Do Sunglasses and Masks Make Us Less Moral?

Wearing sunglasses makes a person less generous, according to researchers at the University of Toronto.  Wearing big sunglasses makes a person more less generous.   And masks?  Well, forget about it: moral behavior gets heart-staked, and the id comes stomping up the basement stairs and burst into the living room to the tune of Romp and Circumstance.

The researchers theorize that obscuring the face, even if only partially, loosens the inhibitions that tie us to social convention. 

Really? 

Evidently, the researchers  don’t remember  those sunglassed Watergate impresarios of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, on the cover on “Newsweek” magazine.   They must not have not seen Paul Newman’s film “Cool Hand Luke;” otherwise, they’d have known how  menacing, how appallingly sinister, sunglasses, especially mirrored ones, can be.  They somehow missed all the Westerns featuring villains with bandanas pulled up to their noses, all the bank-heist films and their variously masked desperados.  They obviously have not read Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” or they would know the Reverend Hooper, going all Puritan-symbolic about secret sin, covers his face in black crepe and freaks out his congregants; nor could they have read  Joyce Carol Oates’  “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” or they would know the ironically-named Arnold Friend conceals his homicidal sadism behind aviator sunglasses.  They seem not to have learned the lesson of Burger King’s unceremonious dumping of that sneaking creeping plastic-masked  King mascot.   Nor, it seems, have they deeply considered  masked youngsters’  extortionate Halloweenean demand of “Trick or Treat.” 

I mean, who, after all, didn’t already know what the Toronto researchers have spent years laboring to discover?   It seems to me self-evident that masks can disinhibit.  After all, their sole purpose is to conceal identity, and, human nature being what it is, people often will do or say things contrary to social custom when anonymity indemnifies them against the possibilities of shame and shunning.  The inward lurking Iago often emerges with the mask.   But sunglasses?  Perhaps within the parameters of the study’s design, the researchers got the result they hypothesized.  Such parameters, however, do not reproduce a real world context and, thus, do not adequately account for our experience and use of sunglasses as a culturally coded commodity.

Consider, for a moment, what this study tells us about ourselves:   that human nature is susceptible to a deeply internalized bias, an intuitive shortcut for thinking.   Evolution has ineradicably stamped in us a cautionary reserve when dealing with others.  We are shaped to trust only the fully-visible face.   It reduces us to helpless reaction, to the tug of biological strings.   While this may be, likely is, true, it misses much.

The study suggests we are incapable of reflection and judgment, that we lack the cultural awareness to recognize that, in terms of style and brand, sunglasses can simply be worn as a fashion statement—hardly compatible with loosening ties to social convention.   People also use sunglasses to denote cool, and while cool can indicate a detachment from or a mild disdain for the normative, the everyday, it functions more as an affectation, more an iconography of the wish to be perceived as defying conformity, as mysterious, as capable of breaking bad.  Sunglasses do not detach us from social convention; they symbolize a desire to be regarded as detached, as possessing enviable élan.  Sunglasses do not cause rebelliousness; they commodify it.  As cultural actors, we know this; we understand the use of sunglasses to complement or achieve a look or lifestyle as a purposeful, self-aware choice with the goal of being seen in a certain way.  We understand that sunglasses are associated with edginess, glamor, self-possession, unflusterability.  We understand they confer an aura of intrigue, mystery.  Could they, as the study asserts, induce wearers to be less generous?   Possibly, but such a result surely restricts the complex cultural reality in which we use and comprehend sunglasses.  It offers thin gruel in place the thick chowder of culture.

I cannot help but see this study as something like click bait research, designed not to dispel ignorance, not to expand the frontier of knowledge, but, rather, to be alluring enough, enticing enough, to garner the attention of a journal eager to attract readers, to attract the popular press and recirculate on the Internet, and to keep the research dollars flowing.   In what light should we apprehend this study? Samuel Beckett provides an answer: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new.”