Slashdot Mirror
Justice Not As Blind As Previously Thought
NotSoHeavyD3 writes "I doubt this is much of a surprise but apparently Cornell University did a study that seems to show you're more likely to get convicted if you're ugly. From the article: 'According to a Cornell University study, unattractive defendants are 22 percent more likely to be convicted than good-looking ones. And the unattractive also get slapped with harsher sentences — an average of 22 months longer in prison.'"
because the FBI was also looking at him for terrorism, and they couldn't find anything on him either... which tells me he didn't do it, and was just not mentally developed in that area of his life that he saw nothing wrong in sleeping in the same bed as someone's kid.
from his upbringing I'm surprised any of them turned out to be well adjusted people.
The study let the fake jury read the case history and listen to taped closing arguments. However in a real trial, the lawyers are up in front and interacting. I wonder how much the lawyers physical attractiveness works into the equation. After all the defendant just sits at the table (unless he/whe takes the stand).
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
No, the scientists have shown an indicative bias in a simplified controlled study. If you want a more concise conclusion, you'll either have to wait for someone to perform further study with a different sampling of people/environments, or you can formulate another hypothesis and provide some test data.
Making the exact opposite statement is equally untested in a scientific sense and also requires proof. Many scientific theories can never be proven with 100% certainty, however, by definition, they must be falsifiable in some way, and in this case provide a numeric analyses that can be refined with improved test methods and data.
What the students have done is formulate a hypothetical argument and provided data to support that position. If further confounding variables are established, then the confidence in the hypothesis is weakened, but doesn't automatically default to an opposite viewpoint. In this case, it merely defaults to a lower confidence of accuracy. The conclusion is what it is, and does support the hypothesis. If contrary evidence is provided, then the hypothesis may be weakened to the point where it does support the opposing argument.
A follow-up study to this one could include a random sampling of people from the greater population. Beyond that, they could use actors. Beyond that, they could provide analyses of numerous real case studies and normalise against various background variables. etc.
At some point, the confidence level of the original hypothesis will increase to a point that extrapolating into the real justice system could produce highly accurate results.
The article author implies that the result extrapolates to the real justice system. However, the actual scientific study is really about human reasoning being influenced by emotional bias. So, I suspect the author of the article has taken liberties to generate their own more sensationalist conclusion.