Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair

20 like_any_other 33 7/2/2025, 10:29:48 AM sciencedirect.com ↗

Comments (33)

ikr678 · 18h ago
If I was a highly competitve salon owner I would be encouraging all clients to have short haircuts, because I wanted the repeat customers (short hair cuts require more frequent visits). Same for colouring hair, nail, eyelash extensions etc. These are all treatments, that once started, require ongoing maintenance $$. It's beauty as a service, not social science.
ericpauley · 18h ago
The study itself is p-hacked to death. It’s very concerning that people are forming such toxic worldviews based on such shoddy science.
Urahandystar · 18h ago
The goal for alot of "Science" is not to find truth, it is to get shared and thus exposure into the non academia world. This then helps the authors get jobs in a highly competitive world of academia.

Its disappointing but "Gotta put food on the table".

globular-toast · 17h ago
Could you elaborate on why you think that?
like_any_other · 19h ago
koakuma-chan · 19h ago
Why is there a need to cut off hair in the first place? I have relatively long hair and I just never cut it.
jfengel · 14h ago
Hair frays at the ends. It becomes fragile and prone to tangling. Hair actually grows longer with occasional trimming -- it prevents the split ends from propagating.

You don't necessarily have to go to a salon for that, especially if you have straight hair. Just comb it flat and have a friend cut a straight line. You can even do it yourself, if your hair is long enough, though it will be a bit ragged.

You can also get it cut for a lot of other reasons. Hair can be shaped and layered, for a style that suits your current preferences. Curly hair in particular can simply look bushy if it's not given some kind of shape.

You don't have to care about your appearance, but if you really don't ever get your hair cut, then you're lucky that you have the kind of hair that doesn't turn into a felted ball.

koakuma-chan · 13h ago
That's very insightful, thanks! I'm gonna look into what can I do.
TMWNN · 17h ago
smt88 · 19h ago
This is almost a parody of pointless social science.

Assuming we can find a reason this topic deserved study, does it generalize to other countries? Will it be true in 10 years? Was it true 50 years ago?

And if it does generalize, what is interesting about the revelation that women sometimes intentionally give sabotaging advice? It's either common or obvious enough that it appears unquestioned in mainstream entertainment regularly. Do we need to empirically confirm every detail of human experience?

coldtea · 18h ago
>does it generalize to other countries? Will it be true in 10 years? Was it true 50 years ago?

Does it matter? Contemporary and local phenomena are also worth studying.

Besides, the conclusions from such a research, assuming it's done well, are not about the specifics (hair length advice, US) but about competitive character in psychology and social dynamics in general.

Like the already generic takeaway "intrasexually competitive people sabotage others through means of advice" (that can just as well apply to ancient Rome or space colonies in 2500).

smt88 · 14h ago
> Does it matter? Contemporary and local phenomena are also worth studying.

Yes. How contemporary? How local? There's a reason we don't study a single person doing something on a random day. It's too contemporary and too local. There's a limit at which the money spent on the research is being set on fire.

> but about competitive character in psychology and social dynamics in general

This is literally my point. This research isn't about anything in general, which is why it's not interesting. It is a tiny study of a very specific population at a single point in time. It doesn't tell us about anything in general at all.

> Like the already generic takeaway "intrasexually competitive people sabotage others through means of advice" (that can just as well apply to ancient Rome or space colonies in 2500).

The takeaway is so generic it isn't worth proving with research. I believe in learning things just to learn them, but why do we need to spend public funds to quantify things that are so obvious they are in plays from a thousand years ago?

Should we also study whether sexually competitive males play basketball more aggressively against each other?

With infinite time and money, this would absolutely be worthwhile, but there isn't value in aimlessly quantifying things just to get a headline and get published.

coldtea · 12h ago
>Yes. How contemporary? How local? There's a reason we don't study a single person doing something on a random day. It's too contemporary and too local

Says who and with what credentials? And, even more so, based on what deeper arguments than "it's too local/contemporary" that don't mean anything? And based on what locality constraint ("it' can't just be American women"?), and in what exactly mechanisms that can't be generalized from the locality studied?

> This is literally my point. This research isn't about anything in general, which is why it's not interesting. It is a tiny study of a very specific population at a single point in time. It doesn't tell us about anything in general at all.

Doesn't have to be a big study to have statistical significance, and even less so to bring useful insights. In fact, as studies go, this has a quite sizable sample size.

The choice of undegraduates is very common in social science studies, and these two studies also include members of the general population.

This is not a poll on the voting preferences of the population at large, or something like that, and for the subject matter there's no reason to believe that the results don't apply regardless of locality.

mcphage · 18h ago
> Assuming we can find a reason this topic deserved study, does it generalize to other countries? Will it be true in 10 years? Was it true 50 years ago?

Those are good questions! Congratulations, you found a reason this topic deserved study. I wonder how many more there are?

smt88 · 14h ago
> Congratulations, you found a reason this topic deserved study.

What reason is that? Because it's so specific, weak, and unimportant that I have to ask many more questions to find a way it could lead to any sort of conclusion?

That makes no sense. By those criteria, everything is worth studying, regardless of cost.

For example, if someone studied what women like to eat at lunchtime in Perth, Australia, I'd have a similar set of questions. The data from that study is not wholly uninteresting, but it needs to have some underlying theory of why the public should fund it before it gets public funding.

And then there's the question of opportunity cost. What else could these researchers have been studying instead?

like_any_other · 18h ago
> Assuming we can find a reason this topic deserved study, does it generalize to other countries? Will it be true in 10 years? Was it true 50 years ago?

More such studies could answer those questions ;)

yieldcrv · 19h ago
Interesting article about hair salons. Someone research the ones performing lip injections too.

My observations so far have been that many women are peer pressuring otherwise attractive women to get botched lip injections, or she performs the botched injection on the client. There seems to be an even greater lack of assertiveness with women towards other women (compared to men and well documented power dynamics). This is also immunized from criticism by saying it was for themselves, as opposed to anything to do with the male gaze.

Would love a study corroborating this.

Cthulhu_ · 19h ago
As in observations on the internet or have you spoken to them / were you peer pressured yourself?
yieldcrv · 18h ago
Observations in person with people that told me why they did what they did

Several “couldn’t say no to my friend” who had just recently got into performing lip injections

I never considered observations on the internet as being worth commenting on, would that have greater weight to you?

FirmwareBurner · 19h ago
They also encourage other women to gain weight, hence the body positivity and fat acceptance movement amongst women, with the effect of reducing sexual competition, it's a well known behavior amongst females.

There was also a study where a group of women would have to rate the appearance of other women, and when the same women switched to more and more revealing clothing, the others rated her appearance lower and lower. :)

Cthulhu_ · 19h ago
Do you have a paper like in the link or is this a kneejerk reaction based on vibes? Your post history doesn't seem to indicate you've got any authority in the field.
gsich · 18h ago
Not everything needs a paper if you experienced it in the flesh.
puchatek · 18h ago
Your in-the-flesh experience is 80% cognitive biases.

Source: my in-the-flesh experience.

gsich · 18h ago
Biases are not random.
FirmwareBurner · 18h ago
Go work or ask any man who ever worked in an all female HR-department, then catalogue the feedback you get. When all points on the graph form a line, is it still a bias?

People say all-male teams are toxic, but they miss that all-female teams tend to be even worse.

haunter · 18h ago
Insert “women think Lizzo is sexy until you tell them they look like Lizzo” meme
mbirth · 18h ago
I believe this all boils down to the phrase:

“Single women keep other women single.”

FirmwareBurner · 18h ago
More like the phrase comes from observed behavioral patterns in reproduction habits of women stemming from biological evolution. The more they can back-stab each other and drag the others down, the higher the chance of getting a higher value male.

Women don't have the testosterone fueled violent tendencies of males to get into physical competition to assert dominance over sexual competitors, so they resort to more subtle and cunning ways of "thinning the herd" of sexual competitors.

throwaway290 · 15h ago
Men need to compete much more hard so I think it evens out, if this backstabbing really exists among women it will surely exist among men just the same.
gsich · 18h ago
or "misery loves company"
coldtea · 18h ago
>Women use competitor manipulation as a form of intrasexual competition. Highly competitive women advised hypothetical salon clients to cut off more hair. Women told clients of similar attractiveness as themselves to cut off the most hair.

Joke's on them. Women with shorter hair look hotter! I'd go for their competitors then!

koakuma-chan · 18h ago
That's not true. Ponytails are the hottest.
pestatije · 16h ago
trimmed not shaven... that's where id put it