Barnum-Type Effect Essay

Discussion
In this study, researchers were trying to identify how pragmatic police utilization of offender profiles is. Police profiling has been proven to be limited practice due to the fact that it is ambiguous, police are finding personal meaning in statements that could apply to many people, this is known as the “Barnum-type effect”. Offender profiling tends to use statements that are ambiguous, leaving these generic statements open to reinterpretation, meaning the statement could be compatible with a number of suspect’s snice the statement can be creatively reinterpreted by the police officer these ambiguous statements about a suspect can apply to many suspects due to the fact that they are generic. In this study, participants in this study had to evaluate genuine and bogus profile descriptions, they were randomly assigned to two groups, a group with a genuine profile the other group had a bogus profile. All participants were given the same profile, and that participants rated the profile on three different ten point scale first how accurately the profile describing the suspect, how unique the predictions were, and …show more content…
This study showed that participants identifying the same suspect all had different interpretations, offender profiling had been proven to not be useful as expected due to the creative reinterpretation of suspects, since one's view of the profile is subjective that can cause the officer to be biased. This study showed the participants' ability to evaluate between genuine and bogus descriptions. The results showed that gender, and years of service did not have any effect on the participant’s ability to profile a suspect. There was little to no statistical difference in between the two sample groups, meaning that hypothesis was