Can You Spot a Killer? The Dangerous Fantasy of Criminal Profiling

The Michael Shermer Show # 569

Criminal profiling promises certainty in the face of horror: this is what a killer looks like, this is how they think, this is how we stop them. But what if that promise is mostly an illusion?

In this episode, Michael Shermer is joined by journalist and author Rachel Corbett to dismantle the myths behind criminal profiling, from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit to our obsession with serial killers, mindhunters, and “psychological fingerprints.”

Corbett explains why randomness is harder to accept than evil, and how our hunger for neat explanations can actually make us less safe.

Plus, the legacy of MKUltra and Ted Kaczynski, the seductive appeal of true crime, and the uncomfortable truth behind the “Jekyll and Hyde” problem: monsters rarely look like monsters.

Rachel Corbett is a features writer at New York magazine, and her writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and Atlantic. She is the author of You Must Change Your Life, which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. Her new book is The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling.

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