Criminals look different from non-criminals. Can..

[Spyder7]

.. you spot the difference?

Quote:

So, contrary to popular belief, you can assess people's character and personality by simply looking at them. Nice people look nice, and nasty people look nasty, and it appears that humans have innate psychological mechanisms to tell them apart. Now, in a truly groundbreaking study, recently published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, Jeffrey M. Valla, Stephen J. Ceci, and Wendy M. Williams of Cornell University show that people can tell criminals and noncriminals apart simply by looking at their still photos. Criminals, it appears, look different from noncriminals

In their experiments, Valla et al. show pictures of the faces of 32 young Caucasian men in their 20s, without scars, tattoos or excessive facial hair, all in neutral expressions. Sixteen of them are convicted criminals, and the other sixteen are not. Valla et al. simply ask their experimental participants to indicate how likely they think it is that each man is a certain type of criminal (murderer, rapist, thief, forgerer, assailant, arsonist, and drug dealer) on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 = extremely unlikely to 7 = extremely likely. Their results from two experiments consistently show that individuals can tell who is a criminal and who is not, by indicating that they believe the actual criminals have higher probability of being a criminal than actual noncriminals.


At the bottom of the article are the 32 pictures used in the experiment. 16 of them are convicted 16 criminals, 16 are not. Can you tell which is which?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-...nt-noncriminals

 

[Shannow]

25/32 here...now sign me up for Jury Duty.

 

[Spyder7]

Only 16 of them are actually guilty of anything, the other 16 are innocents (or just haven't been caught yet).

-Spyder

 

[Shannow]

Statistically, I was more likely to let a crim go than jail an innocent...5 guilty released, and 2 innocents jailed.

 

[Spyder7]

By that reckoning I jailed 3 innocents just because they looked guilty, while I let 6 criminals skate (I only made 13 picks).

-Spyder

 

[crinkles]

20 of them looked like criminals to me,

I thought 9 were criminals ; who in fact were not;
I thought 7 were not criminals ; who in fact were;
I thought 5 were not criminals; who in fact were not;
I thought 11 were criminals; who in fact were.

Good at spotting crims, bad at spotting innocent people!

7 guilty released, 8 innocents jailed.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: Spyder7
By that reckoning I jailed 3 innocents just because they looked guilty, while I let 6 criminals skate (I only made 13 picks).

-Spyder


I rated each of the 32 on what I thought, getting 7 wrong rather than aiming for a 13 number...guess that's how statistics work, everyone has a different internal question for a requested answer.

 

[Spyder7]

Even though I knew 16 of the 32 were guilty, I just scanned the faces and jotted the number of each face that failed the smell test. I hadn't kept track of how many I'd written down until I got to the end and counted the numbers up. Rather than re-scan it a second time I just compared my 13 to the right answers.

My thinking is the same: statistically some will underestimate, some will overestimate, but a big enough sample should average out to about 16 and the average score of correct answers should be much more accurate than what chance would yield.

You can probably then make some good extrapolations from it; such as a police officer trusting his "gut instinct" is merely relying on an evolutionary behavioral tool that is more accurate than the PC crowd would prefer to believe, though not as infallible as the cops who discard facts that don't fit with what they intuitively "know" and follow that path either to a dead long after it was, objectively, fruitless, or (worse) fabricate "evidence" to secure the conviction that fits with what they're convinced of but can't prove otherwise.

I know from when I worked in Loss Prevention that this was a skill you developed and used early if you were to have any degree of success. There were times when you "knew" as soon as you saw a "customer" what they were up to: it was only a question of if you'd seen them in time to catch them in the act or not. They hadn't at that point done anything suspicious, it was just something undefinable that you trusted and went with to separate them from the herd; though you didn't act on gut instinct alone - still had to observe all elements of the crime before you could act.

Other times behavior would tip you off, but of the ones you got that immediate "vibe" from absent any behavior, it was a kind of uncanny thing that nobody I worked with could really explain. Nor could I at the time.

Criminologists should be able to put the findings to good use, in any case, as new theory and tools are generated from it.

-Spyder

 

[Jeepster_nut]

What? No African Americans? Not entirely fair IMO

 

[Shannow]

They expressly ruled out facial hair too...

That's why I want Jury Duty...aside from my statistical impartiality

 

[FL_Rob]

21/32 correct,scary because I thought that I had a better badguy radar.

 

[Vikas]

Are they all perps? Then they are all guilty!

- Vikas

 

[Torino]

My retired police officer neighbor (30 yrs.) said he survived by profiling, profiling and profiling. John--Las Vegas.

 

[eljefino]

I picked out 75% of the arsonists but only 25% of the drug dealers.

 

[CivicFan]

When you start judging people from the looks, you place yourself at the beginning of a very slippery slope.

 

[Win]

Yep, spend some time in court, and you can see that criminal look and demeanor. Judges and jurors see it too, and I think it damages the presumption of innocence for these defendants. They look like they must be guilty of something, even if not the particular act they got charged with.

There are plenty of angel faced criminals are out there also.

 

[Spyder7]

Originally Posted By: CivicFan
When you start judging people from the looks, you place yourself at the beginning of a very slippery slope.


That was the distinction I tried to make: a cop following up on a "hunch" (based on the application of this built in evolutionary intuition) isn't doing anything "bad" unless he crosses the point where he is using that as a filter to discard things that don't fit (chasing a dead end) or goes even further and fabricates evidence to fit his preconception.

This is a lens we all have and that we don't selectively turn on and off - it accounts for some of what we would otherwise call intuition. It may not fit with our PC view of how society "should" behave, but that's not the point of the study.

The study merely confirms that we already DO judge people by their looks, and that more often than not (but not always) that judgment is correct. Note that there is a subtle but important distinction being made: more often than not, but not always.

Some people take issue with these types of studies because they describe the reality of our behavior that run counter to ideological fallacies based on a "should" it isn't inline with. That's an inconvenient fact of life but more good can come from identifying biological hard-wiring and how we use it, than ignoring or discounting it because we don't like the findings.

-Spyder

 

[Spyder7]

Originally Posted By: Win
Yep, spend some time in court, and you can see that criminal look and demeanor. Judges and jurors see it too, and I think it damages the presumption of innocence for these defendants. They look like they must be guilty of something, even if not the particular act they got charged with.

There are plenty of angel faced criminals are out there also.


Agreed. The study has a lot of implications and as fodder for criminologists it can go a long way toward both derived explanation and application of its findings. One application that comes readily to mind is it goes a long way toward breaking down how this aspect of human nature can, and has, led to wrongful convictions when at least one party in the justice system took it too far and used it to rationalize things like guilt absent evidence, or fabrication of evidence because LE was "certain" the perp was guilty and that this was the only way to secure the conviction he "deserved."

Also, it has broader implications and applications that are outside the narrow bounds of criminology and within the broader scope of social psychology in that this filter we use is an everyday, every person thing that will show up in areas having nothing to do with LE or the justice system. It may explain (at least partially) why some students are written off, some people have little to no prospects of legal employment (employers subconsciously using this same filter to screen out applicants during the interview process), and all sorts of other interesting social phenomena where this would likely come into play.

-Spyder

 

[morris]

the trouble EVERYONE missed there was NO ladies. totally bias.

 

[Spyder7]

Originally Posted By: morris
the trouble EVERYONE missed there was NO ladies. totally bias.


That doesn't make the study biased. They opted to go with a sample where things like gender, race, etc were eliminated as variables so that it couldn't be tainted by those variables.

This is the way real science works: if you have a hypothesis that you want to create an experiment to prove or disprove, then you eliminate as many variables as you can which may otherwise skew the results and call into question the validity of the study. Injecting a mix of gender and/or race adds undesired extra variables.

Extrapolating these results to females or racial variables isn't the point of the study, and that's the fodder for future independent studies of this one.

-Spyder