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.'"
Those will take a real toll on your looks. They also have a nasty tendency to turn people into thieves, prostitutes, and murderers. Also, being white trash will tend to age you about ten years, and it usually also comes with at least two or three DUI-on-an-ATV/public-intoxication/starting-a-fight-down-at-the-bar arrests.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe they should have thought about that BEFORE being ugly...
who are in jail and are wondering why their prison term was longer than the average.
Did anyone consider that the ugly may commit more crimes?
No, because typically politicians are not ugly.
:-|
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Any time a study comes out, twelvity million Slashdotters start chanting "Correlation!=Causation". None actually read the article. In fact, most have their rant typed out long before the story hits slashdot, and simply cut and paste into the comment box.
So, in the interest of keeping up this fine tradition, I offer the following:
1) Ugly people are more likely to actually commit the crime. Makes sense. Pretty people are less likely to need to do a crime as they are more likely to get good employement.
2) Committing a crime MAKES you ugly. Far fetched? Maybe. But I am sure those stupid researchers who only get by on grant money never thought of such a thing.
Clearly, I a faceless Slashdotter am more capable of analyzing the situation without actually reading the article, or giving it more than 20 seconds of thought.
Can the rest of my Slashdot bretheren help support my contentions?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Any movie or TeeVee show has shown this for years... there is a caveat, however...They can be good-looking and convicted if theyhave menacing music to accompany them...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Read TFA please. The study was done with students at Cornell, who were asked to give their verdict after reading the closing arguments from the trial. The pictures of ugly and non-ugly people were inserted into these case studies, so that the same facts were presented as though they were about two different people.
The ugly might very well commit more crimes, but this study eliminates that as a confounding factor.
if i see another +5 insightful "correlation != causation" my brain is going to fucking explode.
correlation != causation c'mon guys. Mod me up. You know you want to see it, too.
Lots and lots of little boys?
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.
OK, but how do we know that your brain exploding isn't causing these posts to be moderated highly?
-Dave
A woman at a grocery store near here was in charge of counting money from the tills and putting it in the safe. Over the course of a year she managed to steal over $100,000 in cash by doctoring the electronic sales records. The managers noticed, but she was too hot, so they routinely fired+blackballed the ugliest cashiers for stealing. Well, she finally got caught. The judge gave her a stern warning, no jail time, no probation. And she didn't have to pay back, she got to keep the $100,000. Judge even called her a wonderful person, said she has no chance of reoffending, and has a bright future as a university student and it would be wrong of him to get in the way of her! Left implied is that she gives good head, I guess.
I wish I was hot enough to steal 100 Gs and get to KEEP IT ALL with no other punishment.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Because black people are convicted at a higher rate and Michael Jackson was white.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.