Hair Speaks Louder Than Faces When We Judge Who Has Power, Study Finds

Within a fraction of a second, the human brain decides whether a stranger looks powerful or weak, warm or cold. Those snap decisions shape elections, hiring outcomes, courtroom verdicts, and first dates. For decades, psychologists have studied how facial structure drives these judgments, often using digitally blended face stimuli in which hair is blurred away or ignored entirely. A new study published in Trends in Psychology argues that this long-standing focus on faces has left out half of the picture—literally. According to researchers led by Sarah E. Swanson of the University of Massachusetts Boston, the hair surrounding a face is not background noise in social perception. It is a signal that carries substantial weight, and in one crucial domain it rivals the face itself.

The research team asked a deceptively simple question: when people form impressions of a whole person in a photograph, how much do the face and the hair each contribute? To answer it, they built a novel experimental design that physically separated the two cues. Forty photographs of neutral-faced undergraduate volunteers were manipulated into three versions: a whole picture showing face and hair together, a face-only version in which the hair was covered by a gray outline, and a hair-only version in which the face was hidden behind a gray oval. Different groups of raters judged each version, allowing the researchers to statistically isolate the unique contribution of hair and face to judgments of the complete image.

The 195 participants, undergraduate students at a university in the northeastern United States, were seated in a large auditorium with empty seats between them and rated the projected photographs on a five-point scale. Half were asked to judge power-related traits—strong versus weak, dominant versus submissive, competitive versus uncompetitive, and competent versus incompetent. The other half judged warmth-related traits: kind versus cruel, warm versus cold, unselfish versus selfish, and cooperative versus uncooperative. Participants checked a box if they recognized anyone in the photos, and those judgments were excluded, removing only 57 of 7,800 total responses. The stimuli were carefully controlled: no glasses, hats, earrings, or facial hair, standardized cropping and alignment, and neutral expressions to ensure that hair and facial structure were the only available cues.

The results revealed a striking asymmetry between the two judgment dimensions. For warmth, the face reigned almost supreme. A regression model using face-only ratings explained 84 percent of the variance in warmth judgments of the whole pictures, and adding hair ratings contributed essentially nothing—less than one percent of additional variance, a statistically null effect. Warmth, in other words, is read almost entirely from the face. This fits a large body of theory holding that warmth judgments rely on involuntary, affective cues: the resemblance of a neutral face to emotional expressions, the softness or angularity of facial structure, and the rapid valence assessments people make within milliseconds of seeing a face.

Power told a very different story. Face-only judgments alone explained about 30 percent of the variance in whole-picture power judgments, but adding hair judgments more than doubled the explanatory power, adding another 32 percent of variance. Hair-only ratings correlated strongly with whole-picture power judgments at r equals .65, and hair remained a robust independent predictor even when face judgments were statistically controlled. The practical implication is remarkable: a hairstyle alone carries roughly as much information about perceived power as the facial features beneath it. Unlike the face, which is fixed by bone structure and largely beyond voluntary control, hair is a canvas of deliberate self-presentation, and perceivers appear to treat it as a consciously chosen statement about authority.

The effect was not uniform across genders. Hair’s independent contribution to power judgments was stronger for male targets than female targets, and stronger among male judges than female judges. This pattern, the authors suggest, may reflect entrenched gender norms that code power through masculine grooming styles such as short, structured haircuts. When men’s hair deviates from those conventions, it may disproportionately undermine perceptions of dominance and competence. Historically, research on hair and power has concentrated on women—for example, studies finding that women’s long hair is associated with reduced perceived forcefulness—but this study suggests men’s hair has been an overlooked lever in power judgments, echoing older findings that long-haired men were rated as less authoritative and less competent.

The findings align with broader theories of impression formation, particularly the framework advanced by Susan Fiske and colleagues, which holds that warmth and competence are the two universal dimensions of social cognition. Warmth, on this account, is evolutionarily prioritized because assessing whether someone intends to help or harm is the first task of social perception, and it draws on automatic cues that cannot easily be faked. Power judgments, by contrast, incorporate controllable appearance features—clothing, grooming, and hair—that signal deliberate adherence to or deviation from cultural norms of authority. Because hair can be cut, styled, colored, and reshaped at will, it functions as a strategic tool for impression management, and perceivers seem to read it that way.

The study’s theoretical coherence is strengthened by its convergence with earlier work the authors discovered only after completing their design. Santos and Young, using photographs pre-selected for extreme social characteristics, similarly found that different regions of an image carry distinct social information. The new research extends that conclusion across a broader, more naturalistic range of faces, suggesting the hair-face division of labor in social judgment is a general phenomenon rather than an artifact of unusual stimuli. It also connects to research on baby-facedness: rounder, softer features are consistently judged high in warmth and low in power, and longer hairstyles may contour the face to emphasize that roundness, indirectly softening perceived dominance.

The authors are candid about their limitations. The photo database, drawn from a predominantly White undergraduate population, forced the team to restrict stimuli to White models, constraining generalizability in a field where hair carries profound racialized meanings—documented biases against Black women’s natural hairstyles in hiring, and against older women’s gray hair in competence judgments, show how deeply hair is woven into systems of social exclusion. The study also aggregated four adjective pairs into single power and warmth measures, potentially masking distinctions between dominance and competence, and it did not manipulate specific hairstyle features, leaving open which characteristics—length, structure, formality—drive the effects. The sample skewed male, the design was exploratory and not preregistered, and data collection occurred in 2016.

Even so, the core message is difficult to ignore. Faces dominate when we judge warmth, but hair stands shoulder to shoulder with the face when we judge power, especially for men. Every choice we make about our hair—a job interview haircut, a shaved head, a deliberate departure from convention—may be broadcasting a message about authority that we never intended to send, and one that observers decode with impressive speed. Future work with diverse image sets, finer-grained trait measures, and judges and targets from varied racial, ethnic, and age groups will be needed to map these dynamics fully. For now, the study delivers a viral-worthy insight into first impressions: when it comes to looking powerful, the face may get the credit, but the hair does half the work.

Subject of Research: How hair and facial features independently shape social judgments of power and warmth

Article Title: The Influence of Hair and Faces on Social Judgments of Power and Warmth

Article References: Swanson, S. E., Gardner, M. P., Stivers, A. W., & Kuhlman, D. M. (2026). The Influence of Hair and Faces on Social Judgments of Power and Warmth. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00498-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00498-0

Keywords: impression formation, social perception, hair, facial judgments, power, warmth, social psychology, first impressions, person perception, hairstyle, gender stereotypes, social cognition