{"id":189981,"date":"2026-05-27T18:17:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T02:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=189981"},"modified":"2026-05-27T18:19:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T02:19:38","slug":"new-yorker-malcolm-gladwell-on-the-seductive-appeal-and-shaky-science-behind-the-f-b-i-s-criminal-profilers-and-their-mind-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=189981","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell on the seductive appeal\u2014and shaky science\u2014behind the F.B.I.\u2019s criminal profilers and their \u201cmind reading.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2007<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Douglas and Ressler didn\u2019t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn\u2019t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization.<\/p>\n

Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.\u2019s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim\u2019s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.<\/p>\n

If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should \u201cco-occur\u201d\u2014that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn\u2019t find any support for the F.B.I.\u2019s distinction. Crimes don\u2019t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they\u2019re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of \u201cThe Forensic Psychologist\u2019s Casebook,\u201d told me, \u201cThe whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alison and another of his colleagues also looked at homology. If Douglas was right, then a certain kind of crime should correspond to a certain kind of criminal. So the Liverpool group selected a hundred stranger rapes in the United Kingdom, classifying them according to twenty-eight variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging, or blindfolding, whether there was apologizing or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals\u2014like age, type of employment, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, number of prior convictions, type of prior convictions, and drug use. Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more like one another than they were like rapists who, say, compliment and apologize? The answer is no\u2014not even slightly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons,\u201d Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.\u2019s approach, says. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn\u2019t want to see her. It could mean he doesn\u2019t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms\u2014all of those are possibilities. You can\u2019t just look at one behavior in isolation.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.\u2019s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.<\/p>\n

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic \u201cThe Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,\u201d itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse\u2014the \u201cstatement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.\u201d (\u201cI would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.\u201d) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in \u201cAs You Like It\u201d who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, \u201cIf you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.\u201d There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that \u201cleaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.\u201d (\u201cI can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?\u201d) And that\u2019s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess\u2014all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gladwell’s piece holds up well after almost two decades. Empirical work since 2007 has strengthened the case against FBI-style profiling.<\/p>\n

The BTK resolution looks worse for the profilers<\/a>. Dennis Rader<\/a> (b. 1945) stopped killing in 1991 and stayed silent for thirteen years. In 2004 he started taunting the police again. He asked them whether a floppy disk could be traced. They lied and said no. He sent one. The metadata pointed to Christ Lutheran Church and a user named Dennis. A search of the church board listed Dennis Rader as president. DNA from his daughter’s pap smear at a university clinic sealed the identification. The profile contributed nothing. He turned himself in by reinitiating contact.<\/p>\n

The 1984 session Gladwell quotes got nearly every social dimension wrong. John Douglas<\/a> (b. 1945) and his colleagues predicted a loner, sexually inadequate, lower middle class, probably divorced, hard to remember. Rader was a married father of two, an Air Force veteran, a Cub Scout leader, the president of his church council, a city compliance officer in Park City, Kansas, and a graduate of Wichita State. He had a normal social life and a steady work history. Roy Hazelwood (1938-2016) called him a “now” person who needed instant gratification. Rader’s signature was patience. He stalked some victims for years.<\/p>\n

Donald Foster<\/a>, the Vassar literary scholar Gladwell cites, did the most damning work on James Brussel<\/a> (1905-1982). Brussel’s memoir cleaned up his predictions. The contemporaneous record shows he told the NYPD to look for a German-born man with a facial scar, a night job, expertise in military ordnance, age forty to fifty, living in White Plains. George Metesky (1903-1994) was Lithuanian-American, had no scar, was largely unemployed after 1931, had no ordnance training, was fifty-three, and lived in Waterbury, Connecticut. The double-breasted suit hit was real. The surrounding package missed almost everywhere. Profilers and journalists kept the hit and forgot the misses.<\/p>\n

The Liverpool studies under Laurence Alison<\/a> have been replicated and extended. The organized\/disorganized split keeps failing the empirical tests. So does homology, the assumption that similar crime behavior reflects similar offender characteristics. Brent Turvey’s work in evidence-based behavioral analysis points the same way. So does David Canter<\/a> (b. 1944) Investigative Psychology program in the UK, which uses actuarial models and geographical profiling rather than clinical intuition. Canter’s work on journey-to-crime and the circle hypothesis has produced testable results. The Douglas-Ressler typology has not.<\/p>\n

Genetic genealogy has changed the calculus more than anything else. Joseph James DeAngelo<\/a> (b. 1945), the Golden State Killer, evaded capture for forty years despite multiple profiles. GEDmatch caught him in 2018 through a third cousin’s DNA. Profilers had described him as a loner with possible military experience. He was a former cop, fired for shoplifting, who lived a suburban life with a wife and three daughters. Genetic genealogy has now closed dozens of cold cases that profiles failed to crack.<\/p>\n

The deeper problem with profiling is conceptual. The method assumes a stable personality that expresses consistently across contexts. Modern personality psychology has been working through this issue since Walter Mischel<\/a> (1930-2018) published Personality and Assessment<\/i> in 1968. Behavior depends on situation more than the trait theorists assumed. A man who is meticulous at work might be sloppy at home. The crime scene reflects the constraints of the moment as much as any enduring trait.<\/p>\n

The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit still operates, but the work has shifted. Threat assessment for school shooters, workplace violence, and terrorism takes more of the agenda. The romantic image of the profiler naming the killer’s wardrobe has receded inside the bureau. The public face still draws on the Douglas-Ressler legacy. The internal practice leans more on statistical case linkage.<\/p>\n

What survives from the profiling tradition is the interview record. Douglas and Robert Ressler (1937-2013) did interview thirty-six convicted murderers in the late 1970s, and those transcripts remain useful primary documents. The classification scheme that emerged from the interviews has fared poorly. The interviews themselves preserved offender narratives that would have been lost otherwise.<\/p>\n

Popular culture sustains the profiling mystique. Thomas Harris<\/a> (b. 1940) wrote Red Dragon<\/i> in 1981 and The Silence of the Lambs<\/i> in 1988, both based on the BSU profilers. The film of Silence<\/i> won the big five Oscars in 1992. Mindhunter<\/i><\/a> came to Netflix in 2017. Criminal Minds<\/i> ran on CBS for fifteen seasons. The profiler became a stock figure of American crime drama. The institutional incentive to maintain the mystique runs through the bureau, the authors, the networks, and the consulting market. The skeptical empirical literature reaches a much smaller audience.<\/p>\n

Gladwell needs little updating. The case he made in 2007 has gotten harder, and the technology that solves cold cases has moved past behavioral speculation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2007: Douglas and Ressler didn\u2019t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237,213,29597],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-fbi","category-malcolm-gladwell-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t