Mistaken first impressions: A response

In this journal, Cummins et ar reported an experiment that examined clinici ans' predictions of causes of death from subjects' pre-morbid photographs. They found that clinicians performed at chance. The validity of two of thei r other conclusions are challenged. First, that clinicians routinely form i mpressions of how a person will die from their appearance. Second, that cer tain health professionals use common judgements to form these impressions. These claims are found to be based upon non-falsifiable hypothesis and inap propriate statistics; hence, an experiment employing pictures of feet (or a ny arbitrary personal detail) would have led the authors to the same conclu sions.