Expertise in psychological profiling - A comparative assessment

There has been little empirical study of the abilities contributing to prof icient performance in psychological profiling. The authors sought to addres s this issue by comparing the accuracy of psychological profiles for a clos ed murder case generated by groups differing primarily in characteristics p osited to underlie the profiling process. In addition to a sample of profes sional profilers, the study recruited groups of police officers, psychologi sts, university students, and self-declared psychics. Another group of part icipants compiled a generic profile of murderers without knowledge of the s pecific case given to other groups. Despite the small size of the sample of profilers, there were indications that this group had a set of profiling s kills superior to the individual skills represented by the other expertise groups. In addition, the performance of psychologists was better in some re spects than that of police and psychics, suggesting that an educated insigh t into human behavior might be relatively pertinent to psychological profil ing. On the other hand, ii would seem that psychics relied on nothing more than the social stereotype of a murderer in their production of the offende r's profile.