Can You Spot a Killer? The Dangerous Fantasy of Criminal Profiling
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2025
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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, The New York Times, and The 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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What is the interest in true crime? And why is it apparently women are way more interested in true crime than men? |
| 0:05.6 | It's a huge difference. People say it's because women can identify with the victims in those stories. |
| 0:11.7 | And it's most of our greatest fear, probably to be sexually assaulted, murdered, you know, in these horrific ways we see. |
| 0:19.4 | After my mother divorced my father, she dated this |
| 0:21.6 | other man for several years. He lived with us. Shortly after they split up, he ended up |
| 0:27.0 | murdering his next girlfriend. There were more people studying serial killers than there were |
| 0:32.1 | serial killers. There wasn't this serial killer epidemic that was going on. It was, there was Ted Bundy, and there was John Wayne Gasey, and there were these very high-profile killers. But, you know, you could name them on one hand. So it really wasn't the epidemic that it was made out to be. The size of the attention they got, you know, made it seem like it was. How good are the FBI behavioral science unit scientists there at profiling? I mean, does it work? When does it work? When does it not work? |
| 0:57.4 | My research shows that it really doesn't work, at least not in the way most people think. There was a study done in London that found that only about 2.7% of profiles led to the capture of the murderer. |
| 1:10.8 | There was another study done that found that sophomore chemistry students were more active. of profiles led to the capture of the murderer. |
| 1:15.3 | There was another study done that found that sophomore chemistry students were more accurate in their predictions of who a killer was than the homicide detectives that they compared them to. |
| 1:23.9 | All right, everybody, it's Michael Schumer. |
| 1:26.0 | It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show. |
| 1:28.0 | This episode is on criminal profiling. |
| 1:31.2 | Oh, my God. |
| 1:31.7 | This is one of the most interesting topics we could possibly cover. |
| 1:35.6 | My guest is Rachel Corbett. |
| 1:37.8 | She's a features writer at New York Magazine, |
| 1:40.6 | and her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker. |
| 1:43.4 | New York Times Magazine and Atlantic. |
| 1:46.0 | She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of You Must Change Your Life, |
| 1:50.2 | which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. |
| 1:54.5 | I'm going to have to ask her about that after we talk about her new book. |
... |
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