Somatotype and constitutional psychology
Somatotype is a theory proposed in the 1940s by the American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon to categorize the human physique according to the relative contribution of three fundamental elements which he termed somatotypes, classified by him as ectomorphic, mesomorphic, and endomorphic.
He created these terms borrowing from the three germ layers of embryonic development: The endoderm (which develops into the digestive tract), the mesoderm (which becomes muscle, heart, and blood vessels) and the ectoderm (which forms the skin and nervous system).
[1] Later variations of these categories, developed by his original research assistant Barbara Heath, and later by Lindsay Carter and Rob Rempel, are used by academics today.
[2][3] Constitutional psychology is a theory developed by Sheldon in the 1940s, which attempted to associate his somatotype classifications with human temperament types.
[2] Sheldon and Earnest Hooton were seen as leaders of a school of thought, popular in anthropology at the time, which held that the size and shape of a person's body indicated intelligence, moral worth and future achievement.
[7] In a late version of a pseudoscientific thread within criminology in which criminality is claimed to be an innate characteristic that can be recognized through particular physiognomic markers (as in Cesare Lombroso's theory of phrenology), Sheldon contended that criminals tended to be 'mesomorphic'.
Mesomorphs, in contrast, are typically stereotyped as popular and hardworking, whereas ectomorphs are often viewed as intelligent yet fearful.
This numerical approach has gone on to be incorporated in the current sports science and physical education curriculums of numerous institutions, ranging from the UK's secondary level GCSE curriculums (14- to 16-year-olds), the Indian UPSC Civil Service exams, to MSc programs worldwide, and has been utilized in numerous academic papers, including: "The Varieties of Human Physique" by Sheldon et al (1940) classified body types into three categories using data processes that would not be accepted by researchers today.
[30] Sheldon's ideas that body type was an indicator of temperament, moral character or potential – while popular in an atmosphere accepting of the theories of eugenics – were later disputed.
[2][31] A key criticism of Sheldon's constitutional theory is that it was not a theory at all but a general assumption of continuity between structure and behavior and a set of descriptive concepts to measure physique and behavior in a scaled manner.
[3] His use of thousands of photographs of naked Ivy League undergraduates, obtained without explicit consent from a pre-existing program evaluating student posture, has been strongly criticized.
[3][4][33][34][35] Barbara Honeyman Heath, who was Sheldon's main assistant in compiling Atlas of Men, accused him of falsifying the data he used in writing the book.
