Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people | Hacker News Reader

Jurors more likely to convict unattractive people

euraeka.com

78 pointshaidut37 comments

Interesting, 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.

This has always seemed like the most fundamental flaw in the legal system. Rejecting jurors should be much more limited, in my mind. Perhaps, for example, give the attorney 3 sets of 12- or give him a set of 12, and offer him the chance to reject the whole set, a limited number of times.

Jurors 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.

I think the idea of the psych tests was that they might be used as a tool for the prosecution and defense to exclude members from the jury pool. Today, potential jurors can be asked to fill out surveys with questions like, "Have you ever been the victim of a violent crime?" So, asking "Do you make decisions based on your emotions?" isn't too big of a step.

In the US judicial system, N potential jurors are made available to the prosecution and defense, and each side takes a turn excluding a person until the number of jurors required is reached. I think the idea is that those on the ends of the normal distribution (in terms of biases relevant to the trial at hand) will be removed so that the jury is more fair than if N jurors were selected at random.

Perhaps; but as a juror you are one of the most important people in our modern world. You have to help make a representative, moral and right choice about someones guilt.

I think it's fair to assess who is able to perform that task with minimum bias etc.

Then again does that make it truly representative? Should we test people for racist bias in the trial of a black person?

It's an interesting dilema.

Are 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.

I didn't intend this to be rude. I was trying to point out that, for raw numbers, of course unattractive people are going to commit more crimes. There are more of them (by definition).

If someone asks if Blacks are more likely to die of heart attack, they don't care that there are more whites in the country and therefore they have more heart attacks.

You're right. My mistake.

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.

The effect of intelligence may be even harder to assess reliably - are smarter people simply committing less crimes or are they just harder to be found / convicted?

They commit less crime, or at least less violent crime. The evidence is unambiguous. They have fewer behavioral problems in school, they measure lower on biological correlates of aggression (serum testosterone/DHT and cortical norepinephrine), and, perhaps most importantly, they are less likely to be victims (most murders are committed against people of similar socioeconomic status to the perpetrator).

All this sounds reasonable.

Though given how huge proportion of all crimes goes unsolved (even violent crimes are just about 45% "cleared" [1]), it also makes sense that ones who got caught will be on average less smart than ones who got away, thus skewing statistics in a major way.

[1] http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/clearances/index.ht...

That's funny -- at one point I attended a boarding school for people with 'behavioral problems', and every person there was incredibly smart. I call shenanigans on this idea that smart people get into less trouble.

Wow, talk about a sampling bias.

Relevant: The Ugly Face of Crime: http://www.metafilter.com/49356/The-Ugly-Face-of-Crime

Irrelevant. The relevant question is, are unattractive people on trial more likely to be guilty?

And there is the ?converse?- given someone has committed a crime, is it more likely than not that he/she is unattractive?

Of course. Reality is a bitch.

It's not irrelevant. The fact that unattractive people are more likely to be found guilty doesn't mean anything without knowing whether or not they are more likely to have committed the crime.

Grandparent wants to want to compare P(found guilty|unattractive) to P(found guilty) to reason about whether attractiveness and the jury's finding are independent.

You want to compare P(found guilty|unattractive,guilty) to P(found guilty|guilty) to see the same while taking into account the desirable bias against guilty people, which is of course more informative but has both components unknown.

These arguments tend to crop up whenever someone notices dependence between effects desired to be independent. The argument is then about where the the dependence lies. The topic is always politically sensitive.

I favor the grandparent's position, since it's the simpler one (and actually tractable). That doesn't mean it's right, and if someone's sufficiently convinced otherwise, they can attempt to estimate the guilt of various convicted (perhaps by waiting 50 years and looking for pardons). The results would have to be extraordinarily convincing, however, and quite possibly they would be harmful in that they would establish a genuine bias against unattractive people, which was the original problem.

So this is a situation where the grandparent's position is better whether or not it's right.

If you read the article, unattractive people are more likely to be found guilty /by jurors who react emotionally/ tather than rationally.

Positive attributes tend to build on one another. The attractive are more likely to be wealthy because the wealthy are more likely to be healthy, and the healthy, to be attractive. The wealthy also tend to be better-educated, and the better-educated are less likely to turn to a life of crime--and so on. It is known in social psychology as the Matthew effect, and it explains why there are those among us who seemingly have it all (wealth, intelligence, beauty, happiness) and so many others who don't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

Perhaps. Prison inmates who receive plastic surgery are less likely to get charged with new crimes. Of course, maybe they also don't get charged as often in much the same way as better looking people don't get convicted as often.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3420443

Original link:

http://news.scotsman.com/world/Jurors-more-likely-to-convict...

Every single submission for euraeka.com is just a passthrough for the actual article.

Not 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:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Jurors are also more likely to convict men than women. And give them harsher sentences for the same crimes.

Men are more likely to have committed the crime. The harsher sentence still sucks.

This is utterly unsurprising.

The whole juror system is insane. Let's get ten totally unqualified people to judge a person on a theatrical performance by a lawyer.

It's like, "Hey, we're short on surgeons, can we introduce surgeon duty? Everyone can cut meat right?".

Attractive people, on average, think less and are more sensitive to emotion including conscience. This makes them more likely to be good and less likely to be guilty of crime.

Thinking draws resources away from the body and thus indirectly affects things like movement, grace and growth.

Hence the medieval law of combat: a good knight could not lose against a bad knight.

Also the Emperor Palpatine's skin problems, ugly stepmothers in fairy tales, etc.

Also George Orwell's comment "At age 50, every man has the face he deserves."

Not sure why this comment was downvoted so much, it does a good job of summarizing an ancient world view which goes against our current scientific one. The ancient idea being that one's virtue is connected to one's vitality.

Topics like virtue, nobility, the body/soul have been misunderstood by modern science; these problems can't be solved with empirical evidence + deductive logic. The ancients thought about these things in a radically different way from us because they accepted that higher-level values are a matter of interpretation to be distinguished from lower-level factual (scientific) things.

I am curious why don't they keep the defendants and jury in a seperate room. They can let the jury hear all the arguments etc. I suppose the voice would still be a concern, but it should take care of the unattractive problem for the most part.

Watching the person's movements and mannerisms is a very important part of trust.

Isn't 'attractiveness' relative?

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