The Criminality From Face Illusion

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the claim that facial analysis can predict criminality, arguing that such attempts are fundamentally flawed and may have harmful social implications.

Contribution

The paper challenges recent claims of criminality prediction from face images, highlighting methodological flaws and social risks associated with this illusion.

Findings

Recent successes are likely due to inadequate experimental design

Predicting criminality from face is fundamentally flawed

Belief in this illusion can cause social harm

Abstract

The automatic analysis of face images can generate predictions about a person's gender, age, race, facial expression, body mass index, and various other indices and conditions. A few recent publications have claimed success in analyzing an image of a person's face in order to predict the person's status as Criminal / Non-Criminal. Predicting criminality from face may initially seem similar to other facial analytics, but we argue that attempts to create a criminality-from-face algorithm are necessarily doomed to fail, that apparently promising experimental results in recent publications are an illusion resulting from inadequate experimental design, and that there is potentially a large social cost to belief in the criminality from face illusion.