Physiognomy
Physiognomy is a practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face. The term can also refer to the general appearance of a person, object, or terrain without reference to its implied characteristics—as in the physiognomy of an individual plant or of a plant community.
Credence of such study has varied. The practice was well accepted by the ancient Greek philosophers, but fell into disrepute in the Middle Ages when practised by vagabonds and mountebanks. It was then revived and popularised by Johann Kaspar Lavater before falling from favour again in the late 19th century. Physiognomy as understood in the past meets the contemporary definition of a pseudoscience.
Popular in the 19th century, it has been used as a basis for scientific racism, along with physical anthropology.
No clear evidence indicates physiognomy works—but the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning for facial recognition has brought a revival of interest, and some studies that suggest that facial appearances do "contain a kernel of truth" about a person's personality.
Physiognomy is also sometimes referred to as anthroposcopy, though the expression was more common in the 19th century when the word originated.
Ancient physiognomy
Notions of the relationship between an individual's outward appearance and inner character are historically ancient, and occasionally appear in early Greek poetry. Siddhars from ancient India are also known to have defined samudrika lakshanam that identifies personal characteristics with body features. Chinese physiognomy or face reading reaches back at least to the Northern Song period. The first indications of a developed physiognomic theory appear in fifth century BC Athens, with the works of Zopyrus, who was said to be an expert in the art. By the fourth century BC, the philosopher Aristotle made frequent reference to theory and literature concerning the relationship of appearance to character. Aristotle was apparently receptive to such an idea, as evidenced by a passage in his Prior Analytics:The first systematic physiognomic treatise to survive to the present day is a slim volume, Physiognomonica, ascribed to Aristotle. The volume is divided into two parts, conjectured to have been originally two separate works. The first section discusses arguments drawn from nature or other races, and concentrates on the concept of human behavior. The second section focuses on animal behavior, dividing the animal kingdom into male and female types. From these are deduced correspondences between human form and character.
After Aristotle, the major extant works in physiognomy are:
- Polemo of Laodicea, de Physiognomonia, in Greek
- Adamantius the Sophist, Physiognomonica, in Greek
- An anonymous Latin author de Phsiognomonia
After inspecting Socrates, a physiognomist announced that he was given to intemperance, sensuality, and violent bursts of passion—which was so contrary to Socrates's image that his students accused the physiognomist of lying. Socrates put the issue to rest by saying that originally he was given to all these vices, but had particularly strong self-discipline.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The term was common in Middle English, often written as 'fisnamy' or 'visnomy', as in the Tale of Beryn, a spurious addition to The Canterbury Tales: "I knowe wele by thy fisnamy, thy kynd it were to stele".Physiognomy's validity was once widely accepted. Michael Scot, a court scholar for Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, wrote Liber physiognomiae in the early 13th century concerning the subject. English universities taught it until Henry VIII of England outlawed "beggars and vagabonds playing 'subtile, crafty and unlawful games such as physnomye or 'palmestrye'" in 1530 or 1531. Around this time, scholastic leaders settled on the more erudite Greek form 'physiognomy' and began to discourage the whole concept of 'fisnamy'.
Leonardo da Vinci dismissed physiognomy in the early 16th century as "false", a chimera with "no scientific foundation". Nevertheless, Leonardo believed that lines caused by facial expressions could indicate personality traits. For example, he wrote that "those who have deep and noticeable lines between the eyebrows are irascible".
Modern physiognomy
The principal promoter of physiognomy in modern times was the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater who was briefly a friend of Goethe. Lavater's essays on physiognomy were first published in German in 1772 and gained great popularity. These influential essays were translated into French and English.Thomas Browne
Lavater found 'confirmation' of his ideas from the English physician-philosopher Sir Thomas Browne, and the Italian Giambattista Della Porta. Browne in his Religio Medici discusses the possibility of the discernment of inner qualities from the outer appearance of the face, thus:He reaffirmed his physiognomic beliefs in Christian Morals :
Browne also introduced the word caricature into the English language, whence much of physiognomical belief attempted to entrench itself by illustrative means, in particular through visual political satire.
Della Porta's works are well represented in the Library of Sir Thomas Browne including Of Celestial Physiognomy, in which Porta argued that it was not the stars but a person's temperament that influences their facial appearance and character. In De humana physiognomia , Porta used woodcuts of animals to illustrate human characteristics. Both Della Porta and Browne adhered to the 'doctrine of signatures'—that is, the belief that the physical structures of nature such as a plant's roots, stem, and flower, were indicative keys to their medicinal potentials.
Lavater's critics
Lavater received mixed reactions from scientists, with some accepting his research and others criticizing it. For example, the harshest critic was scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who said pathognomy, discovering the character by observing the behaviour, was more effective. Writer Hannah More complained to Horace Walpole, "In vain do we boast ... that philosophy had broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition; and yet, at this very time ... Lavater's physiognomy books sell at fifteen guineas a set."Period of popularity
The popularity of physiognomy grew throughout the first quarter of the 18th century and into the 19th century. It was discussed seriously by academics, who believed in its potential. Many European novelists used physiognomy in the descriptions of their characters, notably Balzac, Chaucer and portrait artists, such as Joseph Ducreux. A host of 19th-century English authors were influenced by the idea, notably evident in the detailed physiognomic descriptions of characters in the novels of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë.In addition to Thomas Browne, other literary authors associated with Norwich who made physiognomical observations in their writings include the romantic novelist Amelia Opie, and the travelogue author George Borrow.
Physiognomy is a central, implicit assumption underlying the plot of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 19th-century American literature, physiognomy figures prominently in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Phrenology, also considered a form of physiognomy, was created around 1800 by German physician Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim, and was widely popular in the 19th century in Europe and the United States. In the U.S., physician James W. Redfield published his Comparative Physiognomy in 1852, illustrating with 330 engravings the "Resemblances between Men and Animals". He finds these in appearance and character, e.g. Germans to Lions, Negroes to Elephants and Fishes, Chinamen to Hogs, Yankees to Bears, Jews to Goats.
During the late 19th century, English psychometrician Sir Francis Galton attempted to define physiognomic characteristics of health, disease, beauty, and criminality, via a method of composite photography. Galton's process involved the photographic superimposition of two or more faces by multiple exposures. After averaging together photographs of violent criminals, he found that the composite appeared "more respectable" than any of the faces comprising it; this was likely due to the irregularities of the skin across the constituent images being averaged out in the final blend. With the advent of computer technology during the early 1990s, Galton's composite technique has been adopted and greatly improved using computer graphics software.
In the late 19th century, it became associated with phrenology and consequently discredited and rejected. Nevertheless, the German physiognomist Carl Huter became popular in Germany with his concept of physiognomy, called "psycho-physiognomy".
Physiognomy also became of use in the field of Criminology through efforts made by Italian army doctor and scientist, Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso, during the mid 19th century, championed the notion that "criminality was inherited and that criminals could be identified by physical attributes such as hawk-like noses and bloodshot eyes". Lombroso took inspiration from the recently released ideologies and studies of Darwin and carried many of the misunderstandings that he had regarding evolution into the propagation of the use of physiognomy in criminology. His logic stemmed from the idea that "criminals were 'throwbacks' in the phylogenetic tree to early phases of evolution". Bearing this in mind, it is reasonable to conclude that "according to Lombroso, a regressive characteristic united the genius, the madman and the delinquent; they differed in the intensity of this characteristic and, naturally in the degree of development of the positive qualities". He believed that one could determine whether one was of savage nature just by their physical characteristics. Based on his findings, "Lombroso proposed that the "born criminal" could be distinguished by physical atavistic stigmata, such as:
- large jaws, forward projection of jaw,
- low sloping forehead,
- high cheekbones,
- flattened or upturned nose,
- handle-shaped ears,
- hawk-like noses or fleshy lips,
- hard shifty eyes,
- scanty beard or baldness,
- insensitivity to pain,
- long arms relative to lower limbs.
Modern usage
In France, the concept developed in the 20th century under the name morphopsychology, developed by Louis Corman, a French psychiatrist who argued that the workings of vital forces within the human body resulted in different facial shapes and forms. For example, full and round body shapes are considered the expression of the instinct of expansion while the hollow or flat shapes are an expression of self-preservation. The term "morphopsychology" is a translation of the French word morphopsychologie, which Louis Corman coined in 1937 when he wrote his first book on the subject, Quinze leçons de morphopsychologie. Corman was influenced by the French doctor Claude Sigaud, incorporating his idea of "dilation and retraction" into morphopsychology.with a figure pointing to another's sore eye. Oil painting by a follower of Louis-Léopold Boilly.
Scientific validity
Research in the 1990s indicated that three elements of personality in particular – power, warmth and honesty – can be reliably inferred. Some evidence indicates people can detect male homosexuality by looking at the pattern of whorls in the scalp, though subsequent research has largely refuted the findings on hair whorl patterns.A February 2009 article in New Scientist magazine reported that physiognomy is living a small revival, with research papers trying to find links between personality traits and facial traits. A study of 90 ice hockey players found a statistically significant correlation between a wider face—a greater than average cheekbone-to-cheekbone distance relative to the distance between brow and upper lip—and the number of penalty minutes a player received for violent acts like slashing, elbowing, checking from behind, and fighting.
This revival has been confirmed in the 2010s with the rise of machine learning for facial recognition. For instance, researchers have claimed that it is possible to predict upper body strength and some personality traits only by looking at the width of the face.
In 2017, a controversial study claimed that an algorithm could detect sexual orientation 'more accurately than humans'. According to BBC News, "The work has been accused of being dangerous' and 'junk science. In early 2018, researchers, among them two specialists of AI working at Google, issued a reportedly contradicting study based on a survey of 8,000 Americans using Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform. The survey yielded many traits helping to discriminate between gay and straight respondents with a series of yes/no questions. These traits had actually less to do with morphology than with grooming, presentation, and lifestyle. For more information of this sexual orientation issue in general, see Gaydar.
In 2020, a study on the use of consumer facial images for marketing research purposes concluded that deep learning on facial images can extract a variety of personal information relevant to marketers and so users' facial images could become a basis for ad targeting on Tinder and Facebook. According to the study, while most of facial images' predictive power is attributable to basic demographics extracted from the face, image artifacts, observable facial characteristics, and other image features extracted by deep learning all contribute to prediction quality beyond demographics.
Other clues have also been proposed to refute physiognomist claims. For example, the human mind tends to extrapolate emotions from facial expressions and physiognomy, with its assumption of permanent characteristics, would only be an over-generalization of this skill. Also, if one classifies a person as untrustworthy due to facial features, and treats them as such, that person eventually behaves in an untrustworthy way toward the person holding this belief.