It matters not whether the profiler can explain how she analyzed the situation and decided what was important. What matters is whether she was right. Given a track record with a significant percentage of hits, it'll likely be more useful to consult her than other profilers.

Of course, this requires said profiler to come up with some actual specifics, not a Delphic oracle that can be read both ways.

:-)

Where do I sign up to be a profiler??

What good does it do to assess a profile's accuracy after the fact when one of the acknowledged 'experts' of the field (John Douglas) admits he can't explain how he turns the evidence left at the crime scene into a profile of the offender? Further, as the article points out, you can see similar behavior occuring for different reasons, so it's not always possible to conclude that evidence X correlates to behavior Y. Besides, if you make enough predictions, some of them will prove right by sheer chance, and analyzing them won't tell us how to do better in the future.

If some cop's gut instinct does better than the best psychological profiling out there, more power to them.

The assertion that criminal profiling in the sense discussed by Gladwell and our host is a form of the cold reading trick has nothing to do with the other two concepts.

Personally, I am reluctant to abandon the profiling concept completely and I humbly suggest a few things that could be done to improve matters:
- All the profiling should be done in writing.
- Profilers should be required to make specific assertions and explain those assertions and attempt to give a relative weighting to their assertions.
- The profilers work should always be retrospectively assessed if the criminal is caught.

An obvious corollary is the more successful profiles should be studied carefully to determine which assertions and justifications seem to work relatively well.

It seems possible that the above might even be used to build up a body of useful knowledge that could be used by the police without the assistance of a 'professional'. Of course the profilers will absolutely hate this and fight against it all the way.

Laypeople "develop" expertise as they are the other end of every crime.

There was a time when I knew not a single New Yorker who wasn't robbed (mugged as per the TV channels) in the city.

To say one can't have a view about their environment without a PhD in "criminology" is crazy .. even Jesse Jackson stated ON RECORD that he would be scared if he met young men of certain ethnic background in a dark alley.

Is that criminal profiling or racial profiling, and what input lets you correlate one to the other .. these are simple observations however writing papers on them would always be impossible .. even if you have a PhD.

To understand the value of PhD one can watch wizad of oz again .. or read this blog :-(())

>I honestly cannot agree with that statement. Its a humanities discipline which tries to apply the scientific method

I'd just like to point out that there are at least three disciplines within 'psychology', with rather little in common with each other : perceptional psychology, animal psych, human psych. (Other people may divide things in other ways.)

Perceptional psychology includes questions like how close in time two stimuli can be before they interfere with each other. This is very different from "why does little Johnny torture cats" psychology.

(I'm not a psychologist, but I know a perceptional psychologist well.)

Indeed, several someones have. See "Psychic Sleuths" by Joe Nickell, in particular.

It is pretty much worthless astrology.

no, the word "criminal" describes an atomic feature, that being a person who has committed a crime. It says nothing about any other features in a profile. "White collar criminal" or "con artist" might be profiles, but even they are limited in the scope of information they convey.

Incidentally, the "30 per cent chance of showers" is sometimes best translated as "100% chance of showers covering 30% of the forecast area". In other words, we're sure it's going to rain but we're not sure exactly where...

There is certainly a lot of crap out there that claims to be "psychology", but that doesn't mean psychology isn't a science.

Weather prediction is also math, as it is nothing more than, "In the past (for which we have records) weather conditions matching our current weather have been followed by ..." which is statistics. That's where the "30 percent chance of rain" comes from -- it just means that in the past, 30% of instances of our current weather have been followed by rain. Our predictive abilities have gotten better not because of new ideas about weather, but because our records are becoming greater in number and are recording more information.

Science is only useful for testing (validating or disproving) hypotheses. Once proven by the scientific method, application usually involves math.

I would recommend you check out Nassem Nicholas Taleb's book 'The Black Swan.' He makes a pretty compelling case against any effort at prediction, and provides some pretty specific examples, particularly pertaining to the modern financial industry. It really makes you wonder if the supposedly scientific underpinings of some of these forecasts are good for anything more than producing the veneer of rational justification. How much more so, then, for psychology, where it's that much harder to quantify individual mental state and behavior in a consistent and broadly applicable way?

As opposed to "crazy" I presume, or perhaps "white collar criminal" on the other end.

The gradient seems to involve a lot of poor impulse control, driven by greed, or mental illness, or in some cases frustrated ambition.

Criminology is one of the few social sciences where laypeople immediately assume professional expertise on the basis of watching TV and movies. CSI has only worsened this phenomenon.

The word "criminal" describes a profile by itself and leaving some random acts aside, it's a pretty good starting point.

I honestly cannot agree with that statement. Its a humanities discipline which tries to apply the scientific method, and when science cannot provide an answer a whole bunch of crap gets spakled into the cracks. Then when anyone tries to argue with the results some one trots out the " its based in science" quote. Its like trowing a pinch of diamond dust into plaster of paris and claiming the resulting wall is a s strong as diamond.

Profiling is really just the tip of the iceberg.

Have fun.

The issue isn't so much whether science can draw predictions as whether the output of the profiling effort actually contains any. I don't mind paying for people to apply science, but I don't want to pay for bunkum. If we're paying profilers to come up with predictions, they appear to be doing a poor job in the cited profiles (but scientifically speaking, we may be looking at a skewed sample).

If on the other hand we're paying them to motivate law enforcement personnel, and they're using this method to accomplish that, then they deserve the pay. But then I want smarter law enforcement personnel. Either way it's unsatisfactory :).

Scientific predictions are useful because they are testable. If you believe them they point in a particular direction and if that direction is wrong they point out flaws in the models used to create them. If I predict that tomorrow will be sunny with a chance of clouds or foul weather, have I said anything testable? There's science in weather prediction but my forecast isn't science, so I shouldn't be paid (in the role of a scientist) to produce it.

The psychology on which profiling is based seems to originate in Freudian psychology, which is fundamentally unscientific (it makes no specific predictions that can be tested conclusively), and reasoning based on anecdotes, intuition, and introspection (such as the haphazard discussions with inmates the profilers used as a basis for their system).

Also, I doubt whether or not most political commentators even need to tricks for "cold reading," since they can for the most part make whatever predictions they want without any justification, and often suffer no consequences for being wrong.

But here the science is clearly not, in fact, able to draw meaningful predictions out of the details of a crime scene.

I wonder how applicable his findings are to the 'expert commentary' field - the assortment of talking heads on the Sunday morning talk shows, and so on.