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Criminal Justice and Behavior
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What's this?

The Criminal Profiling Illusion

What's Behind the Smoke and Mirrors?

Brent Snook

Memorial University of Newfoundland, bsnook{at}play.psych.mun.ca

Richard M. Cullen

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Craig Bennell

Carleton University

Paul J. Taylor

Lancaster University

Paul Gendreau

University of New Brunswick -Saint John

There is a belief that criminal profilers can predict a criminal's characteristics from crime scene evidence. In this article, the authors argue that this belief may be an illusion and explain how people may have been misled into believing that criminal profiling (CP) works despite no sound theoretical grounding and no strong empirical support for this possibility. Potentially responsible for this illusory belief is the information that people acquire about CP, which is heavily influenced by anecdotes, repetition of the message that profiling works, the expert profiler label, and a disproportionate emphasis on correct predictions. Also potentially responsible are aspects of information processing such as reasoning errors, creating meaning out of ambiguous information, imitating good ideas, and inferring fact from fiction. The authors conclude that CP should not be used as an investigative tool because it lacks scientific support.

Key Words: criminal profiling • police investigations • belief formation • pseudoscience

Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 10, 1257-1276 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0093854808321528
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This article has been cited by other articles:


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