Context Matters: Why Every Location Needs Its Own Behavioral Baseline
In this post, we've updated our description of behavioral baselining to align with our current structured observation framework and have streamlined the supporting research. This post was originally published on February 27, 2019, and has been substantially revised and republished in 2026.
Law enforcement and security personnel are asked to work in a wide range of locations, some familiar, some not. Whatever the environment, recognizing a meaningful behavioral deviation starts with knowing what "normal" looks like in that specific place, at that specific time. Take a look at the video below, showing five very different locations: a mall in Southeast Asia, a ferry crossing in West Africa, an open-air market in the northeastern United States, a market in Turkey, and an outdoor location in the western United States.
Is what you saw in one location relevant to another? Not really. These are five different places, with real variation in clothing, goals, and behavior. What they have in common is that each one has its own pattern of consistent behavior. Rather than call this "normal," which is subjective and hard to train on, we call it a behavioral baseline.
What a Baseline Is, and Why It Has to Be Reassessed
Each of these five locations has a pattern of consistent behavior: people carrying similar objects, walking in similar areas, moving at a similar pace, or completing similar tasks. That pattern is the behavioral baseline for that location, and it has to be assessed systematically, specific to the time and place of observation. A baseline observed yesterday isn't guaranteed to hold today. Patterns of movement can shift by the hour.
The first thing personnel should do when observing any location, from a safe position, is systematically assess its behavioral baseline. With that baseline established, it becomes far easier to identify behavioral deviations, behaviors inconsistent with the baseline, which may be associated with a meaningful concern. Without it, those same deviations are much harder to spot.
Baselining as a concept isn't unique to this field. Psychology and related disciplines use it to evaluate specific individuals with a high degree of analytical precision. Personnel working a beat, a facility, or a post do something similar, often without consciously labeling it: they come to recognize the pattern of everyday life in their environment, and that recognition is what lets them notice when something doesn't look right.
Environmental Context: The Shared Experience of Place
Everyone at a location has a reason for being there. People behave based on that objective, the physical features of the space, and the behavior of the people around them. Every location also has boundaries, entry and exit points, and features that shape how people move through it.
Take a concert. Some people are there to watch. Others are working, selling concessions, or providing security. There are defined entry and exit points. Most attendees will be watching the show, or moving to and from the restroom or a concession stand. Going to a concert shapes how people behave there, producing a behavioral baseline specific to that event.
This shared experience is described by the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM), which holds that the behavioral norms shared by members of a crowd stem from a shared social identity, dynamic norms shaped by the crowd's collective purpose that shift when that purpose or the obstacles members face change (Stott, Adang, Livingstone, & Schreiber, 2008). People with a similar purpose tend to behave similarly. Someone with a different purpose may not. A deviation from the baseline, in other words, is often a deviation from the group's shared objective, and while most deviations turn out to be entirely innocent, some point toward an objective that is criminal or otherwise harmful. We saw exactly this play out in Structured Observation in Action: Identifying a Concealed Weapon at a Protest, where one individual's behavior didn't fit the shared purpose of the crowd around him.
Culture and Behavior
Anyone who has traveled has noticed that different cultures have different patterns and standards of behavior. Culture, broadly, is "a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others" (Hofstede, 2011, p. 3), covering beliefs, ways of life, and patterns of behavior shared within a place or organization.
Research across psychology and neuroscience supports the idea that culture meaningfully shapes behavior, including how people process and react to the same stimulus (Park & Huang, 2010; Boduroglu, Shah, & Nisbett, 2009). Culture can influence the verbal and visual behaviors associated with deceit, fear of detection, and concealment, all of which are directly relevant to structured observation work. The practical takeaway is straightforward: personnel shouldn't expect people in one location or cultural context to behave the same way as people in another, which is exactly why observation has to be grounded in the baseline of the specific environment rather than a generic standard.
An Additional Benefit: Reducing Subjectivity
A core goal of systematic baselining is reducing subjectivity. Any observer's individual knowledge and experience will shape what they notice, and a structured observation process is what helps personnel move past that and observe their environment more consistently.
For law enforcement specifically, this systematic approach also helps officers articulate reasonable suspicion, why they focused on one individual to the exclusion of everyone else around them, which matters both during an encounter and afterward in a report or in court. For security professionals, the equivalent benefit is a clear, defensible account of why a specific individual received closer attention, grounded in an observed deviation from an established baseline rather than a hunch. That articulation is only as good as the vocabulary behind it, which is why a shared vocabulary matters in the first place.
Building This Skill
Establishing a baseline is the first step in the structured observation framework we teach, and it's the foundation everything else, identifying deviations, interpreting them, and communicating them clearly, is built on. Our Threat Observation, Threat Awareness for Law Enforcement, and Threat Awareness for Security Professionals programs all teach personnel how to build this skill.
If you want to talk about training your team on this foundational skill, we'd like to hear from you.
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Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1).
Park, D. C., & Huang, C. M. (2010). Culture wires the brain: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(4), 391-400.
Boduroglu, A., Shah, P., & Nisbett, R. E. (2009). Cultural differences in allocation of attention in visual information processing. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(3), 349-360.
Stott, C., Adang, O., Livingstone, A., & Schreiber, M. (2008). Tackling football hooliganism. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 14(2), 115-141.