Foundations of Psychological Profiling: Terrorism, Espionage, and Deception

223 Pages·2013·16.999 MB·English

by  Richard Bloom

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scientific theory and data on the notion of profiles, integrating essential
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• Describes various psychological events within, or exhibited by,
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and deception
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“triggers” to when, why, and how someone with bad intent may act on that intent. c
The book examines this phenomenon and concludes with the author’s speculation a
on how developments in scientific method and statistical procedures—as well as l

the integration of interdisciplinary sources, politics, and the cyberworld—may P
impact the future of profiling. RICHARD BLOOM
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ISBN: 978-1-4665-7029-0
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Foundations of
Psychological
Profiling
Terrorism, Espionage,
and Deception

Foundations of
Psychological
Profiling
Terrorism, Espionage,
and Deception
RICHARD BLOOM
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
© 2013 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
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Version Date: 20121030
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Contents
Preface......................................................................................................................vii
About the Author ....................................................................................................xix
Chapter 1 What Is Profiling? ................................................................................1
1.1 Definitions of Profiling ..............................................................1
1.2 Histories of Profiling .................................................................7
1.2.1 From Classical Multicultural Texts ..............................7
1.2.2 From Lexical History: Usages of the English
Term Profile as a Verb ..................................................9
1.2.3 Contemporary Scientific History of Profiling ..............9
1.3 Politics of Profiling ..................................................................15
Chapter 2 Challenges of Profiling: Validity and Its Estimation .........................19
2.1 Research Studies ......................................................................20
2.2 Social Deviancy .......................................................................30
2.3 Lessons From Literary Criticism and Hermeneutics ..............32
Chapter 3 Challenges of Profiling: What Is Being Profiled? ..............................37
3.1 Languages of Profiling ............................................................37
3.1.1 Psychodynamic Language ..........................................37
3.1.2 Conditioning Languages ............................................45
3.1.3 Trait Languages ..........................................................50
3.1.4 Physical Languages ....................................................55
3.1.5 Existential and Humanistic Languages ......................60
3.2 Profiling Schematics ................................................................63
3.3 The Cyberworld and Psychology .............................................73
Chapter 4 Challenges of Profiling: Who Is Doing the Profiling? .......................77
4.1 Basic Epistemology .................................................................77
4.1.1 Faith ............................................................................78
4.1.2 Authority ....................................................................78
4.1.3 Intuition ......................................................................79
4.1.4 Logic ...........................................................................79
4.1.5 Empiricism .................................................................80
4.1.6 Experimentalism ........................................................80
4.2 Logical Fallacies ......................................................................83
4.3 Argumentation .........................................................................86
4.4 Social Cognition and Uncertainty ...........................................88
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vi Contents
4.5 Statistical Issues ......................................................................94
4.5.1 Signal Detection Theory (SDT) .................................96
4.5.2 Bayesian Analysis .....................................................100
4.5.3 Binomial Effect Size Display ...................................103
4.5.4 Logistic Regression ..................................................106
4.6 Effect Size and Structural Equation Modeling .....................107
4.7 Deception Analysis ................................................................108
4.8 Close Reading Through Interdisciplinary Sources ...............111
4.9 Profilers and Politics ..............................................................113
4.10 Conclusion .............................................................................114
Chapter 5 The Profiling Matrix ........................................................................117
Chapter 6 The Profiling Narrative ....................................................................127
Chapter 7 Profiling Applications: Terrorism ....................................................137
Chapter 8 Profiling Applications: Espionage ....................................................153
Chapter 9 Profiling Applications: Deception ....................................................165
Chapter 10 The Future of Profiling .....................................................................175
Appendix: Matching of Learning Outcomes With Film Fragments ..............183
References .............................................................................................................185
Preface
Profiling remains a hot topic—so hot that it shows up in films such as My Name
Is Khan, in broadcast and cable television such as Criminal Minds, and in vari-
ous online platforms and mobile devices. Now don’t groan or shudder. I thought
I’d begin this way only because other authors on profiling do and, thus, it serves to
profile them as well as me for profiling them in this way. Also, by even suggesting
that profiling is hot and so hot that it’s featured in the world of make-believe, I’m
also profiling the world in which we live that each of us makes to believe or believes
and then makes. (This last sentence is a takeoff on the writing style used by the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who has been alternately labeled as the most
profound and insightful thinker of the 20th century and as an obscurantist charlatan.
Can you guess which I hope you apply to me?)
Profiling often comes with the presumption of accessing different worlds whether
real or make-believe, but when two worlds collide—as a title of a novel, songs, films,
or the task of a profiler confronting what is to be profiled—all bets may be off. But
the bets are still on profiling as a cultural product, a commodity, a current big thing,
or its posture to become the next big idea as described by the Austrian author Robert
Musil in his unfinished The Man Without Qualities. I wonder how one would profile
a man without qualities.
I’ll add that whether writing fiction or nonfiction or developing dance choreogra-
phy, painting, sculpting, or creating performance art, creators of culture as cultural
product necessarily engage in profiling. Although I will provide a detailed definition
of profiling and some of its connotations in Chapter 1, now I’ll just share that how-
ever it may be defined, it is used to bring order and meaning to what transpires in
life with varying degrees of validity and utility. Here are three immediate profiling
implications of what I’ve just written.
First, that popular entertainment and other cultural production involve profiling
is a backhanded tribute to the French philosopher Baudrillard (2008), who popular-
ized the concept of hyperreality. He described a contemporary world populated by
initially empty and then vacuous humans consuming culture so as to be filled with
something that takes the place of what is real—because representations of what is
real seem fuller and realer than the real. Thus, he commented that the Persian Gulf
War (Operation Desert Storm) never occurred because most of us experienced it
only through mass media representations. Moreover, even military personnel who
were deployed in the Mideast experienced the war through their imaginations and
cultural production. Their seemingly direct experience was constructed and modu-
lated through present and remembered contacts with the mass media on the war, past
wars, and other events associated with ongoing experience. How might one profile
a world or what is in it when reality is so elusive? When something that looks realer
than real is like a sand castle, better yet like the latest multisensory entertainment
experience that seems to first envelop us in some exraordinary and timeless every-
thing, then at least in a time-out from our quotidian something, but soon enough in
vii
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an approach to the nothing of forgotten reverie as the grains of sand of our worldly
lives scatter to the winds.
Second, one way gangsters learn to be gangsters is to try on fashions, behaviors,
and storylines from gangster films; similarly, so do profilers. Various psychological
processes—identification, internalization, introjection, social learning, vicarious
conditioning, empathy, association—may be the culprits. All of these terms vari-
ously encompass how people take things from outside themselves and figuratively
put them inside, leading to a psychological change. What was once something not
us is now us. Given that one needs contact with people and things from the outside
to place them or parts of them inside oneself until they are part of oneself, parents
who are concerned about what their children access and view through online and
other media and with whom their children associate may be onto something. As I’ll
note in Chapter 8, “Profiling Applications: Espionage,” the same applies to person-
nel security authorities entrusted with selecting and managing people with security
clearances and special access to sensitive information. By the way, in this book,
espionage refers only to a betrayal of trust, a generic treason, or an exemplification
of some internal threat, not espionage in the service of one’s country, organization,
or family. But as analogous to the gangsters, profilers learn to be profilers through
fiction and nonfiction. What they read or view may focus largely on profiling’s past
and present, but they actually are profiles of profiling’s future.
Third, as intimated already, depictions of profiling from popular culture com-
municate that the world is controllable, can be influenced, is predictable, and can
be understood. This is relevant to a psychological research tradition: terror man-
agement. Based on the work of American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker
and popularized by three American social psychologists (Pyszczynski, Greenberg,
& Solomon, 1999), terror management posits that human behavior is motivated
largely by a fear of death and a foreboding sense of one’s mortality. Maybe this
helps explain why very reputable people become enmeshed in sexual scandal. Yes,
they’re self-destructing in terms of professional career, but how can this compare
with—as American author Ernest Hemingway might explain—entering the ring,
going a few rounds with death, keeping it at bay, and even getting in a few shots or
having it on the ropes for a while until it launches an ineluctably victorious assault.
Much like adhering to diets of seaweed and ginseng, excruciating exercise regi-
mens, or belief systems featuring an immortal soul and eternal life through belief
in some sacred or secular entity—even including beliefs in nothing—terrorism,
espionage, and deception might be anticipated, deterred, or benignly managed via
profiling focusing on a terror management angle. This might be why many law
enforcement, security, and intelligence consumers continue to use, support, and
fund profiling, even if the associated validity-related data are sparse. And this
might also be why horror films are popular in that we can look through our fingers
or not, walk out of the theater or not, turn it off our screens or not, and choose to
be alive or not unless we read the 20th-century Irish author Samuel Beckett’s take
on life as waiting for death.
In any case, well over 40 nonfiction books of a professed scientific bent in the
English language have been published on profiling since the late 1990s. The qual-
ity of these books varies. Some miscommunicate essential features of profiling and