Pitchfork II

This is not about Colin Pitchfork, rather a theme that I mentioned in that post.

I was asked to provide some thoughts regarding a case for a journalist. In some ways that was a small part of what he wanted to get some information about, predominantly he wanted to have some thoughts about greed and how it might be linked to offending behaviour generally, and a specific case, specifically. The piece hasn't come out yet so I don't know if there will be all kinds of uncomfortable headlines associating me to things that I didn't say - Psychologist Claims that Greed is linked to Rape.

I didn't claim that, but I did wonder it (because there are evolutionary theories of rape and one could see greed as based on the idea that our needs must be met so that we survive) and if we only consider greed as a potential motivator for offending behaviour when money is involved and, where money is involved, we always assume that greed is the motivator.

I was asked if greed best described the motivation for some murders, where the murderers then went on to  access the money of the people that they killed, for quite a long time in some quite sophisticated ways. I don't know. I have never met these people. So maybe the journalist will ignore what I did say*. I hope not as what I hoped to convey was that when there is a case and a judge implies that greed was involved (despite it not having been investigated) and the media implies that greed was involved, we see greed as a risk factor and perhaps miss the other more relevant material. At its most basic this might mean that I will only be concerned by you if you show evidence of greed, not so much if you seem angry that I promised to buy you a delicious hot chocolate on a warm, summer day, only to then renege on that deal. You being annoyed that I didn't live up to my promise, when you perhaps had been relying on it, might be something I see as a reasonable reaction, but not one that should make me concerned for my safety.

To say anything is a motivator of someone else's behaviour is always going to be hard, to say it of someone you don't have a wealth of experience with will be harder, to say it of someone you have never met seems to me to be impossible. The best we can do is hypothesise and consider other possibilities.

* Some time ago a journalist asked me to comment on some data that she had suggesting that there were more sexual assaults on a particular Valentine's day, I think hoping that I might provide a headline that Valentine's Day is a Danger to Women! Beware the Red Rose!!!

I didn't. I tried to be a good psychologist and suggest that in order to know if Valentine's Day was an issue she needed to compare it to other days, ordinary days, special days (e.g., Boxing day), to see if it was because on the day in question Valentine's Day had fallen on a day that might have the highest number of sexual assaults in a week, for example, a Friday. To see if that Valentine's Day had coincidentally occurred with something that might have made people more likely to report, or to make it a day when more people were out (a football match, a full-moon, all Wetherspoons offering free drinks to women in hats). It could have been because it was valentine's Day, but to not check that there might be other explanations seemed unhelpful. She didn't use any of it. I expect if I had said that all women were at risk on valentine's day and that we should ban it my career might have taken a positive turn and I would be resident psychologist for real crime dramas. So, I remain unknown. There's the headline.