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by foldr
1905 days ago
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It's not actually taboo at all to discuss variation in psychological traits between genders. There are innumerable academic studies of gender differences in all kinds of domains. No-one, to any significant extent, is stopping these papers from being published, or calling for this kind of research to cease. Similarly, there are endless articles about gender differences in mainstream news publications. What is controversial is using cherry-picked scientific results to tell just-so stories about why the gender distribution in certain fields is imbalanced. The study on the facial features of criminals was criticized mainly for its shoddy methodology, not for being unethical (see e.g. https://www.callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_crim...). Of course, people did point out that the research could have unethical applications – which strikes me as an obvious and fairly undeniable point. Your assertion that research of this nature is "forbidden" in the West is trivially refuted by googling: e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288373839.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366989/ |
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The first article you mentioned describes the bias of eyewitnesses related to stereotyped "criminal look". But the researchers are very clear: "Further research is needed to identify the features that are associated with the criminal stereotype and how they affect lineup decision processes. The specific elements associated with criminal face stereotypes have not yet been identified."
The second article deals with our interpretation of certain traits (which, in this case, are listed) and it's careful not to imply these traits are actually related to criminality. On the contrary: "such evaluations could inappropriately influence decision making in criminal identification lineups. Hence, additional research is needed to discover whether and how people can avoid making evaluations regarding criminality from a person’s facial appearance".
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135