“Sadly, most of the students and many of the professionals encountered by the authors have no idea what critical thinking is, what it involves or why it is necessary. In fact, it is likely that most students reading this text will have never formally the encountered the concept of critical thinking...This will have something to do with the death of Socratic teaching methods in many universities” (Turvey, 2008: 49).
“I realise many people won’t know about Behaviorism (without the “u”) but one can always spot a Behaviorist when they use the word “behaviours”. There is no such word as “behaviours”. It does not exist in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. There is behaviour, but no behaviours. This is a made-up word, as Behaviorism is made-up” (Robert Luther-Smith).
“Once forensic evidence “revealed” that arson was involved, the authorities were determined to build a case against Willingham” (Dror and Bucht in Cutler, 2012: 259).
The issue in this article is the proposition that investigations are heavily influenced by Behaviorism which tends to focus on any evidence that appears to meet the investigator’s biases and then leads them to build a case according to that particular starting-point rather than assessing all the evidence objectively and looking for a pattern within that evidence. How did that happen? It needs some explanation.
The origins of Psychology
What we understand as psychology appeared in the last 30 years of the 19th century with Wilhelm Wundt (Wundt, 1874) in Prussian Germany and William James (James,1890) in the USA. It could be seen as an off-shoot of so-called moral philosophy, the philosophy of customs and cultural behaviour, the meaning of right and wrong being a good place to start.
Meanwhile in Russia during the same 1890s Pavlov discovered the conditioned response when feeding dogs (Pavlov was, in fact, a physiologist). It was this idea that then appealed to Watson in the USA (Watson,1913) and this, in turn, triggered a wealthy misfit called B.F Skinner to take post graduate qualification in psychology proper (Skinner, 1938): his first degree was in English Literature. Watson got involved in a scandal and went to work, unsurprisingly, in advertising. Skinner was a curious character. It seems he was badly bullied at college. A friend suggested he should develop a theory on behaviour and the rest was history, but it seems Skinner was motivated by a strong desire to control behaviour. He wrote the novel “Walden 53” (Skinner,1948).
Watson was the person who invented Behaviorism, Skinner continued the idea, calling his version “Radical” Behaviorism. Although philosophy was still a large part of psychology especially in the social psychological perspective, the idea of “behavior” was new.
What is Behaviorism?
In essence Behaviorism is about control through stimulus and response which, over time, leads to conditioning, heavily depending on “reinforcement” (i.e. repetition). Put simply, if you repeat something enough people will just respond accordingly. In advertising, it is about “eat” and “buy”, etc.; in politics, it is “vote for me”. The central issue is that Behaviorism can measure specific “behaviors”, for example, in advertising how many people bought the product in response to advertising (i.e. the stimulus), in politics how many people voted in response to a campaign (the stimulus). Today, it is more commonly seen as “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy” (CBT) to control addictions and phobias, such as smoking and arachnophobia.
In contrast, other forms of psychology such as psychoanalysis or depth psychology simply leave the result to be judged by the professional. To the “control” point: neither of the two former can be up-scaled for mass control purposes.
Thereby hangs the tale: Behaviorism wants to predict and shape behaviour. Through objective scientific data, Behaviorism sought to be taken seriously as a scientific subject at a time (the 1930s and 40s) when psychology itself was, in some ways, peripheral to the academic world. At that time, psychiatry was king. To be fair, it still is, but psychiatrists are slowly coming round to seeing psychology as the best route for mental disorders, sadly the chosen alternative has become Behaviorism.
The first problem was the fact Behaviorists used animals such as rats and pigeons to conduct their “Learning” experiments, famously Thorndike and Box and Skinner who filled their time training pigeons to do the most extraordinary things, like playing ping-pong, trying to prove that “organisms”, as they were called, were entirely motived by external factors and didn’t “think”.
The second problem, which relates to the first, was that the physiological difference between animals and humans was ignored. In the first case, messing around with animals is just not very nice. In the second, it’s a disaster. A human has a neo-cortex and a frontal neocortex: animals don’t (primates, dogs and cats have small cortical areas but very little). In fact, the high foreheads that humans have identifies the neocortex. The pre-frontal cortex lies where the Ancients put the “Third Eye”, just behind the skull and relates to higher thinking, planning and such-like, most importantly to inhibition. What this means is while animals respond to controlling behaviour, humans might not: humans can say “No”, as they frequently do (e.g. in the COVID crisis, many didn’t take the vaccine despite the publicity). They can realise they are being manipulated. This didn’t seem to occur to Behaviorists, in fact, when it occurs, they just see it as deviant behaviour.
At this point, I have a personal story. In 1975 I went to Management School in preparation to work in my grandfather’s factory. I really enjoyed the course because the syllabus was so diverse. Part of it was psychology and they went into some detail over management techniques, not least Management Science or “Taylorism”. Taylor (Taylor, 1911) devised time and motion studies. Obviously, this would fit with Behaviorist methods. However, what the management course showed was the “Hawthorne Effect” which is: when subjects are observed, they change or modify how they act. The example they gave us at the time was a footballer that, when observed, repeatedly missed the target, but when not observed had a higher hit rate. In other word: micro-management doesn’t work.
In other words, people should be left to get on with what their doing without excessive monitoring. This may be applicable in capitalist businesses (i.e. less than 250 employees) where the owner or manager can know all employees personally; but in corporations with large numbers of employees and it is difficult for administrators to know everyone, including the police, CPS and legal profession generally. This lesson wasn’t learnt as we have seen from the multiple miscarriages of justice that have occurred. It’s easy to accuse or misrepresent someone you don’t know. This became the time of “Behavioral Units” usually around policing, but involving psychiatrists too and, since the mid-Eighties, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Behavioral Units
So, Behaviorism became increasingly about shaping, controlling and predicting behaviour (the latter being a rather dubious idea in the first instance) and it came to the attention of the FBI. In 1972, J. Edgar Hoover set up the the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) as part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, Virginia, the training centre for the FBI. There had been a series of extremely violent murders, Ted Bundy is a case in point. At this stage, I can direct the reader to “Mindhunter” on Netflix, which dramatises the first moves in the FBI absorbing Behaviorist techniques under the guise of “Behavioral Science” from the book of the same name: Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker (1985).
Douglas was a major force in establishing Behaviorist techniques, although from the first episode of the Netflix series, it seems similar to Sherlock Holme’s inductive technique. In any event, the focus was on what the suspect did rather than what they thought, which brings into question whether Behaviorism is a psychological technique at all: in fact, thought or thinking as a subject was very much a puzzle to the agents it would seem. However, when the police/cops had exhausted all possibilities in solving a crime, one assumes that any help was welcome, if reluctantly. There was always benefit from having another pair of eyes. The Behaviorists were brought in on the case.
So, from the 1970s onwards in the USA, where Behaviorism was born, the detection technique became like a tracker on the hunt, as in Native Americans following a track. However, the track wasn’t specifically physical as in things, but in behaviour. The profile became of the personality of the individual rather than their appearance. It was not what they looked like, it was what they did: their “behaviors”. Turvey (2008) spells all this out in his book “Criminal Profiling” and this is how Behavioral Science transformed itself: profiling (now known as Behavioral Analysis; see the FBI website https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-investigate/behavioral-analysis).
I have to say, Brent Turvey’s book is an excellent primer containing all relevant cases, but the introductory section, “History of Criminal Profiling” is sufficiently critical of Behaviorist approaches to satisfy me, at least. Relevant to this article, and with reference to the Lucy Letby case, he includes witchcraft, which is helpful to my argument, not least because I studied “Witchcraft in Tudor and Stewart England” with the anthropologist and renowned author Alan Macfarlane. I might add, Douglas, the FBI agent and author, used a psychic. Professor Turvey is understandably skeptical of the scientific basis of that.
So, as an investigation proceeds in any case, the investigator looks for any clues, and inevitably, those “clues” that match the investigator’s preferences catch the investigator’s attention, which is where the problem starts. (For a list of false accusations, Google false allegations: there are plenty of them. For a more detailed academic list see Naughton (2013); I would also recommend the Innocence Project, which Dr. Naughton has been instrumental in developing internationally and is exposed in the Netflix series of the same name and can be searched for in the channel).
How do these false allegations occur, and why so often? I suggest it is the technique known as “building the case”.
Building the case
Which, finally, brings us to the point. You’re a standard investigator. There is a crime, usually a murder. You describe the crime scene. Behaviorists like matching evidence such as wound patterns and, thus, finding the modus operandi (MO); what weapon was used, what are the blood patterns, in the sense of did they attack the victim in the same way each time, did the blood get spattered, or was it in a pool. Are there bite-marks? Was there some interest in the victim’s clothing? What physical strength was needed? Was it a man or woman? Are there footprints or fingerprints? The latter is seen as poor quality evidence now. Today, sadly the bodies of Gene Hackman and his wife were found (27/02/2025). The caretaker reporting the scene to the cops said the front door was locked. The cops then reported the door was “ajar”. Why is there a differing account of that? Why had they been lying there so long that their bodies were decomposing? Why didn’t their family report it? As it happens there were simple explanations for all that but those are the questions an investigator should ask.
In the Lucy Letby case, the investigator (and the consultants) had to explain the series of deaths. The Birmingham Six couldn’t explain the nitro glycerine on their hands. The Postmasters couldn’t explain the missing money. Where does the suspicion fall?
The British College of Policing gives us a start to our investigation. The influence of Behaviorism is clear to see:
“Modus operandi" - Being aware of an offender’s modus operandi (MO) helps the investigator to:
• understand how a particular crime has been committed, the type of material that may have been generated in the commission of the offence and how or where this material might be recovered;
• identify linked series of crimes committed with the same MO, (pooling material from a linked series of crimes can be a highly effective way of progressing an investigation);
• identify links between crimes and known offenders who use the same MO;
• predict future offending patterns, which may enable preventive or protective measures to be taken;
• predict future offending patterns, which may enable offenders to be caught red-handed; and,
• identify likely disposal routes and markets for stolen or illicit property, for example, drugs” (UK College of Policing website: https://www.college.police.uk/app/investigation/investigation-introduction).
At this point, like most psychologists, particularly of the social kind, I have a personal experience, which is excellent because you can get to see the system, from the inside, actually working. That’s what all management scientists or consultants want to be: the mystery shopper.
From 1995 to 2019, I was accused of several things that I hadn’t done and I had nothing to do with, as the courts agreed, except the last one which was an abortion of justice (intentional wrongful conviction (Naughton, 2013)) carried out by the judiciary (see, also, "Whatever Happened to Socrates, False Allegations Watch, 13/11/2024). We now know why it happened and the authorities were responsible. The reason is when the authorities get one piece of evidence and the whole case spirals. In my case, a false allegation by a professor at a particular university, with Lucy Letby because she was there, in the Birmingham Six’s case an unfortunate – and extraordinary - co-incidence between explosives and playing cards when presumptive testing.
The point is, despite any training they may get, investigators like Douglas still have their biases (not least confirmation bias), and not least when no significant evidence arises other than what appealed to themselves and when they haven’t given thought enough to it (intuition, gut instinct and they like, rolled into a belief in their own experience, which rapidly went wrong in the first Mindhunters case). But, that one piece of evidence, as such, enables them to follow a line of investigation: they can build the case. So, they focus on what they feel they can be sure of. Within the system, once the investigator is fixed on it, disagreement with the lead investigator can be career threatening.
My favourite hypothetical example is the follows. A woman comes home from work, enters her large house and goes up to the bedroom to find her husband. There is a bloody knife in the doorway. She picks it up. She calls her husband’s name and enters the large space to turn right and find her husband dead on the bed. At that very moment, the au pair walks in the other door and screams. The police are called, the wife is arrested and is sent to jail for life.
In fact, the au pair murdered him because he wouldn’t leave his wife for her, she got the knife, murdered the husband, wiped the handle clean of fingerprints and DNA, put it by the door and waited for the wife to return.
The single piece of evidence – she was holding the knife – led to a call of strict liability – she was holding the knife and her husband had been stabbed with that knife. Other investigations show the marriage was failing, the wife was angry and that’s why she killed him. The au pair said nothing about the affair.
That example shows us the positivity testing theory. The investigators try to prove their hypothesis rather than disprove it. The local police, CPS and legal profession are all long-time associates (what I call the “old lag” theory) the case is open and shut, everyone gets paid.
In fact, Turvey explains how the investigators collect around a theory and dislike being questioned on it. How so when they ask the relevant Socratic questions? Because they aren’t really asking Socratic questions. They probably don’t even know who Socrates is (as Turvey confirms, cited above). They’re simply asking questions. “What’s the time?” isn’t a Socratic question despite the use of the word “what”, it’s just a question. In the wife case, they should ask why SHOULD the wife murder him? Why couldn’t someone else have done it? That then becomes “rocking the boat” and, as said before, that isn’t good for the questioner’s career. They’re building the case; they don’t need anyone questioning that, which is more about institutional pressures than detective work. In fact, Behaviorism is a very corporate type of approach. Everyone must sing from the same hymn sheet; that’s exactly what Sherlock Holmes doesn’t do.
So, when a Behaviorist gets a clue, in the absence of any other evidence, they use that piece to “build the case”. The Birmingham Six appeared to have nitro-glycerine on their hands, case closed; when Lucy Letby was in the clinic, cases of dead babies were claimed to have risen (almost in a supernatural way). The US cases of black men being found guilty when DNA proved them innocent are, frankly, legion. The CPS don’t like you? You’re guilty. That was me. Sadly, for them the judges didn’t agree.
Now, of course, some people are guilty, but the CPS has a 50% failure rate in prosecutions (as accepted by Max Hill, the former Director of Public Prosecution in Parliamentary Committee, as pointed out by myself; another reason for them to dislike me). That is a completely unacceptable success rate by any standards. But, nobody cares about the people found innocent. Max Hill blamed abuse of process – which, in effect, is the failure of the police to provide the correct documents – and thus blamed the police. The CPS still don’t take responsibility for failure of disclosure – the showing the defence exculpatory evidence. The heavy-handed arm of the law just carries on, despite the mountain of evidence they’re doing something wrong. I contend that the problem is Behaviorism and “building the case”.
Conclusion
This history of Behaviorism is complex, if not convoluted, but its appearance was clear in the USA in the 1970s and only made an obvious appearance in the UK in the 1990s and specifically in 2010 in the UK government’s “nudge” unit and elsewhere. Classic detective work appeared in the 19th century, Sherlock Holmes being the most familiar fictional character, but it was the USA, in particular, that started the Behaviorist movement at the FBI training school at Quantico in 1972. Through psychology it became an influence on psychiatry who work closely with the police and, in the UK, specifically the CPS.
The key feature of the FBI’s use of Behaviorism is a form of tracking by identifying clues and creating a psychological profile of the culprit. Is it a man or woman, older, younger, white or other? What are the culprit’s habits, what sort of place the perpetrator would live and so on.
Problems arise when there is no specific evidence to point to the actual offender, which means the investigation then leans towards the most obvious suspects (the spouse, people that were there or wrongly identified as being there) or the investigator has not asked truly Socratic questions like “How did I come to this conclusion: are there alternatives?” For example, a wife is murdered, and the first suspect is the husband. In that instance, the investigators then start looking for clues as to the guilt of the husband. They do not find evidence that pins it ON the suspect, but evidence is acquired to implicate the suspect rather than evidence pointing AT the suspect. For example, I was accused of money laundering in 2006. It came to court with no less than 14 charges, which the judge threw out almost immediately. It was easy to see that the CPS barrister was absolutely dumbfounded: he absolutely believed I was guilty, the main evidence being that I had gone to Switzerland and opened a bank account. The CPS posited it was for the purposes of money laundering. In fact, I was there for a year and was earning money teaching English to pay for the hotel I was staying in. At the time the language school concerned was still using cheques.
The point being that when the police and CPS get their teeth into a case, Socratic thinking goes out of the window, that is, if it even ever came in, as Brent Turvey suggests. The pressure to solve crime heats up institutionally, not least with cases like the Birmingham Six. People died horribly, the IRA (who I personally condemn) were a cruel and heartless group causing mayhem. Irish? What appears to be nitro-glycerine on your hands? You’re guilty, damn you. Apparently, the Birmingham Six were treated cruelly at the hands of the authorities, and all the time they were innocent. Needless to say, the barristers excused themselves by saying it didn’t prove the suspects were innocent, it just allowed doubt to enter the scene.
There are too many miscarriages of justice for this to be purely confirmation bias. In some instances, such as Barry George, the police had minimal evidence, in his case small particles of gun shot residue in his pocket. Much of the “evidence” centred on his eccentric personality. He was fitted-up. Despite this the whole weight of the judicial system found him guilty.
In all this, I haven’t covered interview techniques (or the lack of them). In my cases they just assumed guilt so there was no real interview, which might have helped them from being so biased, but I have watched many filmed interviews which are unremarkable and usually involve suspects who are obviously guilty. But false confessions, often elicited by aggressive interrogation with vulnerable suspects, are covered by Hasel and Kassim (in Cutler (2012).
The issue is when investigators either don’t know if, or wrongly believe that, the interviewee is guilty and bully the suspect into making a confession or think they’re just dissembling. On that basis, if the investigators have one clue that they are building the case on, they falsely attribute evidence given by the interviewee one way or the other according to their own biases.
In conclusion, over-enthusiastic, or failing, investigators are desperate to pin the case on someone and take any clues to be indication of guilt. The knife was in your hand? You’re guilty: and other completely spurious evidence is taken to prove guilt. The investigators decide who is guilty first and build the case on that assumption and don’t question their own assumptions or conclusions, presumably because it undermines their own confidence in themselves as we saw with the barrister in the money-laundering case with myself.
With a successful prosecution rate of 50%, perhaps the smoke is coming from the police and the CPS.
By Robert Luther-Smith (Dip. Man. BA (Hons) (Psych)
References
Douglas, J.E. and Olshaker M.; (1985): Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit; Heinemann.
James, W. (1890); The Principles of Psychology; Holt.
Macfarlane, A.; (1970); Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England; Waveland Press.
Naughton, N; (2013); The Innocent and the Criminal Justice System: a Sociological Study of Miscarriages of Justice; Palgrave Macmillan.
Pavlov, I.; (1927); Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex; Oxford University Press.
Skinner, B.F. (1938); The Behavior of Organisms; Appleton Century.
Skinner, B.F. (1948); Walden Two; Hacket.
Taylor, F.W. (1911); The Principles of Scientific management; Harper and Bros.
Turvey, B. (2008); Criminal Profiling: An introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis; Elsevier.
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the Behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20(2), 158–177.
Wundt. W. (1874); Principles of Physiological Psychology.
Comentarios