Practical Phrenology: Skull Bumps and Economic Behavior

From the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Liberty Street Economics blog:

Phrenology (see this amusing four-minute video), popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the study of skull shape and contours (believed to indicate the location of more- and less-developed areas of the brain) in order to discern individuals’ abilities and personality traits (called “faculties” in the phrenologists’ jargon). A clear map of the various skull sections and their corresponding faculties can be found in this excerpt from Samuel Wells’ version of the 1840 Fowler's Practical Phrenology: Giving a Concise Elementary View of Phrenology.


     Was there a special part of the brain that phrenologists associated with economic behavior?  Yes: it is on the side of the head, above and slightly forward of the ear (area number 9 in the diagram linked above).  Fowler refers to the faculty located in this area as “acquisitiveness” and characterizes it this way:

Economy; the disposition to save and accumulate property.  Excess: miserly avarice; theft; extreme selfishness.  Deficiency: prodigality; inability to appreciate the true value of property; lavish and wasteful.

     Acquisitiveness falls in the category of the “selfish propensities”; the other categories are the domestic propensities, the aspiring and governing organs, the moral sentiments, the perfective faculties, the perceptive faculties, the literary faculties, and the reasoning faculties. All of the selfish propensities are located on the side of the head, around and above the ear. The other selfish propensities are vitativeness (love of life), combativeness, destructiveness, alimenitiveness (appetite), secretiveness, and cautiousness. In this illustration of the phrenological head, the faculty of acquisitiveness is illustrated by a miser counting his gold.

     According to The Illustrated Annuals of Phrenology and Physiognomy (p. 138, 1869 Annual), the faculty of acquisitiveness would have been necessary to be a good banker:

If one is without veneration or the feeling of devotion, he would be out of place if in the pulpit. If all caution and no courage, he would make a poor soldier or surgeon. If small in Self-Esteem, Firmness, Locality, etc., a poor navigator or sea captain. With small Acquisitiveness, a poor banker; and with small Alimentiveness, a poor hotel-keeper or cook.

     In a 1994 article titled Tales of the Commodore, reprinted from Vanderbilt Magazine, the author notes that phrenology was used to explain why Cornelius Vanderbilt (nicknamed “the Commodore”), transportation magnate and the richest person in the United States at the time of his death in 1877, was going insane....MORE