefore less likely to to engage in criminal activity. Unfortunately a large percentage of the crime committed are people with a lower intelligence level, more so leaning towards the petty crime like theft, drugs and assault.
Eysenck has a theory called biosocial theory where he aimed to combine biological and individual/social factors in the use of theory in terms of criminal behaviour. He categorised personality temperaments of criminals into 3 different categories Extroversion/Introversion, Psychoticism and Neuroticism (it’s also important to note Eysenck wrote that people don’t usually just have one personality type but rather they are a mix of both). Extroversion means someone is social, they like risks and prefer to be around people, introversion is the opposite, they prefer books to people. Neuroticism also known as instability is made up of things like anxiety and depression, people with feelings and low self esteem also fit into this character; Eysenck’s said that girls/women seem to have a higher neuroticism. People with higher Psychoticism are aggressive, impulsive, little to no empathy these traits are mostly found in men. There are various statistics
