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I was out for a few drinks the other day with some friends (all in their early 20's and female) and they decided to take a photo of me with short hair around and survey people about my hair length.
Now, I should add - I gave them permission on the condition that they do the survey in Spanish (we live in Spain). So don't be hating - I'm open, I was interested in the outcome and I wanted them to try and improve their Spanish.
They took my drivers license and did the survey. The photo is me at 17, with a buzz cut, which I've almost never had, I've always hated them on me.
The results came back at 10:5 (preferred short:preferred long), which I actually think is really good! Mainly because there's several things to take into account:
- A significant amount of people (especially females, IMHO) will tell you to change something just because you ask them. e.g. If I ask a girl if I should pierce my ear, the likelihood she'll say yes is more than 50% just because she wants to change me.
- Initially the girls were mainly surveying other females, but I think it may have been 50/50 at the end.
- Some people generally dislike long hair on men, and a small minority are the other way around.
- However, the previous point is countered by men losing their hair, or other men with long hair. Most men showing MPB were very supportive of me!
- I started to say that I'm a musician/artist (which is true), which changed a few votes. This also illustrates the abstraction of the survey.
- My friends were drunk and also kinda biased, but I think they were pretty accurate with the vote counting.
After all of those factors are taken into account, THEN we are left with my looks, which is what people were ACTUALLY supposed to be judging, haha!
Other notes. I'm 25 now, with hair past my shoulders, my face has lost a bit of weight since 17, so I do look different.
We may re-conduct the survey, but I might use a different picture. I have had hundreds of different looks when I had shorter hair, and we picked one of the worst ones with my drivers license (though, for this forum it was probably a good photo to use, to hopefully sway some votes!).
People who want to grow hair long should not care what other people think. If growing hair is what makes an individual happy then that is the only thing that matters.
It's not that he cares which they like more, it just curiosity. I do stuff like this all the time and my hair is almost waist length and I have no plans of cutting. It's just interesting to know what people think.
Don't worry, I'm extremely unphased when it comes to other people's opinions, and let people know when their opinion isn't welcome. However, in this case they were asked.
I explained quite clearly that I'm not going to cut my hair. I spent two and a half years growing it long and I enjoy having it long. While I might not stay this way forever, I'm only going to shorten my hair when I'm good and ready.
It was purely for the sake of interest, and a way to meet some new people :)
P.S. I've had the request to dreadlock my hair just as often as I've been told that I look better with short hair.
Hey mate,
Develop items tapping into those variables, pretest the items with a large sample. Do a factor analysis. Administer the questionairre to a large sample n > 100, for structural equation modeling and prior factor analysis. Send the data in an excel or text file to me, I'll analyse the data and test the results at a significance level of .05, per social psychology conventions.
Your friend,
A graduate student in social psychology, lawl.