The Psychology of Baldness : Part 3

Hair!: Mankind's Historic Quest to End Baldness
By Gersh Kuntzman

(Page 3 of 3)

"I just know that I don't feel as good about myself as I was feeling when I had a full head of hair," Stewart said.

For "Carl" (not his real name), the problem on the top of his head went much farther down his body.

"I just don't feel like a man without my hair," he said while awaiting an appointment to get his hairpiece serviced at Penthouse

for Hair Recovery, a locker-room-style hair salon for men who need a toupee and a reassuring slap on the ol' keyster. "When I went bald, I wasn't the man I used to be."

Naturally, academics have done countless studies to put such real emotions into hard-and-fast scientific jargon.

In a 1971 study, for example, people were asked to look at random sketches of men and then asked to rate each man based on their all-critical first impression. The bald men were rated as the most unkind, ugly, hard and "bad." Men with hair were seen as more handsome, virile and active. Men with hair were also deemed "good."

In J. S. Verinis's study-aptly named "The Hairiness and Large Stereotypes"-thirty-six male and twenty-four female college students were shown slides of a hairy and hairless arm, a hairy and hairless chest, a large and a small and were asked to rate the slides in adjectival pairs such as "good/bad," "kind/cruel," "virile/impotent," "strong/weak," etc.

Across the board, the hairy arm, hairy chest were seen as more masculine, more virile and stronger.

Verinis's conclusion: "Both men and women subscribe to this hairiness myth." My conclusion: "Hair makes the man."

Such studies launched an entirely new field of psychotherapy (and, of course, a new name for the new field): the study of the so-called physical attractiveness phenomenon.

Thomas Cash has made a good living studying the phenomenon-and has thrown good grant money after bad to conclude that people tend to find bald people less attractive.

Cash's 1988 study, for example, asked three groups of people-young college students, slightly older Old Dominion staffers and aging faculty members-to look at slides of bald and haired men. No one in the study was told why he or she was looking at these particular pictures, but was asked to rate the person in each slide for qualities such as self-assertiveness, social attractiveness, intelligence, life success, personal likability, physical attractiveness and perceived age.

Guess what? "The bald or balding models were perceived more negatively on every dimension except intelligence," Cash wrote. The study confirmed "a generally deleterious social stereotype of balding. Hair loss produced social judgments of lower aesthetic appeal and fostered less favorable initial assumptions about what the men were really like. Therefore, their lives were assumed to be less happy and successful. Both men and women expected the balding men to be less personally likable than the nonbalding controls."

University of Michigan professor Daniel Moerman did his own version of the study in 1988 (what, was grant money easy to come by then?), asking college students to look at two drawings of the same man-one with hair and one without-and give their impressions.

"The data indicate the existence of a curious kind of prejudice in our society," Moerman wrote. Across the board, the students thought that the bald subject was more intelligent, but considered the man with hair to be more attractive, more agreeable and younger.

"An opinion as to whether a person is agreeable or intelligent cannot be truly formulized until after direct interaction with the person," Moerman stressed. "The respondents in this experiment, however, were willing to predict that people would be more or less so after simply looking at a drawing."

And what they predicted was that men with hair, to put it in terms that one would hear on a college campus, are hotties and men without hair are, sigh, stable.

Researchers call this the "What is beautiful is good" syndrome-and even though it's been ingrained in our collective psyche since prehistoric times (from the cave paintings to Charlie's Angels), academics never stop writing about it.

"Physical attractiveness serves as an informational cue to infer extensive information about a person," psychologist Gordon Patzer wrote a decade ago.

"Consistently in our society, persons of lower physical attractiveness are associated with negative or undesirable characteristics, whereas their counterparts are associated with positive characteristics. People will adamantly state that another person's physical attractiveness has no effect on them, their perceptions, or their behavior; however, controlled observations reveal that people drastically underestimate the influence physical attractiveness has on them."

Copyright © 2001 by Gersh Kuntzman.

About the Author

Gersh Kuntzman has been a New York newspaperman for more than a decade, most recently as a reporter and columnist for The New York Post. Kuntzman's weekly column, MetroGnome, roots out the quirky underside of New York life.