Study links aggression to wide faces

[heart]

I'm curious what people think about this sort of science.

Do you think it is valid or does it have a slant towards the old eugenics type of typecasting based on things like face shape, etc.?

Will thinking like this lead to a new fear based prejudice?


Study links aggression to wide faces

Watch out for those broad-jawed puck passers, warns study by Brock University researchers

Aug 20, 2008 04:30 AM

Chances are it's wider than yours, according to a new Brock University study that equates the width of a hockey player's face with his or her aggressive tendencies.

"Playing hockey ... you can almost tell just by looking at them that this person might be more aggressive than another person," says Justin Carré, a graduate student and the lead study author. The study appears today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology.



"We found that in men, the facial metric that we used was correlated with how aggressive men were on this (computer) test," McCormick says. "There was no such relationship in women; it was only in men." (more at link)

[Jack Flak]

That's a little absurd. Hockey teams have players that are paid to get in fights. They're called enforcers. And I certainly imagine they're going to be a bit burly.

[Kora]

Hm... I don't know.
Facial features are supposed to be inherited by genetic, not as personality (when it seems it's 'inherited' is just a replay of the parental behaviour).
I wouldn't trust this science 100%, but it could be true somehow. The hockey guy seemed pretty aggressive to me, but I think I was just influenced.

[sassafrassquatch]

Big jaws are caused by high testosterone which causes aggression.

[Magic Poriferan]

I think human beings are psychologically unprepared to handle a world where we can see coincidences everywhere. We didn't evolve with the ability to pool so much data together. We developed in a simpler world where such coincidences might have been more likely to mean something.

I think studdies like this are nonsense. Has anyone ever read Gulliver's Travels? If you have, you might remember the part where he's among all of those scientists, and one thinks he can figure out what a person is thinking based on the color of their crap. It's sort of like that.

I also second that using hockey player's as a sample is just retarded. And, as for sassy's testosterone theory, it doesn't explain why the corellation doesn't exist in women. They still have testosterone levels, and it should still affect their bones in a similar way.

[Aerithria]

I agree with you. This type of study sounds like a modern-day version of phrenology or craniometry.