PROFILE - Part 1: Physical Profiling
Welcome to the first part of the Profiling series. Deduction itself can be broken into many subsections and branches, but mainly all of those are classified into 3 main parts: Physical, Language, and Psychological. These contain sub-topics within deduction ranging from body language to logic reasoning to personality typing. But to understand these, and to be able to use them accurately and to their full potential, you have to understand how they are classified and what they are primarily used for. In each part of this series we will introduce you to a new area of profiling. There’s so much to talk about that we could never cover it in this introductory post, which is why this series is meant to frame your mind for much larger, future series that will go in depth on these topics. Here in Part 1 we'll be looking at the seemingly most popular: Physical Profiling.
WHAT IS PHYSICAL PROFILING?
Physical Profiling is a form of reading ones character, behaviour, and lifestyle from physical aspects such as hands, clothing, or belongings. This is often seen in Sherlock Holmes novels/representations, and similar characters. For Sherlock fans it’s known as regular deduction which we see in a typical Sherlock episode. Take “A Study in Pink” for example; in this episode Sherlock shows 2 extremely important deductions, not just to the episode as a story, but as an introduction to the character, and what we want to focus on, his way of thinking. So the question is, what does he actually do? We see him come to conclusions, and we see his reasoning, but what we don’t see is what actually goes on in his head. Does he pick the objects he picks at random? Does he just scan everything? How does he know what to look for? How does he know what something means? We see the trail he makes from point A to point B, but we don’t see how he makes this trail. So let’s shift away from the show and look at the actual method a bit.
What we have to understand is how physical profiling is composed. When we interact with our surroundings we leave residue behind, and the surroundings leave it on us, everything is connected to everything and when there’s a change caused by you or by anything else there will be a consequence to said change. Physical profiling is the method we use to identify said changes in the physical appearance or a person and recognize how they came to be. If I eat something, anything, that food is gonna leave a mark on me, I’m going to have crumbs on my shirt, or maybe a stain on my pants, my hands are going to get greasy. In deduction we learn to trace back those clues to their source, and from there build a scene of what happened in someone’s life. And we’re using the physical aspects of a person, the simple things we can see every day like their clothes or stains, or their shoes, or any accessories, to look for these clues and trace them back to find the information we want. Each time you look at a person you’ll come up with new questions. You know those questions are getting you somewhere when your answers start to overlap.
THINGS TO OBSERVE
So off the bat the first thing that we’re likely to do is observe, which is not the same as looking. Observation involves asking questions about what we take in with our senses. Let’s start from bottom and move to the top, beginning with shoes.
Shoes
Now these may seem very common but they can actually tell you a lot, they are in fact one of the most telling pieces of clothing people wear, think about it, how often do you wash them? How often do you check for scratches on the rubber? Or change the laces? Are they comfortable? Are they for work? What do you use them for? How often? Where do you go? Shoes are the one thing you will carry with you no matter where you go.
Shins & Knees
Let’s move on to shins and knees. This can tell you how someones been sitting, what they’ve been doing while sitting, how enjoyable their time was as they sat. If there’s some kind of residue it can tell you what else they’ve been doing and where they’ve been. Dust? Paint? Mud? Clean? Different color? Bleach stained? These things are worthy of noting.
Shirt & Pants
Next is shirt and pants. Is it stained, if so with what? If it’s food then what kind of food? Is it easy to spill? Look at the angle of the stain. Is it torn? Maybe they work with it a lot, or do sports with it. Material is also quite telling. Hot, cold, wet, rainy, dry, dusty, or hill covered places clothing specific to that environment. Comfort is also a factor - uncomfortable clothes lead to an uncomfortable situation or place - maybe a job or job interview they’re worried about.
Accessories
It’s important to keep in mind any accessories they have on them. This says a lot about what they value and prioritize.
Do they have a phone? In the pocket they can tell you handedness. Is it an expensive one? Does it have alarms? Does it have a case? What’s the background picture? Does it have scratches?
Do they have a purse?
Do they use pockets, if so which ones?
Rings? Do they correlate to social status and/or marriage?
Are they wearing earphones?
Important job?
How much exercise?
Owns a car or uses public transport?
Good health?
Watch? Is it analog? Is it expensive?
CONCLUSION
As you can see there are a lot of things to observe. We gave you a set of locations on a person to observe in the order that we considered the most accurate to a real life scenario. These topics are so large that we’re planning entire series for each of them, so this introductory series should help frame your mind with a platform to process all of this information without getting overwhelmed. This is just physical profiling. There’s multiple layers to creating a full profile of a person. Next week we’ll be looking as Language Profiling and how to decode someones actions, words, and subtle expressions.
