Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
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Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#2Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#3Not surprising - attractive people get rated more highly in competency, likability, trustworthiness, and all sorts of things by virtue of being attractive. This happens in almost all fields, and the reverse happens too:
Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#4Are unattractive people more likely to commit crimes?
Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#5Are unattractive people more likely to commit crimes?
[reply edited to something more appropriate]
That's an interesting question. If they do, it would be interesting to see if people were good at discerning which types of unattractiveness correlate to higher crime-rates.
Or said differently, do we instinctively pick up on something meaningful in personal appearance that correlates to unacceptable social behaviors.
Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#6Interesting, especially when you consider that programmers will often complain when the subject of jury duty is brought up of being summoned for it only to be excused during voir dire when their occupation is discovered. Apparently attorneys prefer jurors they can easily emotionally manipulate. I suppose this is what you get when you systematically exclude anyone with an analytical bent and an IQ above 100 from jury participation: a group of twelve over-emotional, intuition-driven fools who determine the fate of their fellow citizens using the pseudoscience of physiognomy.
Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#7Jurors go through a lot in performing what is a pretty thankless task, and I would imagine that courts and legislatures will think long and hard before adopting any system by which they add the further burden of making jurors undergo psychological tests as a condition of being chosen. Such a system, if used on a jury pool in any systematic way, would prove incredibly burdensome because, as anyone who has served knows, the pool itself is many times larger than the number selected. Even as it is today, jurors will sit around for a whole day, or even for several days, undergoing the selection process - I can't imagine what this would be like if they had to be individually tested for their emotional qualities as well.
Perhaps this can work for exceptional cases only and be made subject to the discretion of a judge in individual cases. Of course, if adopted for any case on the ground that science requires it for fairness, then the failure to use it in other cases may create due-process grounds for appeal whenever a defendant is convicted without benefit of the full range of protections available for the jury selection process.
My guess is that this study is too thin in itself to lead to changes in the procedures, especially because of the practical burdens that would result if its findings are accepted as established scientific fact. A lot more study would be required before so fundamental a change would be made.
Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#8This is utterly unsurprising.
Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#9Are unattractive people more likely to commit crimes?
Separating offense from conviction reliably is impossible, so we'll never know for sure.
One thing you can do though is measure more quantifiable predictors of criminality, such as IQ, and compare estimates based on attractiveness to actual performance. In most such cases the answer is that ugly people are dumber than average and pretty people are smarter than average, but people's subjective estimates are biased much more strongly by attractiveness than they should be given the actual strength of the correlation. A similar phenomenon is seen for height, also.
Re: Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people
#10[deleted]