Is baldness really a physical defect? Yet bald men are generally perceived as more dominant and successful by others, suggests a study from the University of Pennsylvania.
Albert E. Mannes, an American scientist (who, coincidentally or not, is himself suffering from baldness) led a 2012 study in which he analyzed the reactions of 59 individuals.
He wanted to know how people would react when they saw a man without hair (or with a shaved head), so he showed them a series of photographs.
The guinea pigs were able to view each photograph twice. The portraits of men presented appeared sometimes with hair, other times with nothing on their skulls. Although they were in fact the same people, the hairless version was rated as looking more masculine, taller, stronger and more dominant.
Interesting detail: for them to be judged as more impressive, they had to be completely bald, without a single hair. On the contrary, if they only had a bald patch or partial baldness, they were considered weaker and less attractive!
And bald men don’t just look bigger: they also look smarter, more mature and wiser! Another study of over 20,000 subjects, led by psychologist Ronald Henss, a researcher at Saarland University, shows that bald men are often perceived as older, but are also perceived as wiser and more intelligent.
For a long time, scientists believed that bald men were perceived as more sexually powerful, because hair loss correlates with higher levels of testosterone.
In reality, and unfortunately for bald men, this isn’t exactly how things work: Baldness is not directly caused by testosterone, but by the hormone DHT, which is a “by-product” of testosterone that only affects hair cells and not the rest of the body.
So it seems that the different perception of bald people is more a matter of psychology like the fact they seem more intimidating according to certain people.
