As a child I walk into my primary school with a fresh haircut. I am instantly surrounded by jeers, hoots and the kind of joyous sadism only nine-year-old boys can muster. The obvious explanation - children are little barbarians - is true but insufficient. In reality, my haircut is read not as grooming but provocation.
Human beings are coordination machines. Our evolutionary survival depended on shared norms, predictable behaviour, and team-mates we could trust not to defect with the last cooked antelope (that's a ChatGPT flourish).
Anything that deviates from the expected pattern - a strange ornament, an odd smell, a new hairstyle - jolts that ancestral nervous system into high alert. Difference is never just difference: it hints at potential problems: rival allegiances, disease, a status challenge... or looming defection.
The safe bet is suspicion and deprecation.
Fast-forward to primary school. The boys aren’t consciously analysing game-theoretic equilibria; they’re running ancient code. You appear Monday morning with your ears suddenly exposed; their limbic systems, those little commissars of doubt, whisper: something’s changed.
In the ancestral savannah, novelty generally presents as threat. These children do exactly what their forebears did: probe the anomaly.
Their logic is brutally simple: if your new look signals rebellion against the group's cohesion, slap it down; if it signals weakness (“look what they did to him!”) then it’s open season for cheap status upgrades at your expense.
The jeers serve both purposes - mockery is, after all, a multi-tool: it lets your classmates demonstrate loyalty to the tribe’s norms; it lets each lad reinforce, and even increase his status by publicly shaming the deviant (you!).
Girls, it has to be said, do it slightly differently. It's more coalition-management than open warfare but the underlying equation is the same. Difference undermines coalition stability. Unpredictability is expensive. Pressure it until it folds back into conformity. Can be mean, those girls.
Adults don't like to admit it, but they feel the same little jolt of suspicion when a colleague walks into a meeting with an unfortunate crop. But adulthood comes with a prefrontal cortex that steps up and whispers: the situation here is a little more sophisticated - please don’t act like a chimp.
The jeering wasn’t really about your haircut per se. It was that ancient risk-management system still running in the subconscious of our species. You arrived looking newly minted; the tribe did what tribes always do: detected signs of deviance... and punished you for disloyalty or weakness.
You had to get over it, like everyone else.
