Study Suggests Attackers Choose Victims Based on the Way They Walk [View all]

[arely staircase]

In the report titled “Psychopathy and Victim Selection: The Use of Gait as a Cue to Vulnerability,” the authors surveyed 47 inmates at a maximum-security prison in Ontario and found that social predators are very good at picking victims based on their gait—their posture and their stride.

The authors secretly filmed 12 people walking—eight women and four men, some of whom had been attacked before. Then, they showed the footage to a group of inmates, some of whom exhibited interpersonal traits commonly associated with psychopathy—manipulativeness, a lack of empathy, superficial friendliness—and asked them whether or not each person would make a good victim.

These “victim ratings” were then compared against each person’s actual history of victimization. Sure enough, the people whom the psychopaths picked as “likely victims” were usually the ones who had been victimized in the past. These people were often said to have “walked like an easy target”—slowly, asynchronously, with short strides.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/04/09/journal_of_interpersonal_violence_study_suggests_attackers_choose_victims.html?wpisrc=obinsite