Criminals with untrustworthy faces get harsher sentences

　　面孔无法人信任的罪犯刑罚更严酷

　　导读：最新研究表明，罪犯可能会“因脸获罪”。生活中人们通常会被一个人的长相给自己带来的感觉所左右，或者远离，或者亲近，或者委以重任，或者潦草打发。但是在法庭上，长相为自己带来的风险可能是致命的。

　　PEOPLE decide quickly how trustworthy a stranger is, based on what his face looks like. And experiments show that, regarding any particular individual, they generally come to the same conclusion. There really are, it seems, trustworthy and untrustworthy faces—though, surprisingly, there is little consensus among researchers as to whether someone whose face is deemed devious really is more likely to betray a trust. The perceivedly untrustworthy do, however, suffer for their phizogs. And a study published in this month’s Psychological Science suggests that in extreme cases—in America at least—this suffering may be fatal.

　　人们会依据一个陌生人的面孔迅速判断他的可信任度。实验表明，人们对某一个人结论一般相同。看来，确实存在可信任的脸庞和不可信任的脸庞——虽然，令人吃惊的是，对于一个面容狡诈的人是否会更容易背叛，研究者们莫衷一是。然而，那些长着不可信任的面庞的人确实在为长相所连累。本月的《心理学》中发布的一个研究表明在一些极端案例中——至少是在美国——这种连累可能是致命的。

　　John Wilson and Nicholas Rule, psychologists at the University of Toronto, looked at convicted murderers in the American state of Florida, which retains the death penalty. They selected 371 prisoners on death row and a further 371 who were serving life sentences. To avoid confounding variables, all those chosen were male and were either black or white (no Asians or other ethnic groups). Each sample included 226 white convicts and 145 black ones. A group of 208 volunteers whom Dr Wilson and Dr Rule had recruited were then invited to rate photographs of each convict’s face for trustworthiness, on a scale of one to eight, where one was “not at all trustworthy” and eight was “very trustworthy”.

　　John Wilson和Nicholas Rule, 多伦多大学的心理学家，查看了美国弗罗里达州的被判死刑的杀人犯。他们挑选出371个将受死刑的犯人和371个终身监禁的犯人。为减少多余的变量，所有被遴选上的人皆为男性，或白人或黑人(没有亚洲和其他种族)。每个样本包括226个白人罪犯和145各黑人罪犯。Wilson博士和Rule博士招选了208个志愿者为每个罪犯的面孔照片评信任度分数，从1到8，1为“完全不值得信任”，8为“非常值得信任”。

　　The results of all this work revealed that the faces of prisoners who were on death row had an average trustworthiness of 2.76 and that those serving life sentences averaged 2.87. Not a huge difference, but one that was statistically significant (it, or something larger, would have happened by chance less often than one time in 100). That suggests untrustworthy-looking defendants are more likely to face a lethal injection, if convicted, than trustworthy-looking ones.

　　评分的结果表明被处以死刑的罪犯评分平均为2.76，而终身监禁的罪犯平均分为2.87。差距并不明显，但是数据上却意义重大(每100次中会发生的频率少于1次)。这说明那些面孔看起来不让人信任的被告人如果被定罪，比那些面孔让人信任的人更有可能被送上断头台。

　　To show that this was not a result of people with untrustworthy faces actually committing more heinous (and therefore death-penalty-worthy) murders, Dr Wilson and Dr Rule also looked at the faces of those who had been convicted of murder, sentenced and then acquitted on appeal, usually on the basis of DNA evidence. These innocents, too, had more often been sentenced to death in their original trials if their faces were rated untrustworthy. In Floridian courts, at least, it seems that your face really is your fortune.

　　Wilson博士和Rule博士为了证明这并不是因为面孔不让人信任的人实际上会犯更严重的杀人罪(因此会被判死刑)，他们同样也查看了那些因杀人罪获刑罚，最后因为DNA证据而在上述期间被免罪的人的面孔。这些清白的人，同样是被评为面孔不让人信任的人，更多的在原审判中被判了死刑。所以至少在弗罗里达的法庭看起来是这样：面孔决定命运。

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