ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT This paper has two aims: to review the utility of behavioral profiling and to suggest a practical means of placing profiling tools in the hands of operational personnel through behavioral modeling methods. The success and value of profiling for behavioral forecasting has been demonstrated in business and intelligence domains over several decades. Standardized, transferable methodologies to produce that value have not been developed. We here propose a methodology to make behavioral profiling techniques available to a range of operational applications

BEHAVIORAL PROFILING History

The ability to know in advance what key people, collectives and organizations will do is a human striving much older than the social, political and psychological theories and methods we now call upon for those purposes. Divination for predictive purposes gave way to observation and logic in the investigations of ancient strategists, among whom the wisdom of Sun Tzu (The Art of War) is a stellar exemplar. The great Greek philosophers contributed to the knowledge base underlying behavioral forecasting two major insights into the human species:

the durable, repetitive nature of behaviors in stable personalities, and the ways in which important elements cluster in personalities across all cultures

The first provides the basis for an educated guess about future behaviors based on past actions and the second allows a keen observer to extrapolate from one personal characteristic to another within an identified cluster.