What is Phrenology?

In this week's Steministas, we discuss a recently published paper about predicting trustworthiness based on people's facial expressions from Nature Communication. This paper stirred up quite the controversy online. People are arguing that this paper promotes phrenology which is the study of people's qualities and characteristics based off of measuring their physical characteristics - specifically people's heads and faces.

In this episode, we discuss the history of phrenology, what the paper analyzed, and the potential implications of a strong, scientific paper publishing a paper that seems to promote phrenology. 

 

SOURCES: //

Article about main paper we discuss: https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5pawq/an-ai-paper-published-in-a-major-journal-dabbles-in-phrenology

 

Phrenology history: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/facing-a-bumpy-history-144497373/

 

Phrenology history: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-shape-of-your-head-and-the-shape-of-your-mind/282578/

 

Phrenology charts: https://allthatsinteresting.com/phrenology-charts#1

 

Phrenology and racism: https://pages.vassar.edu/realarchaeology/2017/03/05/phrenology-and-scientific-racism-in-the-19th-century/

 

Indian culture and Andrew Jackson: https://jah.oah.org/teaching-the-jah/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-civilizations-indian-intellectual-culture-during-the-removal-era-1/#jackson

Phineas Gage: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/05/21/528966102/why-brain-scientists-are-still-obsessed-with-the-curious-case-of-phineas-gage