The Michael Shermer Show

Can You Spot a Killer? The Dangerous Fantasy of Criminal Profiling

December 13, 2025

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  • Empirical evidence suggests criminal profiling, particularly the FBI Behavioral Science Unit's methods, is often inaccurate, with studies showing profiles rarely lead to capture and sometimes being less accurate than predictions by non-experts. 
  • The public's intense interest in true crime, especially among women, stems from a desire to identify with victims and gain a false sense of control or security by understanding the narrative of horrific events. 
  • The allure of criminal profiling is rooted in a human desire for certainty and neat explanations, making the randomness of evil or the 'Jekyll and Hyde' problem—where monsters look normal—unacceptable to the public and investigators alike. 
  • The discussion highlights that ordinary people, under the right situational pressures (like those seen in the Stanford Prison Experiment, Abu Ghraib, or the 'Ordinary Men' documentary), can be induced to commit atrocities, suggesting evil is often situational rather than solely rooted in 'broken brains.' 
  • The inherent difficulty in accurately profiling rare behaviors, such as criminal acts, is mathematically demonstrated by base rate neglect (Bayes' rule), where even a seemingly accurate test yields mostly false positives when the base rate of the trait is very low. 
  • The conversation critiques the overconfidence in personality assessment, noting that current psychological models like the Big Five are spectrums, not fixed categories, and that self-report data is inherently subjective, similar to how pain scales are unreliable measures. 

Segments

Guest’s Personal Motivation
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(00:03:47)
  • Key Takeaway: The author’s investigation into criminal profiling was personally motivated by the murder committed by a former family acquaintance.
  • Summary: The author’s mother dated a man who later murdered his next girlfriend shortly after splitting up with her. This personal shock led the author to investigate the crime and, subsequently, the broader concept of criminal profiling. The initial investigative approach left the author unsatisfied, suggesting the limitations of trying to reconcile a crime with a known personality.
Fantasies vs. Homicidal Acts
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(00:06:46)
  • Key Takeaway: A vast majority of the population, both male and female, harbors homicidal fantasies, yet only a tiny fraction ever acts upon them.
  • Summary: Approximately 70% of males and 60% of females have fantasized about killing someone they dislike at some point. The core problem in profiling is explaining why this large group of people with similar thoughts does not commit homicide, as the sample size (N) of actual murderers is extremely small.
Serial Killer Epidemic Myth
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(00:07:16)
  • Key Takeaway: The perceived serial killer epidemic of the 1970s and 80s was largely an exaggeration fueled by media attention, with actual victim counts being significantly lower than FBI estimates.
  • Summary: The FBI in the 1970s and 80s claimed thousands of annual victims from serial killers, but historians estimate the actual number was closer to 400 or 500 per year. High-profile figures like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy dominated attention, making the phenomenon seem far more widespread than it statistically was.
Profiling Accuracy and Studies
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(00:02:20)
  • Key Takeaway: Studies indicate that criminal profiling is statistically unreliable, with one London study showing only 2.7% of profiles led to capture, and another finding chemistry sophomores were more accurate than detectives.
  • Summary: Research demonstrates that criminal profiling often fails to deliver the certainty it promises, functioning more as an art or public fantasy than a science. While general psychological insight can be useful (e.g., recognizing psychopaths can pass lie detector tests), specific predictive profiling lacks strong empirical support.
History of Profiling Origins
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(00:17:44)
  • Key Takeaway: Criminal profiling’s origins trace back to Arthur Conan Doyle attempting to profile Jack the Ripper, establishing an early link between fiction and investigative work.
  • Summary: The practice began with Doyle, a novelist, assisting police with the Jack the Ripper case, setting a precedent for fiction influencing real-world crime analysis. This tradition continued through World War II with Henry Murray’s political profiling of Hitler for the CIA, which informed later FBI profiling techniques.
Geographical vs. Behavioral Policing
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(00:20:34)
  • Key Takeaway: Geographical policing, which focuses police presence on small, high-crime intersections, is a practical, data-driven application of crime pattern analysis, contrasting with psychological profiling.
  • Summary: Many urban crime issues are highly localized, meaning a small number of blocks account for the majority of incidents, making targeted patrol effective. This concept mirrors early ideas like Robert Peel’s street patrols and anthropological studies of earthquake aftershocks applied to crime reverberations.
The Jekyll and Hyde Problem
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(00:42:50)
  • Key Takeaway: The enduring popularity of the ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ narrative reflects humanity’s deep-seated need to visually identify threats, making the reality that monsters often look ordinary deeply unsettling.
  • Summary: Throughout history, people have sought literal markers for criminality, such as phrenology, to categorize threats, especially during periods of social change. The dissonance between the horrific nature of crimes (like those committed by Ted Bundy or Eichmann) and the perpetrator’s normal appearance causes cognitive disharmony, leading to conspiracy theories or a desire for visible evil.
Incel Ideology and Violence
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(00:57:48)
  • Key Takeaway: Incel ideology links sexual entitlement to intense rage against women, where rejection can be a catalyst for extreme violence, as exemplified by Ted Kaczynski’s frustration.
  • Summary: Extreme sexual frustration and a sense of entitlement can manifest as rage against women for those identifying as incels. Kaczynski’s desperation was so severe he considered a sex change operation simply to touch a woman, illustrating the depth of rejection-based trauma leading to violence.
Stanford Prison Experiment Re-evaluation
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(01:00:18)
  • Key Takeaway: Participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment later contradicted earlier claims of immersion, suggesting coaching or faking roles, which complicates the experiment’s conclusions about inherent situational evil.
  • Summary: Questions arose regarding whether Zimbardo coached guards to be more aggressive in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Participants later claimed they were ‘just playing a role’ or ‘faking it,’ contradicting earlier interviews where they expressed enjoying the roles. Zimbardo’s subsequent work, like The Lucifer Effect, drew parallels between the experiment and events like Abu Ghraib, suggesting a real phenomenon of situational influence.
Situational Evil and Obedience
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(01:01:41)
  • Key Takeaway: Normal people can be induced toward evil under the right circumstances, as demonstrated by the Milgram shock experiments and the actions of the ‘Ordinary Men’ police battalion.
  • Summary: The speaker asserts that most people are capable of evil under the right circumstances, challenging students who claim they would never participate in studies like Milgram’s. A 2010 Dateline NBC replication of the Milgram experiment found many participants willing to deliver high shocks when authorized by a production company. The actions of the ‘Ordinary Men’ battalion, who killed Jews in Ukraine, were driven by social pressure not to let the group down, rather than inherent sadism.
Psychiatrist’s View on Violence
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(01:05:54)
  • Key Takeaway: Psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis believes that violence is often situational, even suggesting she might have complied with Nazi atrocities if she were in that environment.
  • Summary: Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist studying violence, feels she might have been a serial killer in another life and believes she would have gone along with Nazi Germany’s actions if she were Jewish there. This relates to the trolley problem, where people are willing to flip a switch to save five lives but less willing to physically push a person off a bridge to achieve the same outcome, highlighting the visceral difference in direct action.
Profiling Hitler’s Personality
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(01:07:19)
  • Key Takeaway: Henry Murray’s psychological analysis of Hitler, based on Mein Kampf metaphors, speculated on highly intimate sexual dynamics and parental relationships, illustrating the speculative nature of profiling absent direct contact.
  • Summary: The discussion turns to Henry Murray’s analysis of Adolf Hitler, which attempted to deduce personal traits, including alleged sexual preferences, from metaphors in Mein Kampf. Murray, who lacked a psychology degree but studied with Jung, created the field of ‘personology’ with the grand ambition of atomizing personality traits. This effort, which included work related to Ted Kaczynski, ultimately failed to create predictive models, showing the limits of trying to break down individuals into parts.
Modern Personality Theory Limitations
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(01:12:34)
  • Key Takeaway: The Big Five personality model (OCEAN) is mildly predictive and based on self-report, which is inherently subjective, mirroring the unreliability of subjective measures like pain scales.
  • Summary: The current dominant personality theory, the Big Five (OCEAN), describes general categories on a spectrum, suggesting personality can be nudged through conscious effort. The fundamental problem with these models is reliance on self-report data, where an individual’s rating (e.g., on shyness) is not objectively comparable to another’s rating. This subjectivity is analogous to doctors relying on a patient’s self-reported pain level on a 1-to-10 scale.
Base Rate Neglect in Profiling
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(01:14:30)
  • Key Takeaway: Criminal profiling suffers from base rate neglect, meaning imperfect tests for rare traits (like crime) will overwhelmingly flag innocent people because the base rate of the trait is so low.
  • Summary: Steven Pinker’s example of a cancer test illustrates base rate neglect: a test with 90% sensitivity and 9% false positive rate only yields a 9% probability of cancer if the disease prevalence is 1%. Applying this to crime, until social scientists can predict rare behaviors as accurately as astronomers predict eclipses, profiling tests will mostly identify the harmless. Humans are not wired to think statistically about large populations, leading to the desire to treat probabilistic group data as definitive individual diagnoses.