Typing Serial Killers: Applying the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to Criminal Profiling

By Cathleen Meléndez

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument was developed in the 1940s by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Briggs as a marketable way to apply Carl Jung’s psychological theory to the general population. This book applies the theoretical framework of the MBTI to serial killers in an effort to show how it may be applied to criminal profiling. The analysis of twenty serial killers revealed their preferences in terms of decision-making as well as how they prefer to approach the outside world. Criminal profiling as a practice has been growing and evolving in the past century and can be enhanced with the use of MBTI typing to better understand criminals, identify suspects, and choose optimal interrogation techniques based on the subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Suricata
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778228728

Book preview

Typing Serial Killers

Applying the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

to Criminal Profiling

Cathleen Meléndez

Typing Serial Killers

Applying the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to Criminal Profiling

Published in Canada by Suricata.

Copyright © 2023 by Cathleen Meléndez.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the author’s express permission in writing.

ISBN: 978-1-77-8228728

Contents

Chapter 1: Criminal Profiling      7

Chapter 2: The MBTI as a Criminal Profiling Tool      10

Background of Criminal Profiling      11

Organized/Disorganized Serial Killers      11

Background of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator      15

The Sixteen Types      15

Personality Studies Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator      22

Chapter 3: Analysis of Serial Killers and Findings      24

Applying the MBTI to 20 Serial Killers      24

Interviews after Arrest: Evaluating the Usefulness of the MBTI      39

Chapter 4: Conclusion      42

Appendix      45

References      46

Chapter 1: Criminal Profiling

Criminal profiling is a strategy used by law enforcement that focuses an investigation by narrowing the field of suspects to those who fit a certain profile of a person who would commit such a crime as the one being investigated. The field has been criticized at times for supposedly lacking true scientific research for its theories, but profiling has advanced in the past few decades and contributed to the captures of many killers. Criminal profiling, or criminal investigative analysis as termed by the FBI, involves both an analysis of physical evidence left at the crime scene and a psychological analysis of the perpetrator; these two types of evidence are interrelated and both help build the profile of the offender.¹

One major tenet of criminal profiling is the homology assumption, the theory that offenders who exhibit similar behaviors have similar characteristics and backgrounds, essentially making them equitable.² However, criminal profiling is not as simple as pointing out someone’s race, age, or socioeconomic status, but rather it is an ever-increasing complexity due to the variations in the personality of every person, including those that commit similar types of offenses. Not every serial killer thinks and operates the same way; not every rapist follows the same pattern of assault. Types of offenders are often subdivided into smaller groups. There are organized and disorganized serial killers, power reassurance and power assertive rapists, and preferential and situational child molesters, just to name a few. These all describe the type of behavior exhibited by an offender based on evidence obtained from the crime scene and/or witnesses. But in order to understand what a criminal is thinking, what motivates him, and why he behaves the way he does, one must consult the field of personality psychology, the study of similarities and differences among human minds.

Personality is what makes up one’s distinct character and is commonly known to be a product of both one’s heredity and environment. Isabel Briggs Myers stated that many problems in life could be better understood if analyzed through the perspective of Carl Jung’s psychological theory.³ Isabel Briggs Myers along with her mother Katherine Briggs organized and extended Jung’s theory presented in his 1923 book Psychological Types. Inspired by Jung, they designed a questionnaire to measure people’s personality types. The theory proposes four basic preferences. Every person prefers either introversion or extraversion (I vs. E), sensing or intuition (S vs. N), thinking or feeling (T vs. F), and perceiving or judging (P vs. J) in regards to how they process and react to the world. The letters of each dominant preference are combined into a four-letter personality type, making sixteen different possible types. The instrument known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has found many uses, primarily in career placement and development, and it has become a vital tool for understanding oneself and for understanding one another, improving interrelationships. The MBTI does not measure ability or character but rather how one prefers to function. The MBTI has enormous potential for giving insight into criminal thoughts and actions, and as of yet there has not been any research published that applies the MBTI to criminal psychology.

Getting into the