Believing is seeing? Investigating the perceived accuracy of criminal psychological profiles.

Abstract

This study investigated whether perceptions of criminal psychological profiles are influenced by the identity of the profile's author. Police officers were given a profile they were told was written by either a professional profiler or by an unspecified author. When judged in relation to the actual perpetrator of the crime, police officers tended to perceive greater accuracy in a profile when it was labeled as authored by a professional profiler independent of the actual content of the profile. But officers' judgments of the usefulness of the profile were not affected by knowledge of who wrote the profile. Explanations for this result focus on the ambiguous nature of criminal profiles and how this ambiguity enhances the likelihood that beliefs about the validity of profiling can color perceptions of the content of the profile.