Of profiling, astrology, and magic

Malcolm Gladwell exposes the tricks of forensic profilers

The Rainbow Ruse, the Barnum Statement, the Fuzzy Fact, the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, Forking, and the Good Chance Guess.

These are all magic tricks described in the classic how-to manual of magician Ian Rowland, "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading." When skillfully woven together, these tricks can convince even the most skeptical observer that you possess uncanny wisdom and insight.

For example, take the Rainbow Ruse. Here, one attributes to the listener both a personality trait and its opposite, as in: "I 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." Or, the Barnum Statement, an assertion so general that anyone would agree. And the Fuzzy Fact: a seemingly factual statement couched in ambiguity, as in: "I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?"

Writing in the Nov. 12 New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell presents a crash course in how such time-worn magic tricks have convinced the world of the scientific legitimacy and deductive powers of forensic profiling.

Like a fortune teller's prognostications, the profiles generated by famous FBI profilers John Douglas and Robert Ressler are "so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that [they] can support virtually any interpretation." The magic lies in the fact that police detectives and laypersons alike do not realize this without the aid of detailed, sentence-by-sentence analyses.

Gladwell cites the research on profiling, which shows they are accurate enough to lead to an arrest in only a tiny fraction of cases, less than 3% in one study by the British Home Office.

Partly, the failure of profiling may be due to the unscientific manner in which its premises were generated. For example, the well-known organized/disorganized typology of serial killers – which falls apart under empirical scrutiny – came out of a convenience sample of offenders interviewed using no scientific, standardized method. FBI profilers Douglas and Ressler just "sat down and chatted" with "whoever happened to be in the neighborhood." That's not how one generates good science.

Criminal profiling is glorified in prime-time TV shows such as Criminal Minds. Perhaps as a result, I get multiple queries from youngsters interested in becoming criminal profilers. And I typically get at least one such student each year in my graduate courses on forensic psychology. As a result, I devote at least one lecture to debunking profiling as pseudoscience; I also make this point in my online essay on becoming a forensic psychologist. Thus, I am tremendously excited to see this lucid and wonderfully written essay in the popular press. Perhaps naively, I hope it may lay to rest some of the unwarranted allure of profiling.

Further resources:

The Forensic Psychologist's Casebook: Psychological Profiling and Criminal Investigation, edited by Laurence Alison

"The organized/disorganized typology of serial murder: Myth or model?" by Canter, D.V., Alison, L.J., Alison, E., & Wentink, N. (2004). Psychology, Public Policy, & Law, Vol. 10, pp. 293-320.

"Validities and Abilities in Criminal Profiling: A Critique of the Studies Conducted by Richard Kocsis and His Colleagues," by Bennell, C., Jones, N.J., & Taylor, P.J. (2006). International Journal of Offender Therapy & Comparative Criminology, Vol. 50, pp. 344-360.

Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology, edited by Charles Patrick Ewing and Joseph T. McCann (see especially Chapters 1 & 11, the latter a great account of profiling in the USS Iowa disaster)

"Criminal profiling: the reality behind the myth: Forensic psychologists are working with law enforcement officials to integrate psychological science into criminal profiling," by Lea Winerman, American Psychologist, August 2004.

Photos: Top: Robert Ressler (left) and John Douglas (right); Bottom: The presence of actor Shemar Moore in television's prime-time drama Criminal Minds hasn't hurt the popularity of criminal profiling.

ADDENDUM: Criminal profiler John Douglas, critiqued in Gladwell's essay, has issued a lengthy response that is printed in full at the Crimson Shadows blog.

9th Circuit upholds lifetime supervision of child pornographer

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday upheld lifetime supervision of a child pornographer after he finishes serving his prison term.

Gordon Cope, 58, was caught with computer images and videos depicting child pornography during an undercover FBI investigation of Internet chat rooms. He pleaded guilty to a single federal charge of possession of child pornography and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The appellate court held that lifetime supervision was "reasonable" and Constitutionally permissible in light of the California man's previous conviction in 1981 for attempted sexual assault on a minor.

Cope also appealed special sentencing provisions requiring that he comply with forced medications, penile plethysmography, Abel testing, and polygraph testing as part of mandatory sex offender treatment. The appellate court held that such requirements are permissible, but that Cope should have been provided with adequate notice and more explanation of why these special conditions were needed. The case was remanded back to the trial court for such proceedings.

Yesterday's ruling is available online.

The future is now: Forensic applications of emerging technology

High-tech surveillance techniques are staples of science fiction books and movies such as Gattaca and Minority Report. But many once-fictional technologies are hitting the mainstream. Here are three in the news right now:

Brain scanning and lie detection

A British academic has published what he is billing as the first real-world use of fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain-scanning technology to investigate a criminal suspect's veracity. Sean Spence at the University of Sheffield studied the brain waves of a woman who spent four years in prison for allegedly poisoning her child. The woman was accused of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, a highly controversial syndrome that has led to the jailings (and subsequent exonerations in some cases) of many mothers, especially in England. (Forensic psychiatrist Robert Kaplan of the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, discussed this fascinating topic yesterday on Australia's ABC National Radio show, Ockham's Razor. The episode is entitled "The Rise and Fall of Sir Roy Meadow," in reference to the leading British doctor who testified against mothers in these cases.)

Adding an extra layer of potential controversy, the research was funded by a television station and featured on the station's Channel 4 Lie Lab. The Psychology & Crime blog has some comments on the ethics, and potential limitations, of this media-funded research.

In a previous post, I provided links to online resources about forensic uses of brain scanning technology.

Routine iris scanning?

Meanwhile, in Alameda County, California, police are gearing up to scan the irises of all 2,500 registered sex offenders in the county. With sex offenders such undesirable bogeymen that almost anything goes, the sheriff's department is using them as guinea pigs to test the technology for potentially wider use in the near future.

Imagine that police receive a call about a person annoying a child. Within minutes, they arrive on the scene, whip their handheld iris scanner from their belt, and determine whether the person is a known sex offender.

With iris scanning technology projected to improve to the point that eyes can be scanned from yards away without the target's knowledge, critics worry about "function creep," or more and more widespread use that will invade people's privacy rights.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a report.

Vein pattern recognition

This is a much lesser-known technological gem that's coming to the forefront in the long-running child pornography case of R&B star R. Kelly.

Kelly was charged in 2002 with engaging in videotaped sex acts with an underage girl. He claims that his likeness may have been computer-generated, and has raised doubts about the age and identity of the girl, who is now an adult and who testified before a grand jury that she is not the girl on the tape.

Prosecutors are seeking to introduce testimony of Sharon Cooper, a developmental and forensic pediatrician, that the girl's denial is typical of victims of child pornography. As part of her testimony, Cooper wants to testify that the vein pattern in Kelly's hand is similar to that of the man in the video. The judge has ordered an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the "vein pattern comparison" test is generally accepted in the scientific community.

Law professor Colin Miller, blogging at EvidenceProf Blog, located a web site claiming that such vein pattern recognition technology is gaining momentum as one of the fastest-growing new forensic technologies. Apparently, the technology has found "easy acceptance" in parts of Asia, where there is strong resistance in fingerprinting.

Two new texts in forensic psychology

Joining an increasingly crowded forensic psychological arena comes Rebecca Jackson's Learning Forensic Assessment. I haven't read it so I can't endorse it, but it's got some great chapter authors and is being advertised as more practical than many texts, providing both didactic information and discussions of specific assessment instruments and techniques. At 600-plus pages, it includes topical coverage of:

• Competency to Stand Trial
• Insanity
• Psychopathy
• Violence Risk
• Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders
• Capital Sentencing
• Competency for Execution
• Juvenile Assessment Issues
• Civil Assessment
• Child Custody
• and more ...

For other forensic psychology texts, check out my Forensic Psychology book list at Amazon.

And from Oxford University Press comes Stalking: Psychiatric Perspectives and Practical Approaches, edited by Debra A. Pinals, Director of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship and Training Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

It's written by a committee of nationally recognized forensic psychiatrists for use by mental health professionals, judges, lawyers, law enforcement officials, journalists, and anyone else with an interest in this increasingly high-profile topic. Topics covered include classification of stalking behaviors, risk assessment and risk management, the victim's perspective, celebrity stalking, forensic assessment, juvenile and adolescent stalking, and the emerging topic of cyberstalking.

The American Journal of Psychiatry has an online review by Sibel Cakir, MD.

Do childhood mental disorders cause adult crime?

Forensic scholar Tom Grisso has a nice editorial on the link between childhood mental disorders and adult crime, in the current issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The editorial, commenting on new epidemiological research out of the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, starts out:

The past ten years have witnessed a surge of research on adolescent offenders with mental disorders. The research shows that youths with delinquencies often have mental disorders, and youths with mental disorders are at greater risk of delinquencies. This 'overlap' of the two populations is a good deal less than a majority when examined as a proportion of all delinquent youths or of all youths with mental disorders. Yet it is substantial, especially among the subset of delinquent youths in juvenile justice secure facilities, where about one-half to two-thirds meet criteria for one or more mental disorders.

These findings have focused attention on the implications of public child protective and mental health services for criminal conduct. Is the national crisis in child community mental health services contributing to delinquency and causing the juvenile justice system to become the dumping ground for youths who are inadequately served? Can we reduce delinquency by providing better resources for responding to youths with mental disorders?

The essay continues here.

The important Smoky Mountains study, "Childhood Psychiatric Disorders and Young Adult Crime: A Prospective, Population-Based Study," by William E. Copeland, Shari Miller-Johnson, Gordon Keeler, Adrian Angold, and E. Jane Costello, is also available online. Here is the Abstract:

While psychopathology is common in criminal populations, knowing more about what kinds of psychiatric disorders precede criminal behavior could be helpful in delineating at-risk children. The authors determined rates of juvenile psychiatric disorders in a sample of young adult offenders and then tested which childhood disorders best predicted young adult criminal status. A representative sample of 1,420 children ages 9, 11, and 13 at intake were followed annually through age 16 for psychiatric disorders. Criminal offense status in young adulthood (ages 16 to 21) was ascertained through court records. Thirty-one percent of the sample had one or more adult criminal charges. Overall, 51.4% of male young adult offenders and 43.6% of female offenders had a child psychiatric history. The population-attributable risk of criminality from childhood disorders was 20.6% for young adult female participants and 15.3% for male participants. Childhood psychiatric profiles predicted all levels of criminality. Severe/violent offenses were predicted by comorbid diagnostic groups that included both emotional and behavioral disorders. The authors found that children with specific patterns of psychopathology with and without conduct disorder were at risk of later criminality. Effective identification and treatment of children with such patterns may reduce later crime.

Invasion of the hebephile hunters

Or, the story of how an archaic word
got a new lease on life

Stop a random passerby and ask what "hebephilia" means, and you’ll get a blank stare.

A few years ago, you would have gotten the same blank look from a forensic psychologist. Even from many who did risk assessments of sex offenders.

Not anymore. The obscure Greek word is gaining in popularity, and (for reasons I'll explain in a moment) may even be on the fast track to becoming a de facto psychiatric diagnosis. For that reason, it's a word worth knowing - and tracking.

Defining hebephilia is not as easy as you might think. I couldn't find it in my copy of Webster's dictionary, nor is it listed in several online dictionaries that I checked. Wikipedia (*) defines it as a variant of the word ephebophilia, meaning "sexual attraction to adolescents." Ephebia was the ancient Greek institution in which young men were trained as citizens and soldiers. Philein is the Greek "to love," as in philosophy (the love of wisdom) or philology (the study of literary texts).

Pioneering German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld is credited with coining the term around 1906-1908, as part of his efforts to catalogue the varieties of sexuality (the word transvestism is also his). A tireless campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities, Hirschfeld would roll over in his grave to see how his term is being used today - in the service of involuntarily committing people to state psychiatric hospitals.

Perhaps the most avid proponent of this creative new use is Dennis Doren, a psychologist who evaluates sex offenders for civil commitment and has authored a popular how-to manual for government experts, aptly named Evaluating Sex Offenders: A Manual for Civil Commitments and Beyond.

In his manual, Doren defines hebephilia as a "paraphilia." Another esoteric Greek word, paraphilia is a sexual deviancy characterized by sexual fantasies, urges, or activities involving nonhuman objects, suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner, or nonconsenting partners such as children. The paraphilias listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) include exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, voyeurism, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, and pedophilia. Hebephilia is not among the listed paraphilias.

Since hebephilia is excluded from the diagnostic bible, Doren trains evaluators to give hebephiliacs a diagnosis of "Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified." This is but one of several efforts by Doren to broaden the diagnostic categories under which sex offenders can be civilly detained; in a previous post I discussed his use of the "Paraphilia NOS" diagnosis with rapists.

Hebephilia came close to extinction in 1933, when the Nazis plundered Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin and torched its massive archives in a public bonfire. Yet suddenly, 70-some years later and probably not coincidentally to the 2002 publication of Doren's manual, we are seeing a growing interest in the archaic construct.

In 2003, for example, a student researcher at the University of Montreal described "hebephiles" as an "alarming clinical reality" that was "almost completely absent from the scientific literature." In an unabashed display of self-promotion, she promised to "lift the veil of silence" on hebephilia through her research with Canadian men who had sexually offended against teens.

According to a 2007 publication by the esteemed Mayo Clinic, hebephilia is rapidly "becoming a generic term" to describe sexual interest in adolescents who are under the legal age of consent. The article defines a hebophile as someone interested in teenage girls, with ephebophile denoting attraction to post-pubescent boys. Basing a diagnosis on the legal age of consent seems to imply that a person could have a mental disorder in one jurisdiction but not in another, since the age of consent varies widely and adults may even marry teens under age 18 in many countries and U.S. states.

Hebephiles were the topic of another research study published this month in Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment. The study focused mainly on physical characteristics that purportedly distinguish pedophiles - men who are primarily attracted to prepubescent children - from normal men (who now have their very own label - teleiophiles). The study found that Canadian pedophiles are shorter on average than teleiophiles, with hebephiles somewhere in the middle of the height spectrum. This follows an earlier finding by the same research team, out of Toronto's Kurt Freund Laboratory, that pedophiles were more likely than teleiophiles to be left-handed. The researchers did not find any statistically meaningful relationship between hebephilia and handedness when using phallometry (penile erections) to measure primary erotic attraction. However, they still hypothesize that a neurological abnormality may underlie some men’s sexual attraction to teens.

The absurdity of describing erotic attraction to adolescents as a mental abnormality is that most normal heterosexual men are sexually attracted to teenage girls (who happen to be at the peak of their reproductive fertility). This fact is well established by multiple research studies over the past several decades. Such findings are certainly no surprise to the moguls of popular culture or to the advertising industry, which uses provocative images of teen girls and boys to sell everything from clothes to cars.

Given the scientifically unsupported nature of this emerging diagnosis, I suspect that clinicians will apply it arbitrarily, and especially to men who are sexually involved with male teenagers. I am already seeing this trend informally, in my reviews of forensic reports on sex offenders. Ironically, any such biased application will further turn the tables on Magnus Hirschfeld and the ancient Greeks' aesthetic appreciation for the adolescent male body.

FURTHER ARTICLES ON THIS CONTROVERSY ARE LISTED HERE. 

* Postscript: At the time that this post was written, Wikipedia did not have a page on hebephilia. Now, it does.

Painting: "The Death of Hyacinth" by Jean Broc. Hyacinth was the young lover of the God Apollo. Wikipedia public domain.