Physical Attractiveness and Criminal Behavior

natural un attractive force, deformity, and disfigure handst establish been associated with evil since antiquity. In the Iliad, Homer described the wicked Thersites as possessing contract hair over a misshapen head, with one blinking middle and a lame leg. Physiognomy (the science of reading personality characteristics into nervus facialis features) traces its practice to Homers Greece. When Socrates was convicted for heresy and the corruption of youth in the fifth coke B. C. , a physiognomist charged that his face betrayed a brutal disposition.Greek kitchen-gardening embraced the notion that attend and body were interconnected if a sound brainiac went together with a sound body, the implication was that a twisted 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 soul. These opinions were ensconced into law in chivalrous Europe. Among those accused of demonic possession, eccles iastical edicts interpreted large warts and moles on the fight as fleshly signs of the entry point of the devil into the soul (Einstadter and henry 1995).Secular law directed jurists to convict the uglier of two people who were chthonian equal suspicion for a wickedness (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). In an echo of these sentiments nearly years later, Shakespe atomic number 18s Cassius, in Julius Caesar (Act I, Scene II), is justnessd a dangerous man by his lean and hungry look. The link between untemptingness and criminal fashion remained vital and well in 20th-century American popular culture.In his famous risible strip and in the movies it inspired, cartoonist Chester Gould sharply contrasted the squ ar-jawed, clean-cut good looks of detective instrument Tracy with cutthroat criminals like the flat-headed Flattop, the pointy-snouted Mole, the wrinkle-cheeked Pruneface, and the big-bottomed Pear Shape. Hollywood imitated science in maverick Handsome (1989), a feature film about a highwayman with grotesque facial deformities who reforms after receiving extensive cosmetic surgery.Some of the soonest criminological researchers shared this thinking. Physiognomy persisted throughout the 18th century, most notably in the work of Swiss scholar Johan Casper Lavater, whose influential Physiognomical Fragments appeared in 1775. wholeness hundred years later, Italian prison physician Cesare Lombroso published wretched Man (1876), a famous theater of operations that attributed criminal look to what he termed atavism, an inherited condition that made offenders evolutionary throw coverts to more primitive humans.By conducting autopsies on 66 deceased criminals, and comparing 832 living prison inmates with 390 soldiers, Lombroso created a list of physical features that he believed were associated with criminal behavior. These stigmata included biased foreheads, unsymmetrical faces, large jaws, receding chins, abundant wrinkles, extra fingers, toes, and nipples, long arms, short legs, and lush body hair-hardly the image of handsome men. The notion that criminal behavior was link up to physical anomalies was dealt a severe blow by the publication of Charles B. Gorings The incline Convict in 1913.This study subjected 37 of Lombrosos stigmata to empirical testing by comparing 2,348 London convicts to a control group that represented a cross section of young Englishmen. Goring open little backup man for Lombrosos arguments, concluding that criminal behavior is caused by inherited feeblemindedness, not physical appearance. Undaunted by these results, Harvard anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton conducted an ambitious 12-year study that compared 13,873 phallic prisoners in 10 states with a haphazard sample of 3,023 men drawn from the ecumenical population, searching once more for physical differences.Hooton published his findings in The American Criminal and Crime and the Man, both books appearing in 1939. The books attributed crimin al behavior to biological inferiority and degeneration, ascribing a variety of unattractive physical characteristics to criminals (including sloping foreheads, compressed facial features, drooping eyelids, small, protruding ears, projecting cheekbones, narrow jaws, pointy chins, and locomote shoulders). By the 1930s, however, biological research was rapidly losing favor, as criminologists increasingly argued that genial factors alone cause criminal behavior.Hootons research was ridiculed in particular, one sociologist dismissing his findings as comically inept in historic proportions (or the funniest academic performance since the origination of movable type Reuter 1939). Hooton was condemned for his circular reasoning offenders were assumed to be biologically inferior, so whatever features differentiated criminals from noncriminals were interpreted as indications of biological inferiority. disdain the skepticism of many sociologists regarding these attempts to link physical una ttractiveness to criminal conduct, self-derogation and general phase theories can explain this relationship.Self-derogation theory asserts that youth who are ridiculed by peers retrogress self-esteem and the motivation to conform (Kaplan 1980). General strain theory claims that iterate 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, unattractive youths are blossoming candidates for noxious ridicule that results in low self-esteem and emotional strain. tho a handful of modern studies have tested the relationships among attractiveness, criminal behavior, and perceptions about crime. Saladin, Saper, and Breen (1988), for example, asked 28 students in one undergraduate psychology class to judge the physical attractiveness of a group of photographs of young men. Forty students in another psychology class we re asked to examine the same photographs and then value the probability that those pictured would commit either robbery or murder.The researchers found that men rated as less attractive also were perceived to be prone to commit future violent crimes, suggesting that unattractive people are more likely to be branded as criminals. Another study randomly scrambled 159 photographs of young men incarcerated in juvenile reformatories with 134 photographs of male high school seniors (Cavior and Howard 1973). College sophomores in psychology courses were asked to rate the facial attractiveness of these youth.Significantly more high school seniors were judged attractive than males from the reformatories. In the matter to policy-oriented research that became the basis for the movie Johnny Handsome, surgeons performed plastic surgery to objurgate deformities and disfigurements (e. g. , protruding ears, broken noses, unsightly tattoos, and needle track marks from intravenous drug use) on the faces, hands, and arms of 100 physically unattractive men at the time of their release from Rikers Island jail 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 receive 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 preliminary and suggestive more definitive studies using 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 delinquent to the prejudices of the police and prosecutors. Nevertheless, existing resear ch hints that the folk wisdom dating back to the ancient Greeks may 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.