Quote:
Originally Posted by Truth-Finder
It can help but one must be cautious. It is neither indispensable as seems to be some times for some classifiers who seem completely helpless when no information about ethnicity is given.
Let's quote an exemple; allthough small mediterraneans are rare in the British isles, they occur from time to time.
If I post picture of a britton who might be small mediterranean predominately and I reveal before classification that he is a britton, biased by that info people might fail to see his small mediterranean features and would probably see other influencies such as AM, Nordic, KN,"Atlantid", in other words anything else but what the sample person really is.
Now if I post the pictures of the same man and give no hint about his ethnicity people would classify him as predominately small mediterranean and possible say that he must be Spanish or Italian.
Now, which of those classifications would be the most accurate?
The second one for sure, though the sample's ethnicity would be wrongly guess (and that minor mistake would be perfectly normal as is a very uncommon type for the British Isles)
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I know what you mean. I think in the first case, and unless one is too familiar with the Small Mediterranean type in question, the safest thing would be to classify him as "Mediterranean" in a general sense. Overall I think knowing ancestry does more good than harm, specially since we are giving our opinion on the basis of a few pictures we see in a monitor. And by the way, can you think of 3 Small Med celebrities of British ancestry?