Serial Murder Psychology: What Research Shows Beyond the Myths
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Ukrainian Psychological Hub | October 11, 2026 | Psychology for the AI Era
Serial murder psychology examines what can be established about repeated, separate homicidal acts by the same offender or offenders: the variation in motives, circumstances, behavior, developmental histories, psychological functioning, and investigative evidence. Its scientific purpose is to explain patterns with documented evidence, evaluate competing hypotheses, and identify the limits of inference about any individual person.
The evidence establishes a central conclusion: serial murder is a category of criminal events, not a uniform personality type or psychiatric syndrome. Multiple people may satisfy the same behavioral definition through substantially different trajectories and situations. Researchers therefore examine observable actions, victim selection, opportunity, behavioral change, and the quality of the underlying data before attempting psychological interpretation. FBI multidisciplinary review; Gurian, 2017.
What does serial murder mean in psychological research?
The FBI multidisciplinary symposium defined serial murder as the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender or offenders in separate events. The definition is useful for cross-case investigation because it specifies repeated fatal events rather than a particular emotion, diagnosis, social identity, or motive. Other historical research programs have required three or more victims or introduced an interval described as a cooling-off period. These competing operational definitions select different cases and change study samples. FBI, 2008; Canter and Wentink, 2004.
A serial homicide designation ordinarily describes killings in separate events. Mass murder involves multiple victims within one event or substantially continuous incident, and spree murder is a historically used classification whose boundaries vary across agencies and research traditions. Victim count alone cannot determine the timing, motive, investigative linkage, or legal characterization of killings. Each alleged homicide must also be legally and factually established; the study label cannot establish guilt.
Psychology studies an offender’s conduct and mental processes insofar as reliable data permit. Law determines charges, evidentiary admissibility, responsibility, and findings under the applicable jurisdiction. An assessment score, a descriptive behavioral pattern, or an investigator’s hypothesis has a different status from a court finding. Treating these categories separately protects the accuracy of both forensic explanation and legal decision-making. APA forensic guidelines.
What the empirical literature actually includes
The evidence base is smaller and less standardized than the prominence of serial murder in popular culture suggests. Cases may remain unsolved, multiple agencies may hold different fragments of a record, and research often depends on convicted offenders, historical archives, case summaries, or public sources. Data completeness varies by decade and jurisdiction, while widely publicized offenders may be overrepresented. Studies using one definition cannot be assumed to measure the same population as studies using another.
Large descriptive studies show heterogeneity
Gurian examined 508 serial-murder cases involving 738 offenders, including solo male offenders, solo female offenders, and partnered groups. This design makes diversity within the category visible: co-offending arrangements and gender-related patterns can be studied rather than excluded by a stereotype built around a solitary male offender. The data describe a compiled sample, however, and should not be converted into population-wide probabilities without establishing ascertainment and representativeness. Gurian, 2017.
An exploratory comparison of 157 serial homicide offenders and 608 victims reported, within its samples, greater representation of female victims and stranger victimization in serial cases than in the comparison group of single homicide offenses. The study also found more apparently sexual motivation among serial offenses than among single homicides. These comparisons describe the studied cases; they neither establish that sexual motives define serial homicide nor provide a rule for identifying an offender in an unsolved case. Comparing single and serial homicide offenses.
An FBI investigative study titled Serial Murder: Pathways for Investigations was developed to ground investigative advice in empirical findings about actual cases. Its value lies in structured attention to case information, investigative coordination, and recurring practical obstacles. It is an institutional investigative resource, rather than a clinical diagnostic manual or proof that a proposed offender profile has individual-level predictive accuracy. FBI, Pathways for Investigations.
What a study can and cannot establish
Descriptive research can estimate the frequency of characteristics within a defined collection of identified cases. Comparative research can test differences between case groups, provided the samples and classification methods support that comparison. Longitudinal evidence is needed to assess developmental ordering, and independent validation is needed before a statistical method is used to predict new cases. A dramatic case example establishes that an event occurred when the evidence supports it; it does not estimate how typical the event is.
Why do people commit serial murder?
No single mechanism explains repeated homicide. The relevant processes may include instrumental gain, sexual interests and fantasies, control, domination, anger, grievance, perceived mission, interpersonal conflict, and other circumstances. These descriptions capture different psychological dimensions: a motive describes an intended or perceived goal; an emotional state describes experience at a time; planning and opportunity describe the conditions of action; and a mental disorder is a clinical classification established through diagnostic assessment.
An individual’s stated reason may change over time or may be strategically presented during interviews. A confession or autobiographical account can provide investigative leads, but it requires corroboration against conduct, contemporaneous records, and independent evidence. Investigators can document behavior while remaining uncertain about its psychological meaning. The FBI symposium explicitly emphasizes multiple motivations and rejects the idea of a single serial-murder personality. FBI, 2008.
Instrumental goals and opportunity
Instrumental motives refer to actions that serve an external objective, such as acquisition of money or property, concealment, avoidance of detection, or another anticipated benefit. If multiple killings occur in such circumstances, a psychological account must examine how the offender perceives opportunity and consequences, the role of access to victims, and why violence is repeated. It should distinguish a supported financial or instrumental objective from an inferred personality trait.
Sexual motivations, fantasies, and sadistic behavior
Some serial homicide cases involve sexual assault, sexualized actions, or evidence of sadistic motivation. Fantasy may be relevant to the formulation of a particular well-documented offender, but inference from a single crime-scene feature to a private fantasy remains uncertain. Sexual motivation itself covers heterogeneous phenomena, and investigators must establish the evidence connecting sexual activity, coercion, gratification, and the homicide. General claims that all serial murders are sexually driven contradict the range of cases documented in research. FBI, 2008.
Power, domination, and coercive control
Power and control appear frequently in explanations of serial homicide, but the broadness of those ideas creates a measurement problem. Restricting another person’s freedom or controlling the conditions of an offense may occur for different reasons, including facilitating another objective. Canter and Wentink found that supposedly distinctive power/control indicators were widespread in their studied sample, weakening the claim that those acts identify a separate motivational species. Canter and Wentink, 2004.
Anger, grievance, and perceived mission
Anger and grievance can be relevant to particular violent events. A perceived mission can organize victim selection or provide a story through which an offender understands the killings. Neither an ideological statement nor its absence proves the presence of a psychiatric disorder. The analyst must distinguish publicly documented expressions, verified actions, and inferred internal experiences, especially where statements were made for publicity or after arrest.
Multiple motives and change over time
Motivations are not fixed necessarily across a person’s offending history. Opportunities, relationships, perceived obstacles, learning, and responses to earlier events may alter behavior. A repeated objective may coexist with changing tactics and emotionally significant circumstances. The appropriate research question is which patterns are demonstrable in a given set of cases and whether plausible alternative explanations have been tested. Sorochinski and Salfati, 2010.
Psychopathy, antisocial traits, and clinical diagnosis
Psychopathy is a psychological construct assessed using specialized procedures in appropriate contexts. It commonly concerns dimensions of interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial functioning. Antisocial personality disorder is a clinical diagnosis governed by diagnostic criteria. These concepts overlap in some populations but are neither interchangeable nor equivalent to serial murder. A psychometric score does not establish that someone committed an offense, will commit homicide, or met a particular legal standard at a relevant time.
Claims that every serial murderer is a psychopath mistake a possible characteristic in some cases for a necessary defining feature. Similarly, an absence of outward remorse does not by itself establish psychopathy, and an apparent display of remorse does not establish innocence. Responsible forensic assessment integrates records, history, standardized evidence where applicable, collateral sources, competing interpretations, and the examiner’s limitations. APA forensic guidelines.
Psychosis and criminal responsibility
A person may experience psychotic symptoms and also engage in criminal conduct, but the two facts require separate examination. Psychosis concerns disturbances in perception, belief, or thinking within a clinical framework; criminal responsibility concerns a jurisdiction-specific legal question at the time of the alleged conduct. Diagnostic status alone determines neither responsibility nor the causal explanation of a homicide.
Research on psychotic disorders and violence describes associations that vary markedly with co-occurring substance misuse and other circumstances. The studies do not justify treating people living with psychosis as presumptively violent, and general violence studies should not be relabeled as serial-murder prediction evidence. For a broader clinical discussion see Schizophrenia and Violence: What Research Really Shows. Fazel and colleagues, 2009.
Why forensic opinions need an explicit legal question
An evaluation of clinical symptoms, personality functioning, competency to participate in proceedings, criminal responsibility, or future violence addresses different questions and may use different data. A clinician can describe findings and limitations, while the judge or jury applies the relevant legal framework. Even within the United States, tests for criminal responsibility and procedural standards differ by jurisdiction. Researchers should specify the operational criteria used; expert witnesses should stay within the questions for which their methods are valid. APA forensic guidelines.
Childhood adversity, development, and the problem of causation
Childhood maltreatment, disrupted relationships, exposure to violence, and other developmental adversities can feature in offender histories. They also occur in many people who never perpetrate serious violence. Retrospective biographies frequently select memorable childhood details after the outcome is known, inviting hindsight bias. To identify a causal developmental pathway researchers need appropriate comparison groups, temporal measurement, confounder assessment, and replication.
The familiar Macdonald triad—childhood cruelty to animals, firesetting, and persistent bedwetting—has been promoted as a warning sign of future serial murder. A critical review found that the trio is rarely established jointly as a predictor and that the available evidence does not substantiate its central prediction. Such childhood behaviors may call for compassionate assessment of welfare, coping, and contextual problems; they cannot identify a future serial murderer. Parfitt and Alleyne, 2020.
Childhood characteristics are especially poor grounds for confident individual predictions about an exceptionally rare outcome. Even when a factor is associated with elevated relative risk of some future behavior, most people with the factor may never experience the outcome. Assigning a criminal identity to a child based on an unvalidated checklist creates predictable stigma and distracts from addressing present needs.
Who commits serial murder? Gender, partnerships, and victim selection
The cinematic archetype of a solitary male stranger conceals the varied structure of cases. Gurian’s analysis explicitly compared solo male, solo female, and partnered offenders. Gender-related differences may be present in a studied population, but their interpretation requires attention to investigation, identification, case inclusion, and recording practices. A demographic description cannot substitute for suspect-specific evidence. Gurian, 2017.
Some offenders act with partners, within caregiving or occupational settings, or in relational circumstances that differ sharply from the stranger-abduction stories most frequently portrayed in entertainment. An alleged series may be difficult to recognize when deaths are recorded in separate institutions or jurisdictions. The classification problem therefore involves investigative systems as well as offender behavior.
Victimology asks who was harmed, what opportunities and access existed, what the victim’s circumstances were, and whether the offender and victim were connected. It should preserve victims’ individuality and avoid insinuating that victim circumstances amount to responsibility for the offense. Recurrent victim characteristics can be informative for identifying investigative connections, but a surface resemblance cannot establish a shared perpetrator.
The organized/disorganized serial-killer myth
The organized/disorganized model proposes that some crime scenes reflect methodical planning and others reflect disorganization, sometimes extending this contrast into assumptions about the offender’s intelligence, social adaptation, residence, or psychiatric condition. The model became influential because it offers a seemingly simple narrative: examine the scene and infer the person. Its empirical performance has been substantially challenged.
Canter, Alison, Alison, and Wentink analyzed 39 characteristics across 100 serial murders by 100 U.S. offenders. Their data did not support two distinct behavioral types; widely occurring organized features and much rarer disorganized features failed to produce the proposed dichotomy. This finding concerns the tested model and sample, and should be read as an empirical challenge to rigid classification rather than a claim that preparation or chaotic behavior never occurs. Canter and colleagues, 2004.
A separate cluster-analysis examination used crime-scene criteria in studies of 40 offenders and likewise found no empirical support for the conventional organized/disorganized categories or the four traditional motivational types. The results reinforced the need to derive classification from observed data rather than assume that an appealing set of names captures psychologically discrete offender groups. Taylor and colleagues, 2012.
The visionary, mission, hedonistic, and power/control categories
Another influential classification groups offenders under labels such as visionary, mission-oriented, hedonistic, and power/control. These are historical theoretical descriptions rather than DSM or ICD diagnoses. Canter and Wentink tested the expected clustering of characteristics using crime-scene data and found that common power/control features did not identify a distinct type, with only limited support for elements of other categories. Labels can summarize hypotheses for discussion; their boundaries and predictive implications demand independent validation. Canter and Wentink, 2004.
Behavioral consistency, modus operandi, and crime linkage
Crime linkage asks whether separate events may have been committed by the same person or group. It is an evidentiary and analytical problem requiring reliable case documentation, careful comparison, and evaluation of alternatives. Modus operandi describes how an offense was carried out; behaviors may change with setting, practical constraints, learning, and investigative pressure. The idea of an immutable personal signature is particularly susceptible to overstatement when the supporting behaviors are common or inconsistently documented.
Bateman and Salfati examined 35 behaviors among 90 offenders across 450 serial-homicide cases. Their analysis identified difficulties using individual behaviors as stable markers for linking cases, calling into question simplistic signature-based inference. This does not eliminate the value of behavioral information; it requires attention to its discriminating power, context, and consistency. Bateman and Salfati, 2007.
Sorochinski and Salfati subsequently examined patterns of change across series and suggested that examining broader behavioral and cognitive strategies can be more informative than demanding repetition of the same isolated act. An offender may pursue similar goals while adapting methods. Analysts should distinguish corroborated links from probabilistic ranking and should disclose uncertainty about both false links and missed links. Sorochinski and Salfati, 2010.
What recent reviews add
A 2024 literature review of behavioral crime linkage examined preprocessing choices, statistical methods, and how accuracy has been evaluated. It emphasizes that methods vary and that reported accuracy depends on crime type, sampling, and evaluation design. A 2026 meta-analysis of 29 papers found that performance also differs by behavioral information and crime category; much of its evidence concerns sexual assault or burglary rather than serial homicide. Findings from one offense class should never be imported into another as if they were validated homicide predictions. Burrell and colleagues, 2024; Kelkar and colleagues, 2026.
How much can criminal profiling tell investigators?
Investigative behavioral analysis may organize facts, suggest questions, highlight competing hypotheses, or help prioritize limited investigative resources. Its scientific value depends on the accuracy of the underlying data and explicit tests of the inference being made. A profile cannot establish identity, motive, diagnosis, or guilt from a few scene characteristics. Even a pattern statistically more common among one offender group may be common among other groups as well.
A review of homicide profiling assumptions found only moderate support for some behavioral-consistency claims while considering evidence of relationships between offending features and offender characteristics. That qualified picture is far removed from television narratives in which a distinctive scene yields a uniquely accurate portrait. Modern evaluation should demand out-of-sample testing, documented error rates, and comparison with existing investigative methods. Crabbé, Decoene, and Vertommen, 2008.
A usable investigative hypothesis specifies its supporting observations, rival explanations, and what additional evidence would change the assessment. Geographic movement, victim access, timing, and event sequencing may guide investigative prioritization when documented. Physical evidence, verified records, witness evidence evaluated for reliability, and lawful investigative procedures remain essential for testing attribution.
Prediction, base rates, false positives, and false negatives
Serial murder is exceptionally rare relative to the population of people who display any proposed trait or warning sign. This creates a base-rate problem: even a hypothetical screening tool with impressive sensitivity and specificity could generate many more false alarms than true identifications when applied broadly. The correct interpretation depends on the outcome rate in the population being evaluated, the time horizon, and the tool’s validated purpose.
Sensitivity is the proportion of true cases a method flags, and specificity the proportion of noncases it correctly excludes. Positive predictive value asks how many people flagged by the method actually have the outcome; this value changes with prevalence. Calibration compares assigned probabilities with observed outcome frequencies, whereas discrimination concerns relative ordering. Neither a high area under the ROC curve nor a descriptive psychological resemblance proves guilt or reliably predicts an individual homicide.
Risk factors and protective factors should be identified as empirical associations or case-relevant circumstances, not universal causes. A general violence-risk tool may have been validated for a broader class of outcomes in particular settings; that does not make it a serial-murder detector. The correct companion discussion is Violence Risk Assessment: What It Can Predict and Where It Fails.
Cultural and population validity
Studies built from selected U.S. offenders cannot automatically represent different countries, historical periods, cultures, genders, or populations of unconvicted suspects. Records may reflect unequal investigative attention, differences in access to justice, missing-person reporting, and offense-detection practices. Investigative models require validation in the population and operational context in which they are deployed, with subgroup performance and error rates examined when feasible.
What investigators can learn from serial-murder research
The practical contribution of research is a more disciplined process for detecting possible series, analyzing repeated behavior, and avoiding premature commitment to a suspect or narrative. Agencies may coordinate case information, reconcile differences in evidence coding, examine victimology, preserve forensic material, and review potential geographic or temporal connections. Analytical conclusions should be documented with degrees of confidence that match the supporting data. FBI investigative pathways.
Case linkage is a hypothesis-testing task
Investigators can begin with known similarities while deliberately checking differences, alternative perpetrators, and coincidental common behaviors. The most striking similarities are not necessarily the most diagnostically useful: an unusual detail may have been misrecorded, reproduced by media coverage, or shared by unrelated cases. The research task is to estimate how well a feature distinguishes linked from unlinked events and how reliably it was observed. Burrell and colleagues, 2024.
Interview evidence and retrospective stories
Offender interviews and autobiographical narratives may be useful when appropriately recorded and corroborated, but retrospective motives can reflect memory reconstruction, impression management, deception, or a desire to construct a coherent life story. A highly detailed account can still contain errors. Corroboration requires comparing claims with independent forensic, documentary, and contemporaneous evidence, and interview methods should be consistent with applicable legal and ethical requirements.
What a responsible expert report states
A defensible forensic report identifies the referral question, sources of information, assessment procedures, specific observed behaviors, alternate explanations, limitations, and the scientific basis for its inferences. It also indicates the legal issue on which an opinion is offered and respects the decision-maker’s role. The APA forensic guidelines emphasize independent reasoning, multiple sources, awareness of cultural differences, and transparent communication of uncertainty. APA forensic guidelines.
Serial-murder evidence in court
A court considers evidence under its own rules of procedure, evidence, responsibility, and expert testimony. For example, U.S. federal Rule 702 requires that specialized testimony rest on sufficient facts or data, reliable principles and methods, and their reliable application to the case. State standards and standards in other countries may differ. A psychological hypothesis about an offender type is therefore not automatically admissible or persuasive merely because it sounds technical. U.S. Federal Rule of Evidence 702.
The court’s legal findings, a clinical diagnosis, and a forensic psychological opinion remain distinct. A defendant’s competence to stand trial concerns capacities relevant to the legal process. Criminal responsibility concerns the applicable law and mental condition at the time of the offense. Predictions of future behavior address yet another question. A serial-murder classification, even if factually established, cannot decide any of these issues on its own.
Why well-known case studies often mislead
Famous offenders attract disproportionate research, journalism, documentaries, entertainment, and online discussion. Selecting only sensational cases can create selection bias, while narrative editing makes complicated events appear psychologically inevitable. Retrospective diagnosis is especially unreliable when full records, interviews, and valid assessments are unavailable. A case study should distinguish primary legal and investigative records, contemporaneous clinical findings, adjudicated facts, later interpretations, and conjecture.
The same incident may be described differently in contemporaneous notes, an interview conducted years later, a court record, and a popular biography. Each source serves a different evidentiary purpose. Responsible analysis begins with the strongest authenticated documentation available, acknowledges gaps, and resists turning colorful details into general laws of human behavior. The dedicated EN-58 historical case-study pages will examine particular records within their own carefully bounded intents.
Common myths and what the evidence shows
Myth: all serial murderers are brilliant criminal masterminds
The FBI symposium specifically identified the supposed genius offender as a misconception. Intelligence, educational background, social presentation, and investigative skill can vary. A person remaining unidentified for a period may reflect insufficient evidence, fragmented jurisdictional records, or chance rather than extraordinary intellectual ability. FBI, 2008.
Myth: every serial murderer is a male loner motivated by sex
Research includes women and partnered offenders, and documented motivations extend beyond sexual gratification. These conclusions are consistent with the FBI symposium and Gurian’s comparative sample. No single demographic characteristic or motive is a necessary feature of the behavioral category. Gurian, 2017.
Myth: all serial murderers are psychotic or legally insane
Psychosis is a clinical condition and legal insanity is a jurisdiction-dependent standard. The presence or absence of either must be determined with case-specific evidence. The label serial murderer neither establishes a psychiatric diagnosis nor decides a legal defense. APA forensic guidelines.
Myth: childhood cruelty, firesetting, and bedwetting predict serial murder
The Macdonald triad lacks empirical support as a combined predictive test. Childhood behavior warrants appropriate present-focused assessment and support; an extraordinary future criminal outcome cannot be read from that checklist. Parfitt and Alleyne, 2020.
Myth: an organized crime scene reveals the offender’s personality
Empirical tests did not recover the clear organized/disorganized types predicted by the traditional model. Behavioral observations can contribute to a case formulation when used carefully, while assigning broad personality traits from a category label exceeds what those studies established. Canter and colleagues, 2004.
Myth: offenders always follow an unchanging signature
Studies show that isolated behaviors can vary across killings and that patterns need to be analyzed in context. Linkage remains a probabilistic investigative hypothesis until adequately corroborated. Bateman and Salfati, 2007.
Ethical responsibilities in studying and reporting serial murder
Research ethics require respect for victims and surviving families, factual restraint, transparent methods, and attention to the possibility of harm from publicly identifying uncharged persons. Sensational presentation can obscure victim experiences and distort the reliability of evidence. Scholars should avoid speculative diagnoses and explanations framed around a supposed hidden essence of the offender, particularly when no valid clinical evaluation exists.
In public education, the appropriate distinction is between risk factors, observed behaviors, assessment results, clinical diagnoses, forensic opinions, and legal findings. Each depends on different evidence and has different consequences. Where the available evidence is preliminary, contested, or case-dependent, the article should identify that status at the point of the claim.
Frequently asked questions about serial murder psychology
What is the main psychological cause of serial murder?
Research has not identified one universal cause. Investigated cases involve diverse motives, opportunities, individual histories, and situational processes. A valid causal account would require stronger longitudinal and comparative evidence than an offender biography alone.
Are serial murderers born or made?
The question oversimplifies a complex developmental and situational issue. Biological traits, psychological experiences, social conditions, and choices may each enter particular explanatory models, but researchers have not established a deterministic developmental pathway that reliably identifies future serial homicide offenders.
Do serial murderers always have psychopathy?
No. Psychopathy is a separate assessed construct, and serial homicide is a behavioral event classification. Where traits are assessed in a particular offender, the assessment must be interpreted with its own validity limits and should not be equated with guilt or prediction.
Is serial murder a mental disorder in the DSM or ICD?
Serial murder is a criminological and investigative description of repeated homicide in separate events. It is not itself a clinical diagnosis. Some offenders may receive independent clinical diagnoses based on appropriate evaluation.
Can investigators identify a serial killer from a crime scene?
Crime-scene behavior may provide leads, help test case linkage, or contribute to suspect prioritization. It cannot reliably identify a unique offender or psychiatric diagnosis without corroborating evidence. Traditional profiling typologies have important empirical limitations.
What is the difference between serial murder and mass murder?
Serial murder concerns killings in separate events; mass murder concerns multiple killings within a single event or substantially continuous episode. Operational definitions differ among research sources and legal contexts. The difference is classificatory rather than a diagnosis or an explanation of motive.
Do serial murderers necessarily have a cooling-off period?
Some historical definitions used a cooling-off interval, but the FBI multidisciplinary definition requires separate events and does not make a particular emotional interval an essential feature. Different criteria produce different research samples.
Can violence-risk assessments predict serial murder?
A violence-risk assessment addresses the outcome and population for which it was validated. Because serial murder is exceptionally rare, extrapolating a general violence score to individual serial-homicide prediction is unjustified without direct validation, calibration, and suitable base-rate evidence.
Why is scientific research on serial murder difficult?
The outcome is rare, definitions vary, case ascertainment is incomplete, records differ in quality, and publicly known offenders are not representative of all possible cases. Many studies are retrospective and cannot determine causal developmental pathways.
What should readers trust when a documentary claims to reveal a killer’s mind?
Trust claims that distinguish documented facts from interpretation, link directly to credible primary evidence or peer-reviewed research, and explain uncertainty. Statements attributing a diagnosis, motive, or unique signature from edited footage or anecdote deserve independent scrutiny.
The scientific conclusion
Serial murder psychology is most productive when it treats serial homicide as an evidentiary category and studies variation within it. Empirical work supports careful comparisons of cases, structured evaluation of offender behavior, and context-sensitive investigation. It also exposes the limits of rigid typologies, childhood prediction myths, sensational psychiatric assumptions, and unvalidated profiling claims. The lasting contribution of forensic psychology is disciplined inference grounded in observable evidence, validation, and explicit limits.
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