Criminal profiling is easy, apparently. According to this fascinating article in New Yorker, it uses the same tricks as stage psychics and other cons. Hat-tip to denialism blog.
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Tags: cold-reading, criminology, psychology
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15 November 2007 at 10:29 pm
Richard
This is a long-overdue article. ‘Profiling’ is a pseudoscience - file it alongside water divining and copper bracelets for rheumatism.
I’ve spent a few years in law enforcement. One mob I used to work for had a profiler - basically because it was something they’d seen on TV, and because a chauvinistic police force could be seen to place a token woman in a high-profile position. She was trained in the USA at horrendous cost to the taxpayer. She got to go on a lot of junkets, had a very comfortable office (with framed certificates, always a bad sign), and displayed near-psychopathic levels of arrogance.
The punchline: as far as I am aware, she was not responsible for one single successful investigation.
All homicide investigations in this state have been resolved through a combination of painstaking data analysis, forensic work, and targeted surveillance.
Still, I see no decline in the popularity of novels, films and TV in the ‘profiler’ genre. I suppose it’s because an emotional and intuitive character is more ‘exciting’ than a skilled and methodical one, no matter how poorly it reflects reality.
15 November 2007 at 10:36 pm
Richard
Sorry, that should be ‘all *successful* homicide investigations’ etc. PIMF.
16 November 2007 at 1:58 pm
Stilgherrian
@Richard: Thanks for that, nice to have the suspicions confirmed.
Once I really did freak someone out by “profiling” them after having met them for all of 5 minutes. I picked up enough in those few minutes to be able to go for some high-likelihood comments, which made them suitably gullible, and the rest was pretty standard cold-reading tricks.
Maybe I should go for a job in law enforcement…
Maybe after saying that I should get my head read!