Reading this article has left me somewhat confused. If what the author of the article says is true then the FBI has wasted an awful lot of money and time on a technique that is as useful as reading the tea-leaves.
So, does psychological profiling actually assist in criminal investigations, or is it as useful as a psychic?
To judge from the stuff written by retired FBI profiler John Douglas, the technique can be useful, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s “forgotten” those cases where the profile either didn’t lead to any useful leads or was just plain wrong.
He’s mentioned in the article, and one of his “profiles” is used as a demo. Ianzin’s book on cold reading is used as the guide to the technique. The profile is shown to be a pretty close match for the structure of a cold reading (as described in Ianzin’s book).
The writer goes on to say that Douglas also tweaks his profiles after the fact when he’s writing.
Uh, criminalist psychics? Polygraphs? Profiling? Partial-match fingerprinting? Gun background checks that consistently miss felons? Dossiers on peace activists? Wasting FBI money is an art form. I bet they’ve actually spent money on tea leaves at one point or another.
The problem is that the FBI is made up of people, and people get these weird ideas in their heads. Confirmation bias (my vote for the strongest of all psychological phenmomenon – even more than survival instinct) then makes them see successes where there aren’t any, and they get perpetuated.
No surprise there. I’m looking forward to reading his book on BTK since, as a Wichitan, I may know at least as much about the case as he does and so should be able to spot any fudging on his part.
TimeWinder: I think it’s more a matter of their celebrating their successes and conveniently forgetting the times they screw the pooch.
Just like the rest of us.
Wasn’t it an early part of profiling to release an inaccurate profile in order to annoy the profilee, hoping to get him to contact them or make mistakes? I’m vaguely remembering a book that included a case where they released “has probably had sex with animals” in order to prod the perp. Sadly, a vague memory is all I have. Is it out of line?
Yeesh, I could write them.
“Perpetrator is probably a white male, 30-45 years old, in a lower-level white collar job or blue collar job. Has trouble relating normally to people but covers it up well, i.e., can appear charming and trustworthy when he wants to. Tortured animals as a kid.”
That’s basically what I was going to say as well. For most famous crimes like serial killers, rapists, and domestic terrorists, all you need is one profile to be right on the mark most of the time. However, when the profilers get lazy and start coasting, things tend to go badly wrong for them. The DC area snipers turned out to be a young black male and an older one and they seemed to be caught in some weird love relationship. Oops. The BTK killer in Wichita, KS had a rather stable family with kids and was a leader in his church. The list goes on and on. Much of it is just a statistical trick that impresses the general public but actually takes no skill or further analysis.
I don’t remember specifically zoophilia, but in Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, the main FBI profiler has an interview with a journalist and gives the journalist information that they think will anger the criminal, in the hope that the criminal will come after the profiler.
The answer is pretty much as given in the article by Malcolm Gladwell to which you refer (and in which he refers to me and my book on cold reading, Og bless his cotton socks). There is neither good evidence nor good reason to suggest that so-called ‘criminal profiling’ helps the good guys to catch the bad guys.
There are some people who want criminal profiling to be a useful tool in the fight against crime. This group includes people who do it professionally or who proudly consider it part of their skills base, people who can make money from it, and people to whom the idea offers at least a gleam of hope (this last group includes both crime victims, who want a particular perp to be caught, and law enforcement officials who face the often difficult challenge of catching the perp and who welcome anything that helps).
However, wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. And unfortunately, as the Gladwell article makes clear, psych profiling just doesn’t produce useful results. To say that sometimes the profile does turn out to match the perp is neither here nor there. Make enough guesses and some will come good, just by the laws of chance. But that’s all it is - guesswork in pretty clothing.
There is some correspondence with cold reading. One aspect of cold reading is knowing how to craft statements that subtly employ plenty of vagueness and generalisation, leaving plenty of latitude for creative interpretation that can turn a random guess into a seemingly miraculous (psychic) hit. Similarly, the profiler wants to sound like he’s providing hard info when in fact his guesswork is heavily qualified with ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ so that, after the event, those with the faith can point out the ‘hits’ and ignore the bits that didn’t match. If you skew enough data, you can produce any conclusion you want.
This isn’t a settled issue in law enforcement. There are believers and skeptics. Those who believe like to slice and dice the evidence one way, so as to arrive at the conclusion that yes, psych profiling may be flawed and imprefect but it remains one useful tool among many. Those who are more skeptical stick to the factual evidence, and argue that it’s really no more useful than guesswork. At the end of the day, like so many similar debates, it comes down to ‘it’s as real as you want it to be’.
Thanks ianzin.
That’s almost exactly the same thing that TimeWinder was describing - confirmation bias. It’s convenient that our irrational mind takes care of the forgetting part for us. 