ALBANY, GA—Personality psychologist Florence Yoshimoto has tapped into a fascinating line of research that has gone unnoticed thus far.
The Florida native has long been interested in ways that personality develops. As a young girl, she often wondered if her preference to remain indoors was in some way related to having been kidnapped twice before the age of 8 while she was out playing in her yard. Since coming to Albany State University in 2011, her research has taken a different path: she now wonders how people may shape their personalities through purposeful effort.
"For example," she shared, "when I was in college, I found that I had a very hard time focusing on my school work when I would sit down to complete it. I'd get distracted. I wondered if I could train myself to become a more on-track and focused person."
The former high-jumper explained that she would sit down to work, and whenever she found her mind wandering, she would then maker herself do 10 push-ups.
"I lost 45 pounds, and I learned how to be a more disciplined person!" she exclaimed.
This experience and more have led her to wonder if there are little ways that other people transform their own personalities.
"The idea with this one struck me when I saw a woman with bright purple hair. I wondered if she thought that such an outward appearance would somehow make her inner worth improve. I thought I would do some looking into that kind of thing."
In her most recent experiment, she seems to have discovered one of the keys to male personality transformation, which she describes in her paper "Dud to Stud: Masculinity Increases through Head Attire."
The basic takeaway is that Yoshimoto discovered that males become entirely different people by turning their baseball hats around and wearing them backwards.
She found that even the most normal and responsible American male, once he wore a hat facing the rear of his head, became reckless, arrogant, and showed tendencies toward psychopathy.
"It was fascinating," she elaborated. "We found one subject who consistently drove the speed limit, was respectful toward women, and had a B average in all of his classes. We asked him to wear his baseball hat in the opposite direction for a week, and by that Saturday evening, he had been arrested for speeding while under the influence, was fired for sexual harassment, and dropped out of the university."
This case was not unusual, according to Yoshimoto, who once climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with a man she was dating at the time.
"We had to stop the study after 29 subjects because it was clearly ruining their lives." she said.
She and two of her graduate students are now working on trying to reverse the damage. "My students and I wonder if it could be as simple as turning the hat the correct way again. That seems almost too easy, but this is all uncharted territory here."
Given the outcome of her first experiment on hat direction and personality, she has been having trouble getting her follow-up studies approved by ethical review boards. She cautions readers to carefully weigh the consequences of their hat direction before dressing for the day, and warns anyone in a romantic or otherwise close relationship with a person who wears a baseball hat backwards to use extreme caution and watch for signs of aggression, conceit, smugness, jealousy, and others.