David Canter

PhD, FAcSS, Hon FBPsS, FRSM, FAPA, C.Psychol, MA (music composition)

Applied social psychologist, creator of Investigative Psychology. Emeritus Professor at The University of Liverpool,
Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University.

What Offender Profiling is NOT

The Truth About Offender Profiling

Crime psychology expert David Canter describes how the search for scientific offender profiling became investigative psychology.

Download PDF: The Truth About Offender Profiling

What Offender Profiling is NOT

The Irrationality of Risk Calculations
March 22, 2021
Preparing to inject the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo: gencat cat/CC0/ Wikimedia Commons) Whole nations have stopped the roll-out of AstraZeneca vaccinations because of reports that a ...
The Comfort of Strangers
February 17, 2021
The unwounded help those injured after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. (Photo: Aaron “tango” Tang/CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons) With so many accounts of human nastiness to others, and ...
When Ignorance is Anything But Bliss
January 26, 2021
An anti-vaccination protest from the last pandemic. This one, sponsored by the the Anti-Vaccination League of Canada, took place in Toronto in 1919. Fundamentalist Trump supporters and vaccine ...
Harnessing the Power of a Mob
January 8, 2021
“The membership of this marauding group gives them a feeling of power and strengthens their identity.” (Photo: Tyler Merbler/ CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons) The outrageous attack on the ...
Why Does Social Science Not Bite?
January 1, 2021
David Canter considers why the social sciences failed to influence behavior in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 The remarkably rapid development of a handful of vaccines that enhance the immune ...
The Trump Conundrum
November 24, 2020
As a psychologist the most challenging aspect of the recent presidential election, for me, is understanding why 70 million U.S. citizens voted for Donald Trump. Many have pointed out that this ...
How Dangerous is Donald Trump?
October 5, 2020
As a British academic schooled, from an early age, in the niceties of public debate, I’m struggling to understand the acceptability of a president behaving as Donald Trump did in his recently ...
Race is a Racist Concept
July 28, 2020
Race only became a term that implied a radical difference in the nature of people in the 18th century (this illustration of the ‘types of mankind’ dates from the next century, in 1893). ...
Can Social Science Save Lives in a Pandemic?
June 10, 2020
Is this an example of a government following the science? Some years ago, as a way of showing the impotence of social science, especially psychology, I asked, ‘Why has psychology not created any ...
Emergencies: Why Do We Leave It So Late?
April 29, 2020
When the levee breaks … An example of Newton’s First Law of Motion as it applies to human behavior? (Image: Lt. Cmdr. Mark Moran, NOAA Corps, NMAO/AOC) It may be thought that the slow ...