Ian Harm

What is Investigative Psychology?

A major and rapidly expanding sub-discipline of Forensic and Criminal Psychology.

Originally developed to provide a scientific approach to ‘offender profiling’, in line with David Canter’s conviction that any contributions made by psychologists to the police or legal process must have an empirical, systematic, scientific basis, Investigative Psychology (IP) has now developed to cover all contributions that psychologists & other social scientists make to investigations & legal cases:

Investigative Inferences (’offender profiling’)

Investigative Psychology Practitioners explore styles and patterns of criminal actions in all types of offences, from arson to serial killing, stalking, kidnapping or terrorism, determining how these relate to the offender’s characteristics; this includes geographical profiling

The Investigation Process

Investigative Psychology Practitioners study Detective decision-making and Investigative strategies. They develop procedures for suspect interviewing and the Prediction of Violence.

Investigative & Legal Material

Investigative Psychology Practitioners examine the material used during the investigation and presented in court to Detect Deception and identify False Allegations or False Confessions, Evaluate Eyewitness Testimony or questioned authorship by Forensic psycholinguistics

Source: adapted from, http://www.forenspsych.co.uk/

I’ve been studying investigative psychology on an informal basis for the past 10 years or so and find the whole subject really interesting. The discipline can easily be applied to the business and commercial world where there are many different applications of Investigative Psychology principles and knowledge.

Investigative Psychology Practitioners can assist with identifying and reducing Insurance Fraud and also the detection of deception as well as the vetting of candidates for high level employment positions (known as Probity Profiling, http://www.ia-ip.org/)

Investigative Psychology methodologies and theories have also been very successful in market research and competitor intelligence producing particularly innovative insights in relation to identifying market gaps.

BigIthePI is the Screen Name for Ian Harm founder of IAC Investigations a Professional Investigations Agency based in the North East of England