Revision, Psychology, offender profiling, kocsis

Aim: to investigate the hypothesis that investigative experience gives individuals the ability to construct accurate psychological profiles. In other wors, will experience detectives produce better profiles than other groups? Method: An experiment with independant measures. The independnant variable was accupation of participant Participants: six different groups of participant including 31 senior detectives, 12 experianced homicide detectives, 19 trainee detectioves, 50 police recruits, 50 police students and 31 undergraduacte students majoring in chemistry. Procedure: All participants were given a case description of an actual solved murder. This included details about the crime scene, sketches, phographs, forensic informarion and information about the victim. Once participants had read the material they were asked to complete a 45-item multiple choice checklost, which asked them to assess the offenders physical characterists, cognitive processes, offence behavious and social history and habititans. These participants were also asked to sign a declreeration conferming they had no prior knowladeg of the case Results: The results are suprising. The most accurate profiles were produced byt the chemisty students, followed by the police recruits and then the experienced senious detectives, this would offer little evidence to suggest that investigative experience is thequintessentail skill for effective psychologyical profiling. Further, as both the chemisty students and the police recruits were studying athigher education level, the4re is the suggestion that the educational level of these gripus may have soem bearing on the results and further research into this variable is clearly required.