These random samples of individual judicial capacity show at once how unreliable individual judgment is in these matters. The individual judges vary widely among themselves and they also depart widely from the established order. Moreover, a judge who may happen to show a reasonable degree of correctness in judging sociability may be very far away from correctness in judging the other traits, or may, indeed, judge in quite the reverse of the correct order. To have accepted the verdicts of a single judge would not only have been manifestly unfair to the individual but also hazardous to the employer. The combined impressions of twenty-five judges is here required for the correlations for even half of the traits to reach over .38.
The second point to be noted is that even under these circumstances the coefficients are far from perfect, even for those traits in which they are the highest. Only if beauty, snobbishness, or vulgarity are the traits which are crucial, are judgments of the photographs reliable enough to be worth considering. It would appear that the vocations which depend markedly on these characteristics are exceedingly few. And even here, although the reliance on coefficients of .55 might in all probability aid the employer in decreasing the percentage of the snobbish or the vulgar among his employees, grave injustice would most certainly be done to those many individuals who constitute exceptions and keep the correlations from being perfect. Only when correlation coefficients are very high can their indications be applied in the guidance of individuals (as distinguished from the selection of groups) with safety and justice.
Dean Schneider reports an attempt to verify the principles of a certain system of physiognomics by putting them to an actual test. He writes:
"A group in the scientific management field affirmed that an examination of physical characteristics such as the shape of the fingers and shape of the head, disclosed aptitudes and abilities. For example, a directive, money-making executive will have a certain shaped head and hand. A number of money-making executives were picked at random and their physical characteristics charted. We do not find that they conform at all to any law. Also we found men who had the physical characteristics that ought to make them executives, but they were anything but executives. A number of tests of this kind gave negative results. We were forced to the conclusion that this system was not reliable."
We must content ourselves on this point by insisting that the formulated facts of physiognomy are so unsupported, contradictory, and extravagant that the vocational psychologist cannot afford to trifle with them. General impressions on the basis of the totality of an individual's appearance, bearing, and behavior we shall always tend to receive. Whether one judges more accurately by an analytic recording of each detail or by ignoring these in favor of his own more or less unanalyzed total impression has never been demonstrated. Under any circumstances one is likely to look about for such details as may lend support to the total impression. But it is quite unjustifiable—though perhaps commercially expedient—to pretend that the judgment is really based on the details selected.
The life of him who bases his expectations of human conduct on the physiognomy of his neighbors is bound to be full of delightful as well as fearful surprises. I shall never forget the practical lesson in the principles of physiognomics I learned when watching a shipload of immigrants pass the physical and mental examinations at Ellis Island. Admission to the new land, and to the theater of their vocational plans, depended on the results of these examinations. Ellis Island is perhaps the one place in the world where principles of individual psychology are most in demand, and where such principles as are relied on lead to results of the most serious human consequences. I watched the line file past the preliminary gate, by the inspectors who scrutinized them still more carefully, and on into the inner room where the suspected ones were submitted to more searching examination. One young woman stood out among her companions as easily the most comely and attractive of the women. She was the only one of that shipload who was finally certified as an imbecile, and refused admission to the mainland.
The physiognomic analyses, then, do not merit serious consideration as instruments of vocational guidance and selection. The mere facts of physical structure, contour, shape, texture, proportion, color, etc., yield no more information concerning capacities and interests than did the incantations of the primitive medicine-man or the absurd charts of the phrenologists. In so far as character and ability may be determined by facts of structure, it is by the minute structure of the microscopic elements of the brain and other vital tissues, about which we now know exceedingly little. We shall therefore dismiss from further consideration the futile attempts to diagnose mental constitution on the basis of bodily structure, and turn to the more reliable and scientifically conceived methods of inferring the individual's mental traits from his behavior or his actual performance when tests are made under controlled conditions.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] An interesting review of the origin and development of phrenology and other systems of character analysis is given by Joseph Jastrow, in an article in Popular Science Monthly, June, 1915.
[2] To make clear the way in which these figures are secured, and to show concretely what they mean, suppose that the twenty photographs are lettered A, B, C, D, etc. They are to be arranged in an order by each judge according to his judgment of the intelligence of the individuals, the individuals being unknown to the judges. Suppose that the ten judges place photograph A respectively in the following positions: 9, 11, 5, 8, 9, 12, 7, 8, 7, 14. The average of these ten positions is 9, which we then take as the standard or most probable position of photograph A. Only two of the judges actually place A in the ninth position. The other eight judges all vary more or less from this position. We then find how much each judge varies from the average of the group, and the ten variations are respectively 0, 2, 4, 1, 0, 3, 2, 1, 2, 5 positions. The average of these individual variations is 2.0 positions. This figure indicates how closely the ten judges agree in their estimates of photograph A, a small average deviation indicating close agreement. In this way we find for each of the twenty photographs its average deviation; and if the twenty figures thus secured are in their turn averaged we secure an approximate measure of the disagreement of the judges when estimating the intelligence suggested by the photographs. Similarly we may compute average deviations for any other trait which is judged. These final figures are the ones which are given in the table, each of them being the average of twenty photographs as judged by ten persons.