“Give me it down to there, hair, shoulder-length or longer…”
Posted by Jack on August 6, 2009
The more time I spend involved in research and academia, the less inclined I am to criticise the choices which others make in pursuit of what they consider to be ‘important’ or ‘worthwhile’ research. If it floats your boat and those of your (sometimes minuscule ) coterie of co-obsessives, then get on with it and more power to your elbow. Seriously. In return, I expect that most tedious (and often desperate) of questions, ‘why is your research “important”?’, to at least be asked in a spirit of generous enquiry rather than implied criticism. Likewise, I won’t feign interest in a subject which holds no appeal whatsoever for me, nor do I expect anyone to endure what I do if it holds no interest for them. There are plenty of us; there is so much to learn and know; live and let live; horses for courses, etc., etc., etc.
Having said that, cultural relativism can be pushed to breaking point when it appears to support research which results in the statistically (rather than subjectively) bleedin’ obvious. ‘Man bites dog’ is not a new (or, hence, newsworthy) story. Nor, as The Guardian‘s Education supplement’s ‘Improbable Research’ column has noted, is the conclusion that some people have short hair, some people have long hair and some people have medium-length hair (whether ‘thrust upon them’ or not). Like many of us, I have belonged to each of those three cohorts at various stages in my life. I am probably destined, in time (although hopefully in the long- rather than medium- or short-term), to join that other anthropological grouping which might be termed ‘ex-wearers of hair’. Hence, the researchers of ‘Hair Length in Florida Theme Parks: An Approximation of Hair Length in the United States of America’ really could have stayed at home (and perhaps sat on their “appreciably longer than buttock-length” hair?) rather than “combing” through “strands” of “data” to reach their conclusions, as conveyed by The Guardian. The world would happily (or unhappily) continue to turn without the ‘knowledge’ they have gifted to it. Instead, they could just have listened to what Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot told us (no less astutely, and with no less quantitive accuracy) in 1967 about “the beauty, the splendour, the wonder” of Hair – whether “bangled, tangled, spangled” or, indeed, “spaghetti-ed”.
One Response to ““Give me it down to there, hair, shoulder-length or longer…””
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Gavin Robinson said
One important caveat here is that journalists often don’t report scientific research accurately. They either overstate it by claiming that it proves something exciting which it doesn’t actually prove, or as in the example above they understate it by dismissing it as obvious and trivial without saying what it was really about. The original article in Journal of Cosmetic Science might well explain why this data is important to someone.
I tend to think there are very few things which can’t benefit from more empirical evidence. Common sense is often a smokescreen for dubious assumptions, and can be disproved by actual science. Just think of all the racist and sexist assumptions in the past which people “knew” were true.