Физиогномика: Оценка характера по внешности

Assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance

Physiognomy (from the Greek φύσις, '[[wikt:φύσις, meaning "nature", and '[[wikt:γνώμων, meaning "judge" or "interpreter") or face reading is the 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 (see plant life form) or of a plant community (see vegetation). Physiognomy as a practice meets the contemporary definition of pseudoscience and it is so regarded among academic circles because of its unsupported claims; popular belief in the practice of physiognomy is nonetheless still widespread and modern advances in artificial intelligence have sparked renewed interest in the field of study. The practice was well accepted by ancient Greek philosophers, but fell into disrepute in the 16th century while practised by vagabonds and mountebanks. It revived and was popularised by Johann Kaspar Lavater, before falling from favour in the late 19th century. Physiognomy in the 19th century is particularly noted as a basis for scientific racism. Physiognomy as it is understood today is a subject of renewed scientific interest, especially as it relates to machine learning and facial recognition technology. The main interest for scientists today are the risks, including privacy concerns, of physiognomy in the context of facial recognition algorithms. Physiognomy is sometimes referred to as anthroposcopy, a term originating in the 19th century.

The term 'physiognomy' 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 physiognomy 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 entire concept of 'fisnamy'. Leonardo da Vinci dismissed physiognomy in the early 16th century as "false", a chimera with "no scientific foundation".

The principal promoter of physiognomy in modern times was the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) 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, and influenced early criminological theory.

Lavater received mixed reactions from scientists, with some accepting his research and others criticizing it.

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, 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, a form of physiognomy, measures the bumps on the skull in order to determine mental and personality characteristics, 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 (often metaphorically) character, e. g. Germans to Lions, Negroes to Elephants and Fishes, Chinamen to Hogs, Yankees to Bears, Jews to Goats. In the late 19th century, phrenology became associated with physiognomy and consequently was discredited and rejected.

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 image 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. 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 Charles Darwin's recently released theories of evolution 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". This interest in the relationship between criminology and physiognomy began upon Lombroso's first interaction with "a notorious Calabrian thief and arsonist" named Giuseppe Villella. Upon Villella's death, Lombroso "conducted a post mortem and discovered that his subject had an indentation at the back of his skull, which resembled that found in apes". Lombroso used the term "atavism" to describe these primitive, ape like behaviors that he found in many of those whom he deemed prone to criminality. As he continued analyzing the data he gathered from Villella's autopsy and compared and contrasted those results with previous cases, he inferred that certain physical characteristics allowed for some individuals to have a greater "propensity to offend and were also savage throwbacks to early man". Furthermore, these ideas promoted the concept that when a crime is committed, it is no longer seen as "free will" but instead a result of one's genetic pre disposition to savagery. These "new and improved" theories led to the notion "that the born criminal had pathological symptoms in common with the moral imbecile and the epileptic, and this led him to expand his typology to include the insane criminal and the epileptic criminal". In addition, "the insane criminal type [was said to] include the alcoholic, the mattoid, and the hysterical criminal".

In France, the concept was further developed in the 20th century under the name morphopsychology, developed by Louis Corman (1901–1995), a French psychiatrist who argued that the workings of vital forces within the human body resulted in different facial shapes and forms. 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 (Fifteen Lessons of Morphopsychology).

Due to its legacy of racism and junk science masquerading as criminology, scientific study or discussion of the relationship between facial features and character has become taboo. It had previously posited many links. For example, there is evidence that character can influence facial appearance. Also, facial characteristics influences first impressions of others, which influences our expectations and behavior, which in turn influences character. Lastly, there are several biological factors that influence both facial appearance and character traits, such pre and post natal hormone levels and gene expression. Recent progress in AI and computer vision has been largely driven by the widespread adoption of deep neural networks (DNN), which mimic the neocortex by simulating large, multi level networks of interconnected neurons. DNNs excel at recognizing patterns in large unstructured data such as digital images, sound, or text, and analyzing such patterns to make predictions. The self fulfilling prophesy effect asserts that people perceived to have a certain attribute will be treated accordingly, and over time may engage in behaviors consistent with others' expectations of them. Conversely, social behavior such as addictions to drugs or alcohol, can shape facial features. Research in the 1990s indicated that three elements of personality in particular – power, warmth and honesty – can be reliably inferred by looking at facial features. Some evidence indicated that the pattern of whorls in the scalp had some correlation to male homosexuality, 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. This revival has continued 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 (propensity to aggression) only by looking at the width of the face. Political orientation can also be reliably predicted. personality, and intelligence. In 2017, a controversial study claimed that an AI algorithm could detect sexual orientation 'more accurately than humans' (in 81% of the tested cases for men and 71% for women). The director, an 'equity and inclusion strategist' with no scientific background, was criticized by the researchers for "premature judgement". In early 2018, researchers, among them two specialists of AI working at Google (one of the two on face recognition), issued a reportedly contradicting study based on a survey of 8,000 Americans using Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowd sourcing platform. The survey yielded many traits that were used 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 (makeup, facial hair, glasses, angle of pictures taken of self, etc.). 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 (age, gender, race) extracted from the face, image artifacts, observable facial characteristics, and other image features extracted by deep learning all contribute to prediction quality beyond demographics.

In 2011, the South Korean news agency Yonhap published a physiognomical analysis of the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong un. In the TV series Doctor Who, as the Fourth Doctor examines his new face after regenerating in Robot, he comments on his physiognomy saying "As for the physiognomy, well, nothing's perfect." The newspaper Ukrainska Pravda reported, "The fact that Putin uses [body] doubles is suggested by the intelligence data of the Ukrainian secret services and conclusions made by several specialists, in particular physiognomists."