(PhysOrg.com) -- 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 Psychology (Vol. 5:1), with human development professors Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams.
The researchers gathered head shots of Caucasian males, ages 20 to 29, put them all against a white background and controlled for attractiveness and display of facial emotion. Half were photos of convicts. The criminals were on their first conviction, had short hair and little to no facial hair. About half the criminals had been convicted of violent crimes (forcible rapes, murder, assault) and half for nonviolent crimes (forgery, theft, arson and drug dealing)...
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