Physical Attractiveness and Criminal Behavior

Physical unpresentableness, deformity, and disfigurement baffle been associated with evil since antiquity. In the Iliad, Homer set forth the wicked Thersites as possessing thin tomentum cerebri over a misshapen head, with wiz blinking eye and a gamey leg. Physiognomy (the cognition of reading personality characteristics into facial features) traces its practice to Homers Greece. When Soc place was convicted for heresy and the rotting of youth in the fifth degree Celsius B. C. , a physiognomist charged that his face betrayed a brutal disposition.Greek culture embraced the touch sensation that mind and body were interconnected if a sound mind went together with a sound body, the implication was that a modify mind resided in a deformed body. Aristotle confirmed this view in his Metaphysics when he reasoned that the essence of the body is contained in the nous. These opinions were ensconced into law in medieval Europe. Among those accuse of demonic possession, ecclesiastica l edicts interpret ample warts and moles on the skin as personal signs of the entry point of the devil into the soul (Einstadter and Henry 1995).Secular law order jurists to convict the uglier of two people who were infra equal suspicion for a discourtesy (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). In an echo of these sentiments some long time later, Shakespeares Cassius, in Julius Caesar (Act I, Scene II), is judged a stark man by his lean and starved look. The link between un winsomeness and sinful fashion remained alive and well in 20th-century American popular culture.In his far-famed amusive strip and in the movies it inspired, cartoonist Chester Gould sharply contrasted the square-jawed, clean-cut good looks of detective Dick Tracy with rough criminals like the flat-headed Flattop, the pointy-snouted Mole, the wrinkle-cheeked Pruneface, and the big-bottomed Pear Shape. Hollywood imitated science in Johnny Handsome (1989), a feature film rough a robber with grotesque facial d eformities who reforms by and by receiving extensive cosmetic mathematical process.Some of the soonest criminological researchers shared this thinking. Physiognomy persisted passim the 18th century, most notably in the work of Swiss scholar Johan Casper Lavater, whose authoritative Physiognomical Fragments looked in 1775. One hundred geezerhood later, Italian prison physician Cesare Lombroso publish vile Man (1876), a famous study that attributed criminal conduct to what he termed atavism, an genic condition that made offenders evolutionary throwbacks to more primitive humans.By conducting autopsies on 66 deceased criminals, and comparing 832 sustainment prison inmates with 390 soldiers, Lombroso created a list of bodily features that he believed were associated with criminal behavior. These stigmata included slant foreheads, asymmetrical faces, large jaws, receding chins, colossal wrinkles, extra fingers, toes, and nipples, long arms, short legs, and profligate body hair-hardly the image of handsome men. The stamp that criminal behavior was related to somatogenic anomalies was dealt a severe blow by the publication of Charles B. pierces The English Convict in 1913.This study subjected 37 of Lombrosos stigmata to empirical testing by comparing 2,348 London convicts to a incorporate group that represented a cross section of schoolgirlish Englishmen. Goring arrange little support for Lombrosos arguments, last(a) that criminal behavior is caused by inherited feeblemindedness, not corporeal appearance. Undaunted by these results, Harvard anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton conducted an ambitious 12-year study that compared 13,873 manlike prisoners in 10 states with a haphazardly sample of 3,023 men drawn from the commonplace population, searching once more for physiological differences.Hooton published his findings in The American Criminal and Crime and the Man, both books appearing in 1939. The books attributed criminal behavior to biolo gical low quality and degeneration, ascribing a variety of homely physical characteristics to criminals (including sloping foreheads, compressed facial features, lachrymose eyelids, small, protruding ears, projecting cheekbones, narrow jaws, pointy chins, and locomote shoulders). By the 1930s, however, biological research was quick losing favor, as criminologists increasingly argued that social factors alone cause criminal behavior.Hootons research was ribd in particular, one sociologist dismissing his findings as comically ill-chosen in historic proportions (or the funniest academic consummation since the invention of movable type Reuter 1939). Hooton was condemned for his eyeshade reasoning offenders were assumed to be biologically inferior, so whatever features differentiated criminals from noncriminals were interpreted as indications of biological inferiority. Despite the irresolution of many sociologists regarding these attempts to link physical un prepossessingness t o criminal conduct, self-derogation and general strain theories can explain this relationship.Self-derogation theory asserts that youth who are ridiculed by peers lose self-esteem and the motivation to set (Kaplan 1980). General strain theory claims that retell noxious, unwanted interactions produce disappointment, depression, frustration, and anger (Agnew 1992). both theories see delinquency and crime as means of retaliation that boosts ones self-worth or vents ones anger. Certainly, unseductive youths are prime candidates for noxious ridicule that results in low self-esteem and horny strain.Only a handful of modern studies have tested the relationships among attractive force, criminal behavior, and perceptions about crime. Saladin, Saper, and Breen (1988), for example, asked 28 students in one undergrad psychological science class to judge the physical attractiveness of a group of photographs of teen men. Forty students in another psychology class were asked to examine t he same photographs and wherefore assess the probability that those pictured would pull up either robbery or murder.The researchers found that men rated as less attractive also were perceived to be wedded to commit early violent crimes, suggesting that unattractive people are more believably to be branded as criminals. some other study randomly scrambled 159 photographs of young men incarcerated in juvenile reformatories with 134 photographs of male person high school seniors (Cavior and Howard 1973). College sophomores in psychology courses were asked to rate the facial attractiveness of these youth.importantly more high school seniors were judged attractive than males from the reformatories. In the fascinating policy-oriented research that became the stern for the movie Johnny Handsome, surgeons performed plastic surgery to correct deformities and disfigurements (e. g. , protruding ears, broken noses, ugly tattoos, and needle track marks from endovenous drug use) on the fa ces, hands, and arms of blow physically unattractive men at the time of their release from Rikers Island immure in New York City (Kurtzberg et al. 1978).These ex-convicts were matched against a control group of equally unattractive inmates released from the jail who received no reconstructive surgery. When the researchers compared recidivism rates one-year later, those who received the surgery had importantly fewer rearrests. Apparently, improved appearance resulted in improved behavior. These research findings are earlier and suggestive more definitive studies apply better measurements are needed. In particular, future research should relate ratings of physical attractiveness to the self-reported riminal behavior of persons taken from the general population. such studies would rule out the possibility that unattractive offenders are more likely to appear in jails and reformatories simply due to the prejudices of the law and prosecutors. Nevertheless, existing research hints t hat the folk experience dating back to the ancient Greeks whitethorn have some basis in reality. Physical appearance is related to self-worth and behavior as the adage goes, pretty is as pretty does. When it comes to criminal behavior, the opposite may be true as well.