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Essay 3 Legal Psychology
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Essay 3: Criminal profiling. Grade: 10
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1PSY3377 Legal Psychology
Assignment: Problem 5: Profiling
Assignment #: Third assignment
Word count: 787
Question
It has been argued by many scholars that most current profiling methods rely on a naive and out-
dated understanding of personality and the trait approach. Do you agree with these scholars?
Answer
Criminal profiling is the process of analyzing evidence found at a crime scene in order to
determine the characteristics of the offender. This is often done by trying to identify the
personality and demographic characteristics of the offender (Douglas, Ressler, Burgress, &
Hartman, 1986; as cited in Alison & Kebbell, 2006). Some underlying assumptions of
personality and traits used to construct a profile, may however not be accurate (anymore). For
example, many statements in a criminal profile tend to attribute behaviors to dispositional traits
of the offender- which are thought to stay the same over time- and not to situational factors
(Alison & Kebbell, 2006). In this essay I will identify the major underlying assumptions used to
form a profile of an offender and analyze whether they are accurate.
The first assumption on which many profilers rely, is the consistency assumption. This
assumption states that the behavior of the offender is largely consistent across the offences. In
other words, the behavioral variation for a specific offender across offences is smaller than the
behavioral variation between different offenders. It would not be logical to look at behavioral
indicators of the same offender committing numerous crimes if the behavior of the same offender
varied more than between offenders (Alison, Bennell, Ormerod, & Mokros, 2002). Some studies
indicate that there might be consistency across offences of the same offender. For example, in
their study Mokros and Alison (2002) assessed behavioral consistency. They investigated the
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