Can you tell criminals from non-criminals by sight?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Okay, I don’t want to taint my results by reading other replies first, so here are my guesses:

[spoiler] I think the criminals are 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31
I think the non-criminals are 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 30, 32

I had trouble with 5, 9, 16, and 23. I feel reasonably confident about the rest. I tried to look around the eyes for signs of premature aging, squintiness (“something to hide”), and dishonesty. So basically, I was looking for hardened/career criminals. If someone just did a couple months in the pokey for weed possession, my method wouldn’t really apply.[/spoiler]

Wow, I suck! heh. Only got 9 right. A lot of false positives.

22

I didn’t assume any of them were. I mean, they all look like people I’ve met, and as far as I know, I’ve never met any criminals.

23

amazing…

I got 10 correct…missed 6 criminals and misidentified 5 as criminals/. Seems to be better than chance.

24

11 right: 4,5,8,10,11,16,21,23,28,29,31

25

Me too.

26

I’m awful at this apparently.
I only guessed correctly at seven. All those photos looked quite bland to me - I’m curious which ones were most often missed, either because people assumed they were “criminals” although innocent or because some of the “innocent”-looking ones looked somehow more criminal.

27

Mind you - this study wasn’t conducted on a representative sample of the general population. Almost all respondents were female, all were between the ages of 19-26, and they were college students taking a psych class. And it was a very small sample, all Americans. I don’t think this qualifies as a really reliable, valid test.

28

And this thread is probably pretty much useless as a poll since it will skew towards those who bother to post because they are proud of the fact they achieved better than chance.

29

I thought this thread would be a stealth poll on whether or not posters are bigoted

30

Four Dopers had perfect scores (or so they say) -c’mon fess up!

31

Yes, that’s true. Also, the criticism to the study above is valid – at best, one can say that it shows that people can tell convicts from non-convicts – or even more accurately, from people chosen from a database of facial expressions, respectively from a set of pictures ‘provided by a colleague’. I only skimmed the thing, but I didn’t see how and where it was ascertained that those people actually are ‘non-criminals’ – the NimStim catalogue, in particular, does not seem to include such data; the faces are those of professional actors, whose identity was not otherwise disclosed, posing in the required ways. So it seems they could all be criminals?

Yes, I was afraid people would think this is an ‘so you would kill the baby Beethoven, but save Hitler?’-kind of ‘gotcha’ deal. But those are silly.

32

I did far better than I thought-- 10/16! I’m not a good judge of character in some ways. I chose the cocky-looking ones.

33

Yea…no black pictures. However, that would have made it easy to spot the criminals.

34

Identifying criminals on sight is less about pictures of their face and more a total picture of body language and behavior.

35

I got ten right. Gussed 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8,9, 10, 14, 16, 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31.

36

10 right. My guesses were:

1
4 (correct)
6
8 (correct)
10 (correct)
13
14
16 (correct)
18
20 (correct)
23 (correct)
26
28 (correct)
29 (correct)
31 (correct)
32 (correct)

37

Any statisticians care to do a confidence interval test on the results? Yeah I know skewed samples and all, still would be interested.