Ever Had a Bad Hair Day?

Science World, Sept 18, 2000 by Miguel Vilar

A researcher uses the scientific method to find out whether a Bad Hair Day affects your mood.

Ever wake up, steal a glance at yourself in the mirror, and get the queasy feeling you're in for a Bad Hair Day? Has your idea of bad hair--hair that's perhaps too frizzy, poofy, greasy, or mashed down--ever affected your mood or self-esteem? If so, you may want to check out what psychologist (scientist who studies human behavior) Marianne LaFrance discovered.

LaFrance, a Yale University professor, studies how physical appearance affects people's feelings. So like any scientist, LaFrance performs experiments. And the best way to ensure a successful experiment is to follow the scientific method, a step-by-step process for doing research. "The scientific method helps you properly link cause and effect," says LaFrance. "It's the framework for an experiment, and helps you guess right."

What's Up With Your Hair?

The first step in the scientific method is to notice something--make an observation. LaFrance noticed that if she suggested to a friend that she had bad hair --"your hair isn't looking as good as it usually does"--her friend's attitude changed dramatically. She became depressed and lost confidence. These observations led LaFrance to formulate a research question: How does the idea of having bad hair affect your attitude?

Before getting tangled up in knots, LaFrance did some background research on the psychological (mental and emotional) impact of appearance. Background research tells her if other scientists have asked and answered similar questions in the past. LaFrance combed through medical and psychological journals, but couldn't find an answer.

So it was time for LaFrance to formulate a hypothesis--an educated guess about what the answer to her question might be. Her hypothesis stated that both males and females would feel embarrassed or depressed when asked to remember a bad hair day, but she proposed that females would be more affected than males.

Hairy Experiment

LaFrance then set out to design an experiment, a study to test her hypothesis. An experiment must be carefully formulated to test the effect of one variable, or characteristic, at a time. Experiments are full of variables, but scientists alter only one variable at a time. This variable is called the independent or manipulated variable. LaFrance's independent variable was the memory of bad hair.

Changing the independent variable affects other variables. These variables are called dependent or responding variables. In LaFrance's experiment, the dependent variable was a change in attitude--whether the person felt less smart, less sociable, and embarrassed as a result of his or her own perception of having bad hair.

Hair-Raising Test

LaFrance began testing her variables with a step-by-step procedure, (see Make a Plan!) or plan. First she separated 120 volunteers into three groups randomly (in no specific order). In isolation, each group was primed, or prepared, with a pre-existing condition. Group 1 was asked to recall a bad hair day. Group 2 wasn't told anything (left unprimed); this group functioned as the control, a standard against which researchers compare primed groups. Group 3 was asked to recall a day in which they had difficulty opening a package. Why a package? "We wanted people to think about a bad experience that had nothing to do with their appearance," LaFrance says. This way she could test if their mood changes were due to the memory of the way they looked, or had nothing to do with appearance (like packaging).

After preparing the three groups, LaFrance asked all volunteers to take three written tests: a "state of self-esteem test," an "emotion scale test," and a "20-statements test." The self-esteem test asked questions to measure how volunteers felt about themselves at the moment. The emotion scale test listed a series of descriptive words (like "angry," "scared," and "bothered"), and asked participants to mark words that described how they felt right then. Finally, the 20-statements test listed the words "I am --" 20 times. Volunteers filled in the blanks with whatever words they felt best described them at the moment.

LaFrance kept all other experimental variables constant, or unchanged, so as not to interfere with volunteers' answers. The study was also blinded--volunteers didn't know the purpose of the experiment, nor were they told there were two other groups.

Experiment Results

After reviewing the volunteers' answers, LaFrance reached a conclusion, or summary of her results. "We found that both sexes in the group primed with the memory of bad hair suffered from much lower self-esteem," she says. "At first we thought females would be more impacted than males, but males were just as affected as females, or even more."

When comparing Group 1's answers to those of the other two groups, LaFrance found that males in Group 1 felt less smart and confident than males in the other groups by thinking they had bad hair; these males also felt unsociable and more nervous. Females reported feeling more bothered and embarrassed than males. When describing themselves for the 20-statements test, all Group 1 volunteers responded more negatively.