Author: Richard Bloom
ISBN No: 9781 466570290
Review date: 06/12/2025
No of pages: 226
Publisher: CRC Press
Publisher URL:
http://www.crcpress.com
Year of publication: 22/04/2013
Brief:
Hardback, also ebook.
In our January print issue we featured a book titled Criminal and Behavioural Profiling. Here we feature a wide-ranging and thought-provoking book on Psychological Profiling.
At times the work threatens to lose momentum and prefers quotes from great authors (such as James Joyce, hardly the clearest writer) to saying things about the practice of profiling. However Dr Richard Bloom does begin endearingly by right away calling profiling a ‘hot topic’ and throughout the book links ‘learning outcomes’ with film fragments, from such Hollywood movies as The Godfather and Rebel Without A Cause. As Bloom admits, he is aiming at varied audiences – intelligence officers and law enforcers, besides students and the public. One intriguing point is that the fast-developing cyber-world is changing behaviour – if the virtual world is changing our very psychology, how will that force change on profilers? Profiling seeks to predict events (you can give Mrs Y security clearance, you cannot trust Mr X with inner secrets), and to post-dict – to spot the events that have already happened that matter, such as after a terrorist bomb, or an act of espionage: was the bomber alone, where might he have trained, who was paying the (state or corporate) spy. Bloom makes the neat point that ‘profiling is how we live’. If you see someone in a mall carrying a skateboard or in scruffy clothes, is he someone to keep an eye on?! Could someone have predicted that Anders Breivik would kill scores of people in Oslo?
We profile all the time, but how accurately? As Bloom describes, or one event (taking illegal drugs, having gambling or other debts) does not necessarily make you less trustworthy. However, as Bloom says, ‘having significant financial problem and having a significant disparity between how much money one has and how much one desires are two very different things’. But if I’m a government employee and wish I earned more, does that mean I will spy for China?! To complicate life further, people lie, or say one thing and do another. Bloom closes by hoping that profiling turns into ‘some interdisciplinary enterprise’ taking in psychology, the humanities and arts, all as paths to human knowledge. Bloom is alive to GPS and smartphone apps that will make surveillance (and profiling by data mining) easier. But will ingenious people just find new ways to deceive? If profilers tossed a coin to make decisions about people they profile, they would be right half the time; profilers, Bloom seems to admit, can only give you 70 to 80 per cent accuracy of detecting deception. If I tell you a story and won’t look you in the eye, does that make me a liar, or shy or under stress? Profilers may be chasing a will-o-the-wisp; but as Bloom shows, a profiler’s work is noble and important, to seek to understand people.
