Behaviour prediction is an important applied goal of psychology and the prediction of violent behaviour, in particular, has attracted considerable attention. Although the ability of mental health professionals to predict violence adequately was widely accepted till the late 1960s, a number of important studies then seemed to establish irrefutably the conclusion that clinical assessments of dangerousness, or violence proneness, were hopelessly inaccurate. Renewed attempts to predict violent behaviour, particularly in criminal populations, however, have recently culminated in the development of empirically based actuarial systems, which have shown a dramatically improved capacity to predict violent behaviour. These systems have already begun to have important impacts on parole and institutional classification policies. It is argued that these new systems involve not merely a methodological, but also an important conceptual shift in the enterprise of violence prediction, and that actuarial strategies may have been unjustifiably neglected by psychologists. Some suggestions for the integration of such actuarial approaches with contemporary theoretical developments in personality and social psychology are discussed.
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