Chapter 28 — Self-Check Quiz

24 questions: multiple choice and short answer. Try them closed-book. The answer key is in the collapsed block at the bottom.

Multiple choice

1. The bulk of the working field of forensic psychology consists of: - A. Constructing profiles of unknown offenders - B. Competency to stand trial, criminal responsibility (sanity), and violence risk assessment - C. Reading body language to detect lies - D. Hypnotizing witnesses to recover memories

2. Competency to stand trial is a question about the defendant's mental state: - A. At the time of the offense (past-tense) - B. Right now — their present ability to understand the proceedings and assist counsel - C. At the time of arrest only - D. After conviction

3. The insanity defense concerns: - A. Whether the defendant can presently assist their attorney - B. The defendant's mental state at the time of the offense (criminal responsibility) - C. How dangerous the defendant will be if released - D. Whether the defendant is competent to be executed

4. A defendant found incompetent to stand trial is: - A. Automatically acquitted - B. Found "not guilty by reason of insanity" - C. Typically held while competency restoration is attempted, with proceedings paused - D. Immediately released

5. Compared with unstructured clinical judgment, structured/actuarial risk assessment is: - A. Less accurate - B. About the same - C. Measurably more accurate at predicting violence - D. Banned in U.S. courts

6. The core premise of criminal profiling is that: - A. Every offender leaves a fingerprint - B. Behavior reflects personality, so crime-scene conduct reveals an unknown offender's characteristics - C. DNA can be inferred from behavior - D. All killers fall into exactly three types

7. The FBI's classic organized/disorganized typology, on empirical examination, has been found to: - A. Sort offenders cleanly into two distinct types - B. Not hold up well — most scenes show a mix of features, and the "types" blur into a continuum - C. Predict an offender's address precisely - D. Be more reliable than DNA

8. A modus operandi (MO) is best described as: - A. A non-functional ritual performed to meet a psychological need - B. The learned, functional behaviors used to commit the crime and avoid detection, which tend to evolve - C. The offender's home address - D. A type of DNA marker

9. A signature differs from MO in that it is: - A. Always identical to the MO - B. Behavior beyond what the crime functionally requires, theorized to be more stable across offenses - C. The fastest way to commit a crime - D. A legal standard for insanity

10. The empirical studies that have tried to measure profiling accuracy have generally found that profilers: - A. Vastly outperform all comparison groups - B. Do not substantially outperform comparison groups, and profiles contain many vague statements - C. Are always wrong - D. Achieve DNA-level precision

11. The Barnum effect is the tendency to: - A. Detect lies from microexpressions - B. Accept vague, broadly applicable descriptions as highly accurate descriptions of oneself (or an offender) - C. Remember crimes in vivid detail - D. Confess under pressure

12. "The subject is intelligent but underachieving, with hidden anger and a troubled family history" is, as a profile statement: - A. A highly specific, falsifiable prediction - B. A Barnum-style statement that fits a huge share of possible offenders and predicts little - C. Proof of identity - D. A validated actuarial output

13. A statement that "cannot be wrong": - A. Is the most valuable kind of forensic claim - B. Carries no information, no matter how accurate it feels - C. Is required by Daubert - D. Individualizes the offender

14. Courts generally do not admit criminal profiling as: - A. Background for an investigation - B. Proof that a particular defendant committed the crime - C. A topic for cross-examination - D. A subject of academic study

15. On the validity spectrum, predictive criminal profiling is best placed: - A. Equal to single-source DNA - B. Low — below DNA, toxicology, and fingerprints, and below even contested physical-comparison methods, because its core inference is unvalidated - C. At the very top - D. Exactly equal to bite marks in every respect

16. Geographic profiling is more defensible than psychological profiling mainly because: - A. It reads personality more accurately - B. Its inputs (crime locations) are objective and its output (a probable search area) is testable - C. It requires no linked series of crimes - D. It identifies the offender by name

17. In the cold case, the "lone drifter/stranger" profile: - A. Correctly identified the offender - B. Pointed investigators away from Roy Keller toward a phantom outsider — profiling misled - C. Was admitted in court as proof - D. Excluded Roy Keller by DNA

18. The honest status of the profile in the cold-case file is: - A. "Strongly supports the suspect" - B. "Profiling misled; excluded as proof" — it is not evidence and proves nothing about who killed the victim - C. "Individualizes the offender" - D. "Confirms an accidental fire"

Short answer

19. In two sentences, distinguish competency to stand trial from the insanity defense by their time frame and by what each decides.

20. Name three distinct reasons the evidence gives that criminal profiling does not reliably predict an unknown offender's characteristics.

21. Explain, using the Barnum effect, why a vague profile feels accurate even when it predicts almost nothing. Use a one-line analogy (e.g., horoscopes).

22. Why is "the profile matched the killer who was eventually caught" a poor argument that profiling works? Name the reasoning error.

23. Give the single property that makes the right-hand column of Figure 28.2 (specific predictions) informative and the left-hand column (Barnum statements) uninformative.

24. In the cold case, the profile pointed away from Roy Keller. Write one sentence stating the honest status of the profile as evidence, and one sentence describing the methodological lesson it teaches about how profiles should be used.

Answer key (click to expand) **Multiple choice:** 1-B · 2-B · 3-B · 4-C · 5-C · 6-B · 7-B · 8-B · 9-B · 10-B · 11-B · 12-B · 13-B · 14-B · 15-B · 16-B · 17-B · 18-B **Short answer (model points):** **19.** *Competency* is **present-tense** and decides whether the defendant can, right now, understand the proceedings and assist counsel — i.e., whether it is fair to try them at all. The *insanity defense* is **past-tense** and decides the defendant's mental state *at the time of the offense*, going to criminal responsibility (guilt), not the fairness of the present trial. **20.** Any three, e.g.: (a) the **organized/disorganized typology does not hold up** — scenes show a mix, the "types" blur into a continuum; (b) the **inferential leap from behavior to personal characteristics is unvalidated**, and the "behavior reflects personality" premise is overstated (behavior is heavily situation-driven); (c) the **original method was methodologically weak** — a small, non-representative sample of caught/incarcerated offenders, no control group, no measured error rate; (d) **accuracy studies are unimpressive** — profilers do not substantially outperform comparison groups, and profiles are full of vague statements. **21.** The Barnum effect is the tendency to read personal specificity into statements broad enough to fit almost anyone; a profile of "an angry, underachieving young man with family problems" describes a large share of plausible offenders, so it feels tailored while predicting little — exactly like a horoscope that "describes you perfectly" yet was written for millions. **22.** It is **survivorship/selective storytelling plus hindsight bias**: the remembered cases are the hits, the misses are dropped, and after an arrest the mind matches the suspect to the vague profile retroactively, counting loose correspondences as successes. A profile present at the *end* says nothing about whether it pointed *away* from the offender (or toward innocents) in the middle, and proves nothing about the method's error rate, which no one has measured from the anthology of triumphs. **23.** **Falsifiability.** The specific predictions *risk being false* (a named handedness, workplace, vehicle, or record can be checked and can turn out wrong), which is exactly why a correct one would narrow the field and carry information; the Barnum statements are constructed so they can scarcely be wrong, and a claim that cannot be wrong cannot be informative. **24.** **Status:** "The 'lone drifter/stranger' profile is not evidence and proves nothing about who killed Marcus Diallo; it misled the investigation and is excluded as proof — it includes and excludes no one." **Lesson:** a profile should be treated as one tentative, falsifiable hypothesis to be actively tested and disconfirmed, never as a template the evidence is bent to fit — and when a profile feels most compelling, that is the moment to ask what would prove it wrong.