Phrenology

My third grade teacher taught my class about the Wild West. One of the lessons was on the James Gang. Looking at a picture of Jesse James, I said, “He doesn’t look like a criminal!” It was perhaps a nonsensical utterance, but I guess that back in my childhood, I thought that criminals resembled monsters more than fellow humans. Handsome as Jesse James was, the psychological literature does suggest that criminals tend to be rated as uglier than your average law-abiding citizens.

There certainly are some strange anatomical correlations, e.g., finger length can predict the risk of prostate cancer, and the color of lunulas are related to the risk of stroke, to mention just two examples.

Be that as it may, it’s important not to confuse the good data with the fallacious. Alphonse Bertillon, it’s universally agreed, was not onto something valid when he developed an algorithm for calculating potential criminality in people by quantifying anatomical ratios.

Nor was Franz Joseph Gall correct when he employed a method similar to that of Bertillon to divine various personality and psychological traits by feeling the shape of a subject’s head.

Even though I know that phrenology and the Bertillon criminal identification system are fallacious, I still find myself making the mistake I made about Jesse James; that is, I make assumptions about people’s personalities by the way they look. For example, I think that prettier people are nicer than the ugly ones, though my opinion changes when I get to know them. And I sometimes imagine them with no faces, and instead imagine talking directly to their brains.