Facial hair and Professional Baseball
A statistics study by Wahl and STATS in 2013 determined that professional baseball players with facial hair outperformed those without it in the previous decade of All-Star Games.
What does this mean scientifically? Not sure, but it’s funny. Who knows, there might be a link with perceived aggressiveness, dominate personality, or even hormone levels.
More on Facial Hair and Perceived Aggressiveness
A study by Dixson and Vasey in 2012 (the same authors of the study you sent me) did a study with women who were European New Zealanders (White ethnicity) and Polynesians from Samoa. They found:
- In both cultural groups, women did not rate bearded faces as more attractive than clean-shaven faces.
- However, women and men from both groups did judge bearded faces as:
Older
Higher Social Status
Interestingly, they showed people from both groups a picture of a face in an aggressive expression, either with a beard or without one.
- Those from both groups rated the bearded face as more “aggressive.”
The reason they used people from two groups is to show that some of these effects work across cultures.
Even though different cultures have different rules regarding facial hair, there are strong underlying mechanisms that seem to be more universal.
The moral of this study is: beards don’t seem to make someone more attractive, but they do make someone seem older and with higher social status. Also, it makes aggressive actions seem more aggressive.
Therefore, when a man is deciding whether to wear facial hair, he should consider the kind of message he’s sending by wearing it. It doesn’t seem like beards necessarily make a person more or less attractive (though certainly each man will be different – all scientific studies are based on averages and not individuals).
Facial Hair Preferences – Twin Study
One study by Verweij, Burri, and Zietsch in 2012 sought to examine whether there was a genetic influence on preferences for various traits.
- They found a bunch of twins to see whether some of their preferences were determined by genetics.
- By studying the differences between the preferences of identical twins (that share almost the same DNA) and fraternal twins (who share some of the same DNA, but not identical) who were either raised in the same household or raised in separate households, they can roughly examine the role of genetics vs. the role of upbringing.
They found that:
- Overall, women preferred clean-shaven men over bearded men (87% to 13%).
- HOWEVER, older women were significantly more likely to prefer bearded men.
- Also, they found that 38% of the variance in preference for facial hair was genetic. That’s pretty high – it means that whether a woman prefers facial hair on a man is strongly influenced by her genes.
The Role of Genes vs. Environment
Based on all the research I’ve seen over the last two days, one theme jumps out:
- A lot of fashion preferences might simply be what is “trending” or fashionable at any given time (this is the influence of culture and the environment). However, it seems that wearing a beard taps into something more universal and biological.
A beard is one of the strongest examples of “sexual dimorphism” across all humans.
- Sexual dimorphism is a physical difference between a male and a female of the same species.
- Because beard growth is strongly determined by age, hormone levels, and the genetic ability to grow one, there are stronger signals being sent off than with other fashion decisions.
That means that beard-wearing is different than the decision to wear a skinny tie vs. a wide tie. It communicates deep biological messages.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore cultural rules and practices (like whether beard-wearing is trending, whether your profession has an anti-beard culture, etc.). It just means that a man must think about the biological message they’re sending as well as the cultural message.
