Whenever we encountered some findings that certain traits had been identified with this type of serial killer, or that type of terrorist, we thought it was fantastic. But we didn’t think too critically about it. And for sure we never bothered to look for the underlying data, much less examine the methodology used to determine how strongly these traits correlated with perpetrators of that crime. The problem is, nobody else was doing that, either. Profiling only works if the profile is accurate. That should go without saying. But it has become plain over the years that the various profiles out there are not accurate. They are not based on actual data, but instead only on anecdotes. (And as we like to say, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”) Nor are these profiles based on any significant sample size. No profiling study ever did even a simple regression analysis to determine whether any particular trait happens to be a meaningful variable.
