When this item ran across the news feed I instantly thought of Zimmerman:

Do I look bigger with my finger on a trigger? Yes, says UCLA study

UCLA anthropologists asked hundreds of Americans to guess the size and muscularity of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding a range of easily recognizable objects, including handguns.

The research, which publishes today in the scholarly journal PLoS ONE, confirms what scrawny thugs have long known: Brandishing a weapon makes a man appear bigger and stronger than he would otherwise.

“There’s nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer is bigger or stronger, yet you do,” said Daniel Fessler, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. “Danger really does loom large — in our minds.”

Researchers say the findings suggest an unconscious mental mechanism that gauges a potential adversary and then translates the magnitude of that threat into the same dimensions used by animals to size up their adversaries: size and strength.

“We’ve isolated a capacity to assess threats in a simple way,” said Colin Holbrook, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in anthropology and co-author of the study. “Though this capacity is very efficient, it can misguide us.”

The study is part of larger project funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research to understand how people make decisions in situations where violent conflict is a possibility. The findings are expected to have ramifications for law enforcement, prison guards and the military.

“We’re exploring how people think about the relative likelihood that they will win a conflict, and then how those thoughts affect their decisions about whether to enter into conflict,” said Fessler, whose research focuses on the biological and cultural bases of human behavior. He is the director of UCLA’s Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, an interdisciplinary group of researchers who explore how various forms of evolution shape behavior.

[…]

Study participants consistently judged pistol-packers to be taller and stronger than the men holding the other objects, even though the experiment’s four hand models were recruited on the basis of their equivalent hand size and similar hand appearance (white and without identifying marks such as tattoos or scars).

To rule out the possibility that a feature of any one hand might influence the estimates, researchers had taken separate pictures of each hand holding each object — some participants saw the gun held by one hand model, others saw the same gun held by another model, and so on; they did the same thing for each of the objects. The researchers also shuffled the order in which the photos were presented.

On average, participants judged pistol packers to be 17 percent taller and stronger than those judged to be the smallest and weakest men — the ones holding caulking guns. Hand models holding the saw and drill followed gun-wielders in size and strength.

[…]

The role of guns and gun ownership in America as being signs of masculinity and of strength should not be under appreciated.