Facial Profiling
Can you tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his mug?
By Dave Johns SLATE EXCERPT:
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009, at 10:36 AM ET On Nov. 27, 2008, Indian police interrogators came face to face with the only gunman captured alive in last year's bloody Mumbai terror attacks. They were surprised by what they saw. Ajmal Kasab, who had murdered dozens in the city's main railway station, stood barely 5 feet tall, with bright eyes and apple cheeks. His boyish looks earned him a nickname among Indians"the baby-faced killer"and further spooked a rattled public. "Who or what is he? Dangerous fanatic or exploited innocent?" wondered a horrified columnist in the Times of India. No one, it seems, had expected the face of terror to look so sweet.
The notion that a man's mug reveals his character is an age-old bias. Since Aristotle, people have thought it possible to infer personality traits from the face and body, an art known as physiognomy. The practice grew popular in the years after the American Revolution, when a Swiss enthusiast published a series of illustrated pocket guides to help readers interpret faces on the go. Soon, it was plain to everyone that a man's greatness was prefigured in his face. (George Washington's big schnoz, for example, signaled strength and foresight.) Over the next 150 years, a gang of enterprising physiognomists set about using the new "science" to identify society's bad apples, too.
In the late 19th century, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso ran autopsies on convicts and cataloged features that might identify "born criminals," such as jug ears and overdeveloped canines. In the 1930s, Harvard's Earnest Hooton examined 14,000 prisoners and observed that first-degree murderers tended to have straight hair, while the hair of second-degree murderers was unusually golden. A few years later, Columbia psychologist William Sheldon studied delinquent youth and invented a human taxonomy consisting of three typesectomorphs (thin-faced, skinny, brainy), mesomorphs (broad-faced, muscular, aggressive), and endomorphs (round-faced, fat, sociable). He further divided these groups into 88 subtypes named after animals, such as the Herons (very often Phi Beta Kappas, he wrote) and the Foxes and Coyotes (Jesus Christ's type, per Sheldon). Overall, he concluded that the meaty-faced mesomorphs were most prone to criminality.
Much of this work fell apart under scrutiny. Lombroso's statistical methods stunk. Hooton chucked data that didn't fit his hypothesis. Sheldon had not examined very many criminal delinquents, and no one much understood how he distinguished a Great Cat (such as King Arthur) from a Great Saber-tooth Bobcat (e.g., Bronko Nagurski) in the first place. In the wake of the Nazi death camps, theories of "criminal anthropology" fell from favor, and researchers emphasized social explanations for behavior.
END EXCERPT
I don't think you can. As a matter of fact, you can't and to try to is both foolish and stupid.
Amber, the 19 yr old who started class a month before I did is the stereotypical cute little blond, who, by the way, is better, faster, and meaner than I am. You'd never see it coming, until it was too late.
Can you tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his mug?
By Dave Johns SLATE EXCERPT:
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009, at 10:36 AM ET On Nov. 27, 2008, Indian police interrogators came face to face with the only gunman captured alive in last year's bloody Mumbai terror attacks. They were surprised by what they saw. Ajmal Kasab, who had murdered dozens in the city's main railway station, stood barely 5 feet tall, with bright eyes and apple cheeks. His boyish looks earned him a nickname among Indians"the baby-faced killer"and further spooked a rattled public. "Who or what is he? Dangerous fanatic or exploited innocent?" wondered a horrified columnist in the Times of India. No one, it seems, had expected the face of terror to look so sweet.
The notion that a man's mug reveals his character is an age-old bias. Since Aristotle, people have thought it possible to infer personality traits from the face and body, an art known as physiognomy. The practice grew popular in the years after the American Revolution, when a Swiss enthusiast published a series of illustrated pocket guides to help readers interpret faces on the go. Soon, it was plain to everyone that a man's greatness was prefigured in his face. (George Washington's big schnoz, for example, signaled strength and foresight.) Over the next 150 years, a gang of enterprising physiognomists set about using the new "science" to identify society's bad apples, too.
In the late 19th century, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso ran autopsies on convicts and cataloged features that might identify "born criminals," such as jug ears and overdeveloped canines. In the 1930s, Harvard's Earnest Hooton examined 14,000 prisoners and observed that first-degree murderers tended to have straight hair, while the hair of second-degree murderers was unusually golden. A few years later, Columbia psychologist William Sheldon studied delinquent youth and invented a human taxonomy consisting of three typesectomorphs (thin-faced, skinny, brainy), mesomorphs (broad-faced, muscular, aggressive), and endomorphs (round-faced, fat, sociable). He further divided these groups into 88 subtypes named after animals, such as the Herons (very often Phi Beta Kappas, he wrote) and the Foxes and Coyotes (Jesus Christ's type, per Sheldon). Overall, he concluded that the meaty-faced mesomorphs were most prone to criminality.
Much of this work fell apart under scrutiny. Lombroso's statistical methods stunk. Hooton chucked data that didn't fit his hypothesis. Sheldon had not examined very many criminal delinquents, and no one much understood how he distinguished a Great Cat (such as King Arthur) from a Great Saber-tooth Bobcat (e.g., Bronko Nagurski) in the first place. In the wake of the Nazi death camps, theories of "criminal anthropology" fell from favor, and researchers emphasized social explanations for behavior.
END EXCERPT
I don't think you can. As a matter of fact, you can't and to try to is both foolish and stupid.
Amber, the 19 yr old who started class a month before I did is the stereotypical cute little blond, who, by the way, is better, faster, and meaner than I am. You'd never see it coming, until it was too late.
