Psychological profiling, frequently referred to as offender profiling, is identifying the most probable characteristics of a criminal from his or her behavior at the crime scene. This serves “to help police investigators narrow down and prioritize a pool of most likely suspects.” (Psychological Profiling) Terrorists are, presumably, the hardest category of criminals to profile due to the lack of both legal and academic consensus about the scope of terrorism (McGuirk, 2018). Without an exact definition of where a certain type of crime begins and ends, it is difficult to design any standardized image of a personality that is most inclined to commit it.
A way to smooth the possible misunderstandings is the application of scientific approaches rather than non-scientific ones since the former provides a clearer conceptual framework and methodology. In addition, the scientific method involves testing and validating the accuracy of the outcomes with the help of the relevant disciplines, for instance, investigative psychology (McGuirk, 2018). It is worth mentioning as well that deductive techniques are not suitable in the context of terrorism. Crime scenes may be seriously destroyed, and detail may differ substantially from one location to another, which allows for no deduction.
Therefore, inductive methods are preferable in scientific profiling, specifically, the techniques that rely on past criminal records. From those, it is possible to guess the key characteristics of the offenders, hence the most probable trends in their activity. The two most widespread types of inductive profiling are inductive generalization and statistical argument. The first approach lies in designing a profile from observations by finding similarities among several events. The second presupposes calculating a statistical correlation between previous crimes and the characteristics of those who committed them (McGuirk, 2018). For the above reasons, these two techniques are currently prevalent in the psychological profiling of terrorists, and the majority of the profiles combine both for maximal accuracy.
References
McGuirk, N. K. (2018). An evaluation of the theory and the practice of terrorist profiling in the identification of terrorist characteristics. University of Birmingham.
Psychological profiling. (n.d.). Web.