Men’s hairline has long been a source of consternation, and while there has been a definite sense that there is growing acceptance of the ravages of age.  Indeed, there have even been suggestions that baldness is actually a sign of male dominance, and is therefore a good thing to possess in a leader.  Alas, a new study from the University of Otago reminds us that the societal biases against baldness persist.

The researchers wanted to explore how we perceive bald men (both in the natural and deliberate sense), in terms of things such as age, dominance and leadership preferences.  The results suggest that we appear to prefer our leaders to have a full head of hair, whilst such men were also viewed as younger, smarter, healthier and more attractive.

The findings emerged from experiments whereby several hundred volunteers were shown photos of men that had been digitally altered so they either had a full head of hair, a shaved head, or were naturally bald.  The volunteers then rated the men on their age, leadership, masculinity, dominance, attractiveness, intelligence and health.  A second experiment then did likewise, but asked the volunteers to rate the images based upon their leadership preferences in times of war, peace, exploration and exploitation.

The results suggest that our hairline is seen as an important characteristic people look for in leaders, even if we do so subconsciously.

“Baldness is an extremely common phenomenon amongst aging men, thus also affecting many leaders,” the researchers explain.  “Head shaving is one of the common responses to ‘hide’ a balding head, which previous research showed increases how dominant a man looks. Looking more dominant can be an asset for leaders, particularly in situations of conflict.”

Boldly going

As with previous studies, men with shaved heads were indeed viewed as more dominant, and indeed more masculine than men with a full head of hair.  This didn’t seem to translate into who we want as leader however, with this even true in times of conflict.

“We thought the dominant looking shaved head would give them a preference boost during conflict, but it gave them a penalty during peace instead,” the researchers say.  “Also, we found in the two voting-paradigm studies that the full heads of hair were generally more preferred as leaders—regardless of the context—as previous studies did not find any general preference. This is likely due to increased perceptions of attractiveness and health that the full heads of hair received compared to the shaved heads and the balding heads.”

It should be said that while the preferences of people were quite clear, the differences in their preferences for a leader with a full head of hair was still relatively slight compared to a bald leader.  As such, the findings don’t suggest that we find the idea of bald leaders absurd, as the evidence from real life clearly shows, but that there is a slight societal preference for leaders with hair.

“As voters we should be aware of such biases which make us choose leaders on criteria that have no bearing on how effective they are at doing their job,” the researchers conclude. “We have no reason to think that men with a full head of hair are actually better leaders than balding men or men with a shaved head.”