So a few years ago my 11-year-old sister came to my mom asking why she had so much more hair on her arms than most girls in her grade did. My mom replied “it’s a good thing trust me; people who have more hair on their arms are smarter.” I was sitting there also, and that kind of got me thinking, like there’s no way that’s true, she just said that to make her feel better, but it definitely has something to do with genetics. For some reason that always stuck with me and I always thought about it time to time, in school if I would see someone with a lot of hair on their arms, I would think, “I wonder what their grades are like.” In public if I saw someone with a lot of body hair I would think, “I wonder what they do for a living, where did they go to college.” When I would go to the doctors I noticed my doctor had a lot of chest hair and so I was like, “well that makes sense, doctors are very smart people, so maybe a lot of body hair is correlated with intelligence.” I thought this would be a great opportunity to look into this subject since we learned about correlation and chance.

A study conducted by Dr. Aikarakudy Alias looked at men and the relationship of their education level and amount of body hair.

His study was mainly focused solely on chest hair. According to doctor Alias students had more body hair than men who worked inferior jobs. He also discovered that men who performed highly in their degree were hairier than men who performed poorly. His study was conducted among mostly men who were about 22-years-old. He also found that doctors had the most chest hair along with highly educated men compared to the population. Alias studied this experiment in America as well as India. The study he conducted in America was of medical student and he found that 45 percent of those men were hairier than the population of the study. In India he expanded his study by surveying engineers and labor workers along with the doctors. He concluded that the engineers and doctors had more body hair that the laborers. He found that, out of the sixteen engineering students, hairier men got better grades. On a statistical level, he discovered that the top six engineering students had more hair on their bodies than the bottom eight. A deeper survey of his study found that the more intelligent men had hair on their chest as well as their backs. To concluded his study Dr. Alias said that even though the men with an abundance of body hair are perceived to be more intelligent, there are men with a lack of body hair or none at all that are still highly intelligent.

A blog post on Quora, written by Pavan Kumar had an opposing view on this topic. He opened up his post by clearly stating his opinion, that the assumption of ecsessive hair increasing your intelligence is false. Unlike Dr. Alias, women were not involved in his study. Pavan’s observational study was solely based off of scientific facts alone. He stated that the number of hair follicles in males, females, and chimps are the same…only the thickness of the follicles alter.  His post read that, although it may seem like men have more body hair than women and children and less body hair than chimps, looks can be deceiving. In his post he went on to discuss a simpler relationship not correlated to hair. He explained the relationship of growing 100 plants in two different areas. The first area was fertile, with good water supply. The second was less fertile with less water supply. Obviously over time the plants that were nourished well will look denser, although both of the areas have the same number of plants. In my opinion he is explaining a third variable that assists the plants into growing more densely. He then states that the third variable in men is testosterone, and how it affects the thickness of hair follicles. He compared the fertile area of the one test group of plants to testosterone and how they correlate to assist the grow of the variable they affect.

Sources:

Cooper, Glenda. “The Hirsute of Higher Intelligence | The Independent.” Independent, 11 July 1996, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-hirsute-of-higher-intelligence-1328285.html.

Kumar, Pavan. “Is Excessive Body Hair a Sign of Intelligence? – Quora.” Quora, 10 Aug. 2015, https://www.quora.com/is-excessive-body-hair-a-sign-of-intelligence.

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