Friday, April 8, 2011

Gut instinct: We can identify criminals on sight, study finds

I knewit.
There I was, minding my own business at the intersection of Finance and Felonious...
From PhysOrg: 
A woman walking her dog encounters a man. She has an instant, visceral reaction to him and screams. The next day, she sees his picture in the newspaper; he has been charged with rape.

This anecdote prompted three Cornell researchers to reopen a "long and sordid" history of research and debate about whether we can determine who is a criminal by looking at his face.
Their finding: We can.

"In two experiments, subjects were able to distinguish between criminals and noncriminals by rating each photo we presented to them," said human development doctoral student Jeffrey Valla '12, first author of the study, published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural (Vol. 5:1), with human development professors Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams....MORE