Personology
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Personology, is a recent "New Age" variant of the ancient pseudoscience of Physiognomy, which is closely related to the disproved study of Phrenology. It is a system of face reading that purports to show a correlation between a person's physical features and appearance, and the person's behavior, personality and character. Mainstream science considers personology to be a wholly false pseudoscience.
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History
Personology is said by Naomi Tickle, the founder of the International Centre for Personology, to have been developed in the 1930s by Edward Vincent Jones, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. Jones purportedly noted the behavioral patterns of those who appeared in his court, began taking notes and eventually convinced himself that he could predict people's behavior from observing their facial features. Fascinated by his apparent discovery, Jones dropped his judicial work and began "researching" the field using earlier literature published about the subject by notable authors such as Johann Kaspar Lavater. Jones is said to have compiled a list of 200 different facial features, which he later narrowed down to 68. There is no evidence that Jones conducted any controlled scientific experiments in attempt to eliminate influences of self-deception or confirmation bias. After seeing Jones perform a cold reading on his wife, Robert L. Whiteside, a newspaper editor, became an ardent supporter of personology and is said by Tickle to have 'done the science' proving the validity of personology in an experiment that "used 1,068 subjects and found the accuracy to be better than 90%". Whiteside's alleged study appears nowhere in any of the scientific literature.
Examples of supposed personology correlations
- Coarse hair: less sensitive
- Fine hair: extremely sensitive
- Tight skin across frame of face: likes things to be very clean and neat
- Wide jaw: likes to be in charge
- Square chin: loves to debate
There is nothing known to medical science or any of its subdivisions such as neuroscience, which support any of the claims of personolgy or its supposed explanations.
Further reading
- Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, W H Freeman & Co., ISBN 0716733870
- Naomi Tickle (2003), You Can Read a Face Like a Book: How Reading Faces Helps You Succeed in Business and Relationships, Daniels Publishing, ISBN 0-9646398-2-3.
External links
- Personology Research & Development Center, Inc. (http://www.personology.com/)
- A skeptical look at Personology in The Skeptic's Dictionary (http://skepdic.com/personology.html)
- Brief history and examples from a proponent's view (http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~tmd/person.htm)