The abundance of police movies, TV series and crime novels give you a great picture of what forensic psychologists do – sometimes wrongly. Yes, police movies and TV series are truly criminal in content, but often only in terms of their inaccuracies and simplifications! Forensic psychology is an ambitious and diverse discipline and in this chapter I take a look at some specifics of the profession to sort out the reality from the fiction. Whatever activity a forensic psychologist is involved in, he’s arriving at logical conclusions using systematic, scientific procedures. The forensic psychologist’s work is founded as much as possible on objective research, which isn’t always easy to do for reasons I discuss in this chapter. Grasping What Forensic Psychology Is Not You know the typical crime movie plot, which goes something along the following lines: the detectives in the film are stumped (you’d have no plot if they found the criminal sitting crying at the crime scene). The serial killer has killed again (why are most killers in films serial killers?) and the pressure is on to find him (or more rarely, her).
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