Thanks; we aim to please, or at least amuse and bewilder.
Even more than that, ‘understanding’ someone’s outlook to that extent explicitly requires empathy. But sociopaths lack empathy (or, at least as we understand it) and essentially lack the kind of restraint and remorse that a normally socialized person does. You (who I’m assuming are not a sociopath) could go out and commit a violent, Manson Family-esque murder but you would be affected by it in ways that sociopaths are not, and would likely suffer psychic trauma and the attendant pathologies (anxiety, dissociation, amnesia, panic attacks, et cetera). It just isn’t really possible to truly understand the mindset of someone who cheerfully commits a violent murder and then goes on with their life without remorse, much less someone who cuts up their victims and stores them in the freezer for a late night snack. But you can certainly identify petty dominance/bullying behaviors or psychosexual ‘kinks’ like those demonstrated in the history of Dennis Rader which presage violent anti-social behavior, and that is useful information.
I think the quite legitimate skepticism regarding behavioral profiling is in the high degree of assumed confidence by ‘experts’ in producing exacting profiles even though much of the field is based upon anecdotal analysis instead of a statistical body of evidence. That doesn’t mean it is complete bunk, but it does mean that interpretation is necessarily somewhat subjective and not a precise science that can be relied upon to generate detailed predictions.
The entertainment industry, of course, has given us expert profilers who have tortured visions as they seek to delve into the maw of criminal insanity, and serial killers who only kill other serial killers (certainly a very specialized category), or the erudite Hannibal Lector who learned his cannibal manners at the hands of brutal Russian soldiers and went on to become a world famous genius psychiatrist who also also eats uncouth patient’s livers with fava beans and a big Amarone della Valpolicella. Real serial killers are somewhat less refined and it is often less of a surprise that they are discovered than a question of why it took so long for authorities to get a clue about the guy who keeps naked boys chained in his apartment. The latter doesn’t really make for an appealing thriller that would attract award-winning talents, while every top tier actor is on the lookout for that career-defining psychopath role that will win them an Oscar.
Glossing over the hijack potential, Mindhunters readily acknowledges that while some of the Atlanta child murders were not traceable to a single killer, Wayne Willliams was definitely the perpetrator of a large share of them.
People who promote the idea that “they got the wrong guy” in connection with this and other notorious serial killer cases (like the Boston Strangler) often have in common a willful ignorance of the likely psychological and physical characteristics of these offenders.
Hugh Aynesworth and Stephen Michaud spent several weeks interviewing Ted Bundy while researching The Only Living Witness (1983), a biography of Bundy that they co-wrote. They interviewed Bundy again in 1989 in the weeks before his execution and published Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer (1989), which is specifically about the interviews and contains transcripts taken from said interviews.
I have read both books and found them both fascinating and scary.
I think it’s more a matter of how when they catch a white serial killer, people say “He seems so normal - he must be a serial killer!”, but when they catch a Black serial killer people just assume he killed people because he’s Black. That’s if they even catch him - serial killers mainly choose their victims from their own communities, and the police are less likely to hunt down someone who murders Black people.
The series Mindhunter is based on a book of the same title by retired FBI agent John Douglas. He and colleagues created the FBI’s criminal profiling unit and based much of their analysis on interviews with serial killers and other violent offenders.
Maybe the sort of predictive analysis associated with “profiling” isn’t completely useless, but so, so much of it is bunk. For instance, Douglas and many other profilers point to the Macdonald Triad of youth behaviors as indicative of a future serial killer. But there’s little evidence to back up that this “triad” of behaviors (bedwetting, cruelty to animals and setting fires) is particularly predictive that a person will engage in serial violent behavior. At most they may indicate the child has a shitty homelife, which may be associated with a higher likelihood of violent behavior, but the triad gets treated like a magical formula for diagnosing insipient serial killers.
I doubt there’s any statistically significant ethnic component to serial killers. Rather I expect closely reflect the ethnic statistics of the society they live in.
Reprising on the empathy question.
Sociopaths clearly have a well developed theory of mind and from a neuropsychological point of view one might guess that the same circuitry most folk use for empathy is co-opted for its predictive capabilities. Which perhaps leaves the sociopath with a proportionately lower capacity for empathy.
Not exactly easy to observe the difference externally. Perhaps one could repurpose tests for finding replicants.
I was involved in a serial killer investigation more than 15 years ago. It remains unsolved. The FBI unit did a work up and said our guy was a white male, 30s, physically strong, single and had a low paying job. We did develop a “person of interest” (actually, no one would officially call him that) who checked all the boxes. We could also place him very near where the bodies were recovered. I watched the video feed as he was being interviewed but he lawyered up pretty quickly. The lack of physical evidence meant no charges. Granted, the profile was pretty broad but it did match this guy in all respects. Oh, and there have been no similar murders in the area since.
This has already been answered just above, but I’ll add an enlarging comment.
Whenever a plot-inessential detail in a book is changed for a movie, it’s either for brevity, difficulty to depict visually vs. in words, or assumed audience stupidity.
Since door #1 & 2 don’t apply to a bottle of wine, it’s gotta be door #3. People who read a lot know words. People who watch a lot of movies don’t. Or at least don’t necessarily. The SES of the average book reader is a couple notches above the SES of the average movie-goer as well. SES and vocabulary go together.
Yes it’s been resourceful interviewing serial killers since serial killers are mentally ill with antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and paraphilia. This is why we need mandatory free mental health therapy and counseling along with mandatory lobotomies and mandatory free insane asylums for severely mentally ill pedophiles and psycopaths and sociopaths and narcissists where they give them free shelter and free food and therapy and counselling. If insane asylums and lobotomies still existed today there wouldn’t be serial killers. I been a metal patient in the psych ward when I told my therapist and got drunk and made a video that I have homicidal thoughts but didn’t act on it because it was illegal and got diagnosed with depression, anxiety and alcoholism. I’m six months sober now.