Category: Psychology

Probability

What do you mean when you say something is “probably” going to happen? Does that mean 50%? Greater? Less? In many fields, especially in intelligence, people use words to describe the likelihood of something happening.

Sherman Kent, one of the CIA’s premier intelligence professional, wrote about this subject. Since then, others have studied it and put together graphics to describe the words and their estimative probability.

Charles Weiss wrote about this subject in 2008. He published the below graphic:

Interestingly, other researchers reportedly conducted a poll in Fall 2021 with 956 participants to see their reporting. Here is their results:

So, what do you mean when you say something will probably happen?

Violence risk assessment of Sovereign Citizens: An exploratory examination of the HCR-20 Version 3 and the TRAP-18

Lee Vargen and I spent over a year going back and forth on the research and this article.

Abstract: Sovereign Citizens comprise an understudied right-wing extremist movement in the United States who have grown in notoriety in recent years due to several high-profile instances of violence. Despite this, little empirical research has been conducted on Sovereign Citizens, including research on assessing their risk for violence. In this study, we sought to replicate and extend a prior study on Sovereign Citizen violence. Using open-source data, we added several new cases to a pre-existing dataset of violent and non-violent Sovereign Citizen incidents, yielding a total sample of 107 cases, 69 of which were scored using the HCR-20V3 , and 83 of which were scored using the TRAP-18. Our findings indicated that higher scores on both instruments were significantly associated with greater odds of cases being violent. We also observed that several risk factors occurred with significantly more frequency among violent cases than non-violent ones. Implications for future research and professional practice are discussed.

Read more here.

The January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capitol: What the TRAP-18 can tell us about the participants.

I started working on this project in the Summer of 2021.

Citation

Challacombe, D. J., & Patrick, C. L. (2022). The January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capitol: What the TRAP-18 can tell us about the participants. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/tam0000194

Abstract

On January 6, 2021, hundreds of individuals converged on and breached the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to overturn the presidential election results. For the present study, open-source research was conducted on 101 federally indicted participants of this event—half of whom were indicted on assault or other violent felony crimes and the other half for trespassing or nonviolent misdemeanor charges. Then, we used the Terrorism Radicalization Assessment Protocol (TRAP-18; Meloy & Gill, 2016) to examine these Capitol insurrection participants indicted for their actions. Four proximal warning behaviors and one distal behavior were significantly found to be related to the individuals indicted for violent crimes. Similar to previous work using the TRAP-18, these results indicate that several dimensions of the tool postdicted violent behavior in this sample. Interestingly, this was the first study to test the TRAP-18 validity in a large group of extremists acting in concert. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Impact Statement

This study found that a terrorism-focused assessment tool, the TRAP-18, was able to postdict violent behavior in a random sample of 101 individuals who were indicted for crimes related to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection. It found the TRAP-18 was able to successfully postdict violence in this large group of individuals acting in concert. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)