But that’s not what she claimed
And yet the evidence is if anything in favour of the idea that - to a limited extent - we can judge traits from appearance. It’s wise to verify even the things we think are obvious.
(I could find no evidence that astrological signs affect anything, although there is some that the season of birth can make a difference.)
I found that one first, but the study I linked to is larger and more recent.
That makes the analogy especially apt, I think. We have some limited evidence that a few things can be somewhat judged by appearance, therefore:
Mannerisms of speech are part of speech. I don’t think there’s even a rigorous claim to be examined here, but if the context was instead, say, that a military test pilot could recognise other military test pilots just by the way they speak (not specifically what they say), would that be surprising?
People recognising other people in their own group by features of their speech isn’t a particularly unlikely claim, I think.
I don’t think it’s in the spirit of fighting ignorance if we lie about what the evidence shows just because someone may willfully misinterpret it. 
And how many studies have not shown that people could spot the crook?
It’s not surprising that there has been an occasional study where people picked out the crook in more than a chance number of guesses.
Agreed, but there are two different threads of conversation happening in this topic.
-
Certain conditions that affect both appearance and behavioural or mental traits in correlation; Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, for example.
-
The pseudoscience of physiognomy, where we can judge everything about a person based on details of their appearance.
These things sound like they could be the same, but there is a yawning gulf of missing evidence between them.
It would be surprising to me.
Unless we’re assuming an accent of some sort is associated with test pilots.
Maybe that’s the claim being made? That the person hearing is recognizing some accent and then assumed based on that accent that the person isn’t a real writer? I suppose there are some accents in the US that are easily recognized and assumed to be less capable by proxy, but that’s seems like an unpleasant thing to encourage.
No, I’m not talking about accent - or not exactly accent in the way it is thought of in regional variants; in the case of test pilots, people who have to communicate clearly by radio will, over time, adopt certain vocal habits, some of which may be really very subtle to an untrained ear, but may be really obvious to someone in the same group.
Accents might be an interesting analogue though; I have met English speakers from outside of the UK who could not tell much difference between any British-English accents, whereas, as a native Brit, I can sometimes pin down an accent with an accuracy of tens of miles or less. I couldn’t even necessarily tell you what the differences really are, just that I can hear them. Those are vocal mannerisms grouped by geography, but there are other ways that humans group themselves too.
I should probably stop this hijack now though - this is not the thread topic.
Have you heard the old joke/s: If you look like your driver’s license/passport, you’re too sick to drive/travel? Well, years ago, a women’s group at my mom’s church (in Idaho) decided to travel to get Concealed Carry licenses (in Utah). I think there was also a training session.
You should have seen the photo on that license. It was definitely mugshot-for-something-aggravated-worthy.
The astrological signs are wrong since the positions of the constellations had shifted since Ancient Greekish times. You would need to perform the research against the corrected/updated dates rather than the commonly cited ones.
(But that would still show bupkis, I’d expect.)
Yes, I agree. The way I see it is that per (1) it’s not crazy to think you can see a pattern in how criminals look, or intelligent people vs less intelligent, or similar. It’s not implausible that differences in appearance could be correlated with various traits or conditions, and some of these increase chance of criminality, so it shouldn’t just be dismissed without checking. But it is crazy to think you can judge whether a particular person is a criminal just by looking, as the OP seems to want to. Plenty of criminals look 100% normal, and many people who look intimidating are in fact perfectly nice and law-abiding. Physiognomy is still a pseudoscience.
Just restricting the subject to actors, there are plenty of actors who look pretty evil, and are (perhaps for that reason) often cast as criminals, but who are widely reported to be very nice people in real life. Examples include Willem Dafoe, Richard Kiel, and Thomas J. Watson. Undoubtedly the list could be extended quite a bit. On the converse side, there are actors who look perfectly nice but are reported to be horrendous people in real life, like Peter Sellers and Chevy Chase.
I have worked for child welfare almost 30 years and some of the most stunningly beautiful people have been responsible for the most stunningly abhorrent actions.
So I never judge by looks alone.
If it were otherwise, it would be a well-developed forensic science by now; after all, it’s had multiple centuries head start on things like fingerprints and DNA analysis
Good point, and these real life counter-examples might be more convincing to the OP and anyone with similar views.
Not really. Real life examples are just what I stated, anecdotes. So far, all the research listed point to positive correlations between A & B, none show negative.
Maybe it’s because we refuse to listen to our gut instinct and think “Hey this person might look evil but let’s give them a chance”, which is the behavior most of the commenters in this thread would display. And to avoid backlash, others, please note that I’m not saying it’s right or wrong.
Though I completely agree with you on the notion about lacking peer reviews. Still, even with just 1 point of evidence, the balance would still lean toward whichever conclusion it reaches.
On point! I also concur with @Ulfreida 's analysis paragraphs above that. It’s just that in this topic, I want to focus on faces. It’s not a coincidence that Zuckerberg didn’t name his platform boobbook or whatever.
Now, if people can correctly pick out criminals based on inherent stupidity and aggressiveness, then it’s just a layer of heuristics and doesn’t detract the theory.
That’s true. You seem to be concerned about false positives. (Un)fortunately, most of us aren’t a judge/lawyer, so the chance of being a, say, girl in the 1st hypothetical scenario in your 2nd post iirc, is overwhelmingly higher than that of being a justice official. IMO she’d much rather refuse all 3 criminal-looking people because she still has 97 to work with. Better than the risk of being duped/raped/killed or whatever for the reward of increasing that number to 99.
It’s imprudent to call this a pseudoscience off the bat, when 1) physiognomy is quite a thing in eastern countries, especially China for example, and 2) all the proper evidence posted so far has supported it. That’s pretty knee-jerk IMO. Just because you’re from a western culture (British, right?) doesn’t mean everything that sounds disagreeable to the ears are rubbish. Instead, we can all reread DemonTree’s post about how circumstances mold a criminal and reflect on how our own upbringing form our worldview. I bet you were taught that anything related to Hitler (in this cases, eugenics) is eViL. Seems like you’re trying to slap an ugly name to the issue at hand, which I think doesn’t much concern either Hitler or eugenics.
I won’t entertain posts about morality lesson or something similar. If anything, note that I’ve more than once expressed the desire to assign a proper % to face in overall judgment, which includes a big variety of elements that thankfully someone listed out. I don’t want to a) use physiognomy alone to b) judge everything about a person based on details of their appearance, as @Mangetout (tried to) misinterpret.
Besides, your posts are all barks, no bite. The reason I really appreciate @DemonTree and @Ulfreida 's posts is that they get to the point. I said I want research, they linked some paper, and then expressed their opinions. As you may notice, I posted this thread under “facts”, but it was moved to “humble opinions” despite my intention.
I believe none of it.
People who have had crimes committed on their person by real criminals can’t pick the right person from a book of mug shots of other real criminals.
Faces are hard to read. Hard to remember from chance encounters. And faces have fooled millions.
It’s not a trustworthy way to determine much of anything about anyone.
It’s too easy of an instrument to manipulate.
Ever heard of a poker face?
There are plenty of counterexamples, especially if you look at ordinary photos of people, and not mug shots. When Larry Nassar was in the news, the thing that struck me was how mild mannered and “safe” his face looked.
There have been hundreds of years of research trying to tie facial features to personality, and it’s pretty much all come up empty.
Again, there are two different ideas here. What was disproved was phrenology, and Lombroso’s ideas of atavism and born criminal types. The idea that you can identify detailed personality traits just from looking at someone or measuring their skull is indeed nonsense. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be statistical correlations between appearance and personality traits, and research on this has not ‘come up empty’. There are multiple studies showing such correlations, eg