Blonde in the Spotlight: Media Bias and the Overrepresentation of Hair Color in Murder Coverage

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, welcome back. Just a reminder if you haven't got it,
it's the book called Dog Psychology. So if you own
a dog you want to understand how it thinks, how
to train it, then you can get my book, Doctor
Carlos's book Dog Psychology on Amazon, Kindle or paperback. So
today we're going to be looking at something that I've

(00:21):
been looking at a lot of posts and a lot
of posts on social media tend to post blonde women
being attacked by individuals of a different ethnicity than being Caucasian,
and they seem to say that this is a the
dig target blonde women more than any other. So I
thought i'd look it up. And research does indicate some things,

(00:43):
but not necessarily the blonde component. So research indicates a
correlation between physical attractiveness and women and elevated risks of
sexual victimization, including sexual assault and rape. The relationship appears
more pronounced for certain dimensions of attractiveness. So some of
the dimensions include curvaciousness and youth related cues. They believe,

(01:05):
at least the theory goes that they may signal reproductive potential.
Now we know for blonds that blonde hair tends to
be associated psychologically or at least unconsciously, to youth. Evidence
for a direct link to murder, though, is less extensive,
but it exists in the context of rape murder cases
where reproductive age women younger, often associated with higher attractiveness,

(01:29):
are overrepresented among victims. Multiple studies looked at how physical
attractive attractiveness influences the likelihood of sexual victimization. One study
looked at over three thousand adolescent females and found that
greater curvaciousness curvaciousness measured via self reported physical maturation scales

(01:50):
consistently predicted higher risk of rape victimization across by variate
and multivariate models. If you contrast that, though with an
interview rated overall attractiveness showed no significant association, and body
weight was initially linked positively, but later when you control
for other factors, became non significant. Older, age and higher

(02:13):
number of sexual partners also increased the risk, suggesting attractiveness
interacts with behavioral and possibly demographic variables. Another study looked
at youth as a proxy for attractiveness, noting that fifteen
year old females are approximately nine times more likely to
be raped than a thirty five year old female and

(02:33):
almost five times more likely than a twenty five year
old female. The primary explanation that they posited sexual attractiveness
supported again by youth fertility, and this is also supported
by patterns and sexual assaults doing robberies where offenders target
women age fifteen the twenty nine more frequently. This also

(02:55):
aligns with what they call broader societal indicators, such as
declining compensation for female workers with age. An additional research
looked at highly attractive adolescent girls about the ninety five
percentile that have been reported as three and a half
times more likely to experienced childhood sexual assault compared to
the less attractive peers. In prison settings, perceptions of physical

(03:19):
attractiveness among incarcerated women have been linked to heightened susceptibility
as well to victimization. So let's look at a correlation
with murder, particularly rape murder. Evidence for a relationship with
murder is primarily observed in rape murder contexts, where evolutionary
perspectives suggests links to attractiveness due to reproductive cues. Right, So,

(03:42):
if you're an evolutionary type of person, you can think
about here inclusive fitness the ability to be successful not
only in reproduction, but reproduction of your particular genes, so maybe, well,
we're not going to get into that. That kind of
gets into altruism and arguments in regards to evolution, but
the simple idea that you wanted your genes to live

(04:04):
forth found. Another study in that by the FBI looked
at four hundred thousand cases over a twenty year span,
found that reproductive age women thirteen to forty eight are
overrepresented among multiple offender rape victims, with peak risk in
the fifteen and nineteen age range two and a half
times higher than for ten to fourteen and five times

(04:27):
higher than for fifty five fifty nine. In contrast, these
women are underrepresented in theft murder cases, where risk increases
with age. The analysis replicated earlier findings, so evidence on
hair color there wasn't much going on. There was no
large scale peer review study that actually isolates blonde here
that I could find. Most research focused on broader attractiveness

(04:51):
cues such as youth again, curvaciousness, or facial symmetry. This
is one of the things we do see people seem
to agree on and what's attracted if they did not
against we don't really have any numbers in regards to
hair color, So it looks like a lot of what's
happening is either availability bias because people see the blondes

(05:14):
more often in headlines. There are some studies that show
that women with blonde hair tend to be shown more
as murder victims by the news than any other hair
color or ethnicity. Somebody called it the missing White women
syndrome and media which studies suggest that blonde, young, attractive

(05:37):
women receive more attention in news coverage. So this could
create the perception of higher victimization rates because it doesn't
seem to be there, at least according to some studies.
I remember, studies are just pieces of the puzzle. Now.
As I mentioned earlier, evolutionary psychology posits that traits associated
with youth and fertility, clear skin, symmetrical features, crevacous increase attractiveness,

(06:02):
and blonde hair, particularly in populations where it's rare, may
be perceived as a novel or attractive trait and also
associated with youth studies. Another study focused on age and
body shape rather than hair color in context for blonde
hair is less common, it may draw attention and potentially
increase perceived vulnerability, but again the support research wise is

(06:29):
quite limited, So that's it for now. It was kind
of an interesting concept that I was talking about. Oh,
here's a little statistic. In a twenty sixteen analysis of
fifty three missing person cases involving women between two thousand
and two thousand and nine, examined media portrayals across CNN, MSNBC,
Google News. It found that victims described with keywords evoking innocence, young, blonde,

(06:54):
and pretty received significantly more coverage than others. He