I think there is some truth in this. I mean this is mainly my opinion so take it with a grain (or several grains) of salt if you will, but there are times while I’m at work that people will go by me and I get this feeling that they are up to no good, then find out after either watching them myself or hearing from another person that that person I had an odd twinge about just ran out the door with a DVD player. (I’m a night supervisor at a retail store).
Or, and I think this one fits more. A friend of the family had a boyfriend that we all went to see. Me and my own boyfriend both had these rankled feeling about this guys, and later on found out my mom had the same rankled feeling about.
Much later -probably about a month later- we found out the guy had tried to pull knives on the friend.
I don’t know how true this is, because now I get this same feeling for a good friend’s husband. I have absolutely no reason to feel this way about the husband, I just still seem to feel that ‘this-guy-is-creepy’ feeling. Even though I know the guy and my friend have been married for more than fifteen year, they have three children (two adopted) and both go to church. (not that that last part has any indication that the person MUST be a good guy, just giving more example of something that should give me the exact opposite feeling than what I do have).
But I’ve also heard that we get these feeling for a reason, so maybe there is some kind of animal ‘knowing’ that does allow us to figure out, ‘hey this isn’t a person you should be around’ a kind of ‘danger, danger, will robinson’ that our animal ancestors left with us.
There’s very little downside (from a survival perspective) to mistrust of all strangers. In a hunter/gatherer sense, you really only need to rely on your family and close neighbors. It doesn’t hurt your chances of survival to distrust even safe people.
It may be true that your subconscious mind is getting other queues about the relative trustworthiness of a person (based on stuff you might see peripherally, smells, sounds, etc), but that’s different from having an innate animal sense about it.
I’d like to see more evidence for being able to judge stuff from faces. There’s just too many examples that people are bad at gauging these sorts of things that it would be an astounding result. And even in this result, there’s some questionable methods and not a big difference between being able to tell or not.
Obviously. That’s a no-brainer, and it’s the reason why the research is faulty. For the “non-criminals” they chose pictures of people that were specifically identified as neutral:
In other words, the criminal pictures were from mugshots. They corrected for the typically bad lighting, graininess, etc. that mugshots have, but those photos are taken right when they arrest someone–usually a moment when that person is in an extremely negative state–and the facial muscles reflect that. Even an innocent person looks “bad” in a mugshot, because he’s so pissed off at the people taking his picture.
The obvious answer seems to be that if people could tell who the criminals are, there would be no crime. That panhandler looks like a purse-snatcher, so I’m going to go back into the store until he leaves (or have someone escort me to my car.) That guy stopping to pick me up when I’m hitchhiking looks totally friendly and non-criminal so I’m not going to be found stuffed in his freezer 3 months down the road. This guy I’m about to marry totally doesn’t look like a wife-beater. This guy on the elevator when the doors opened obviously looks like a rapist, so I’ll pretend I forgot my keys or something and not ride down with him.
What on earth? We’re talking about a world where some reason a handful of women are hopelessly infatuated with Scott Peterson for crying out loud.
First, you’re conflating people who have committed crime with the act of crime itself. Not everyone who is a criminal, or a potential criminal, commits crimes at all times, or is a constant danger to those around him. Many of us, in our work and personal lives, encounter people who are admitted or proven criminals, or who we strongly suspect to be criminals, and yet we don’t or can’t avoid them.
Second, not all crimes have witnesses or victims, and not all crimes in which there is a victim or witness does the he see the perpetrator long enough in advance to avoid or prevent the crime.
Third, you’re supposing that people can identify criminals with 100% accuracy, when in fact a strict interpretation of the claim that people can identify criminals would require only that they’re able to do this better than chance (i.e., all other things being equal, over 50% of the time). Even if all criminals were a constant danger to those around them, if people can guess at who’s a criminal with only 51% accuracy, they are going to spend all their time running away from half the people they meet, and no one is ever going to go out in public or get any work done.
Okay… I admit I wasn’t thinking about just faces when I wrote that. I was thinking about the whole picture (pun not intended).
So I’d say in complete answer to the question about telling from pictures :dubious: no I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t say it’s not probable.
But from telling when someone’s near you, yeah I think that’s entirely possible.
Seeing good or bad in someone’s eyes appears in ancient myths and perhaps can give some insight into how it may work. For instance the scriptures (Jesus) state that yes you can if you have a certain gifting (Paul).
I tried the poll to see - got 10 out of 16. I realized I was looking at (a) whether they had some semblance of a smile and (b) angry eyes. (Hard to say that one without thinking of Mr. Potatohead) After reading more of the thread, I also realized I was looking for the tilt backwards and a little sideways of the head that seems to be an attitude display characteristic of many mugshots. Plus, poor lighting.
So, it’s not criminals I see, but subtle facial clues of attitude and emotion; I still got 10 out of 16 and I’m terrible at reading emotions. As mentioned by others, mug shot time is not exactly the best time to get a bland, unemotional photo, let aone a “smile, I’m taking your headshot” moment.
The article mentioned OJ as an example. The only thing I associate with OJ is poor decision making and poor impulse/anger control on 2 occasions; I hardly put him in the category of career criminal. Does Tiger Woods’ wife look like a criminal, even though there are rumors she may have committed assualt with a deadly weapon? The article also mentioned that womena can determine who will be a better father by sight - something that it seems contradicts a lot of real-world observations. Most of us are quite aware that a lot of women fall for the real jerks. (Hmmm… Tiger Woods?)
I still stand by my example of Bernie Madoff. As much a career criminal as any habitual purse-snatcher, nonetheless people were lining up to give him money until the last minute.
I think humans are very complex animals driven by a multitude of contradictory emotions. We have evolved to be very sensitive to others’ emotions, as displayed on their faces. Maybe we’re not seeing “criminal” so much as the manifestation of a deep rage at the world that results in severe antisocial acts. However, some are completely capable of faking or bypassing those displays, or not having the deep emotions that act as warnings. To paraphrase Lincoln, “you can tell some of the criminals all of the time…”
Maybe it’s possible (I never said it wasn’t) but it seems unlikely.
Really, I objected to the idea that it’s due to an “animal sense”. There’s already a perfectly natural explanation - innate distrust of strangers combined with subconscious reading of contextual clues generated by normal senses.
As for live people, you’re not getting my whole point. In real life, you can withstand a high false-positive rate without any consequences. Basically - confirmation bias doesn’t hurt your survival chances while an error can be deadly. So, it’s better (from a game theory perspective) to be flag people as ‘untrustworthy’, even if they’re not.
Let’s say your “innate” sense flags, on average 55% of people as ‘untrustworthy’. I say 55%, as this is about the rate people flagged non-criminals as criminals in this study. But let’s say we know that only 20% of them (if that) are actually untrustworthy. That means, you are, AT BEST, wrong about 35% of people. With error and false positives, you are potentially wrong about many more people than that.
Then, you have a high false positive rate. But it doesn’t matter. It does no harm to initially mistrust strangers (and you just forget about these cases). But let’s say your ‘sense’ actually flags a dangerous person. Well, then that provides ‘evidence’ that you actually have such a sense, even while you ignore (or most likely don’t test) your false positive rate.
So, you remember the few times the detector actually picks an untrustworthy person but never really test EVERY time the detector goes off to determine the error and false positive rates. That’s one of the basic types of experimental error - confirmation bias. You remember the stuff that supports your conclusion while ignoring the rest.
That thought just occurred to me, too. It doesn’t seem that the NimStim catalogue includes data on criminal record (I think it’s completely free from personal data), and I didn’t see anything about that mentioned wrt the set of photos obtained from ‘a colleague’ that was used for the main study. Would seem to be quite a glaring flaw, but I didn’t (at a quick skim) see it addressed anywhere. But I could’ve just missed it, so I’d be glad if someone who read the study in more detail could comment…