D
Deleted member 65752
Deleted 27th May 2024 Coming back 3rd July 2025
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2024
- Posts
- 2,785
- Reputation
- 4,203
Socioeconomic Disparities
"Experiments prove that employers prefer not to hire or promote short employees, and that they do not adequately compensate them. According to various studies, controlling for other variables, every inch of height is worth hundreds of dollars in annual income, which is no less severe than the wage gap associated with gender or racial discrimination"
The Economist: Short Guys Finish Last
"Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium... Using a cross section of 13 countries, we show that there is a consistent height-wage premium across Europe and that it is largely due to occupational sorting. We show that height has a significant effect for the occupational sorting of employed workers but not for the self-employed. We interpret this result as evidence of employer discrimination in favor of taller workers."
"Finally, our results suggest that it is not simply the case that height operates as a proxy for gender, even though men are on average taller than women. Indeed, the results of four earnings studies show that whereas height and gender are correlated, it appears that height has a more important effect on earnings than gender."
Height changes the way a person's resume is graded, and that the effect was stronger than other well known effects like ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and more.
"5 separate groups of 22 students were asked to estimate the height of a man presented before them whose academic status changed with each of the 5 groups. Results indicate that as ascribed academic status increased, students' estimation of height increased."
"Because we expect people to prefer more physically formidable leaders, we predicted our subjects would tend to draw a taller leader meeting a shorter citizen, with height measured by the vertical size of the figures. In fact, that is what we found. More than twice as many subjects drew a taller leader..."
In this experiment showing the halo effect, people instinctively assume the taller man is more successful than the shorter man.
Our main finding is that height does have a strong positive effect on life satisfaction.
"Short women are in luck. There was no real household income difference between short and tall women."
Malcolm Gladwell: "In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6’2″ or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6’2″ or taller. Of the tens of millions of American men below 5’6″, a grand total of ten–in my sample–have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American... That means that a person who is six feet tall but otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five will make on average $5,525 more per year. As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the height-salary study, points out: “If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we’re talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage.” Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It’s because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon."
"During one of the Republican presidential debates before the 2016 election, the web search company Google tracked what terms Internet users were searching for while watching on TV. The results were surprising. The top search wasn't ISIS. It wasn't Barack Obama's last day. It wasn't tax plans. It was: How tall is Jeb Bush? The search analytics unearthed a curious fascination among the voting public: Americans, it turns out, are fascinated with how tall the presidential candidates are. And they tend to vote for the tallest candidates, according to historic election results and research into voter behavior."
"We found a twofold higher risk of suicide in short men than tall men... The pattern didn't seem to stem from socioeconomic or prenatal influences, the researchers write. The results also didn't change much when the researchers excluded men with psychiatric diagnoses."... In fully adjusted models, a 5-cm increase in height was associated with a 9% decrease in suicide risk.
"Overall, tall women were rated as more intelligent, affluent, assertive and ambitious than shorter women. A perceiver-sex difference was found such that men rated short females more highly than tall females on expressive characteristics while women raters did not."
"We found that individuals with shorter height had lower belief in a just world compared to their taller counterparts, and this effect can be partially mediated by life satisfaction."
The Big Short: How Height Discrimination Hurts Chinese Men
Size matters: Men perceived as more masculine if they are taller and heavier, regardless face shape
"According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives."
"We find that a large part of the effect of height on well-being is driven by a positive correlation between height and economic and health conditions. However, for young men the effect of height on happiness persists even after controlling for these variables, implying that height is associated with some psycho-social direct effects on well-being. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that men care not only about their own height but also about the height of others in their reference group."
"In the UK Biobank study, shorter stature and higher BMI were observationally associated with several measures of lower socioeconomic status. The associations between shorter stature and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in men, and the associations between higher BMI and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in women. "
"Findings demonstrate that the consequences of short stature experienced by participants extend beyond body dissatisfaction to interpersonal processes and functioning in social, professional, and romantic domains. We suggest that height dissatisfaction primarily arises due to negative attributions relating to interpersonal experiences and internalized pejorative social attitudes toward men of short stature. In conclusion, short stature is a significant and pervasive issue for some men that is often—and unjustly—trivialized and overlooked."
Debunking The Napoleon Complex/Small-Man Syndrome
"Even so, Adler himself did not invent the term. Despite identifying numerous “complexes” of various Napoleon Complex kinds, the Napoleon complex was not included among them, nor was Napoléon used to illustrate overcompensation. Moreover, the complex does not constitute a recognized personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the term is seldom granted an entry in encyclopedias and dictionaries devoted to psychological science and practice. In addition, the Napoleon complex is almost never the explicit subject of scientific research in the professional journals of psychology, psychoanalysis, or psychiatry. In the main, it represents a pseudoscientific term that is popular among journalists who want to provide an apparent explanation for the behavior of politicians, entrepreneurs, and other celebrities who happen to be shorter than average. It has also become a mainstay of folk psychology, the expression at times being evoked to explicate the odd behavior of a friend or acquaintance." (On page 3029 of the PDF)
Research found taller men were more likely to lose their temper. The research was designed to test Short Man Syndrome - or "Napoleon complex."
"Also as predicted, stronger men had a greater history of fighting than weaker men, and more strongly endorsed the efficacy of force to resolve conflicts--both in interpersonal and international conflicts."
Short boys are victims of bullying more often in school, less likely to perpetrate bullying
"Despite previously reported links between short stature and poorer psychosocial adaptation, no evidence was found that stature per se significantly affected the functioning of the participants in these areas as young adults."
"Indeed, we found that, compared to shorter people, taller people were more likely to blame innocent victims, and this effect was mediated by by BJW-self [belief in a just world]."
"Archival data concerning more than 1600 respondents to the 2014 and 2018 iterations of the United States' General Social Survey confirm this hypothesis, with taller respondents (as the proxy for formidability) likelier to approve of police officers hitting male citizens in several circumstances, as well as corporal criminal-justice punishment in the form of the death penalty."
“Using data from the British Household Panel Study, we find that taller individuals are more likely to support the Conservative party, support conservative policies, and vote conservative; a one-inch increase in height increases support for Conservatives by 0.6%.”
Dating/Relationships
On the Bumble dating app, 90% of women pursue 6% of men, in terms of height.
Additionally, while larger upper bodies boost attractive ratings for taller men, they don’t appear to have the same effect for shorter men.
Dutch men are the tallest in the world because that’s what women prefer.
Sperm banks require that men be at least 5 feet 8 inches tall.
"Infidelity studies have found that when a woman cheats she is more likely to do so with a mate who is taller than her current partner. Consistent with the theory of sexual selection for height, taller men have been found to have more offspring than shorter men. There is also evidence that taller men are more likely to have long term mating partners and to have more partners than shorter men."
The top word men are drawn to in online dating is "love." The top thing women look for in a man's bio is 6'.
"If you think of marriage as a market and tallness as a valuable commodity, short men “make up” for lacking it by earning more money... This further confirms an existence of height-based status exchange in which short men compensate for their lower physical status with higher proportional earnings, while tall men appear more likely to use their status to attract women..."
Consider a man who is 5' 2" tall. In order to be as desirable to a woman as a man who is 5' 11.5" tall and who earns $62,500 per year, he needs to have an additional income of $269,000 (i.e., he needs to make $331 ,500 per year).
Tall men have more reproductive success.
Short men do more housework than tall men
Experiment about height & dating (women admit they would only date a short doctor if all the other men were convicted criminals.)
"Women are most satisfied when their partner was 21. cm taller, whereas men are most satisfied when they were 8. cm taller than their partner."
"Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this significantly affects their marriage prospects with whites."
"A greater height difference in a couple was positively related to the wife's happiness."
"The study found that women’s height preferences are far stronger than men’s. Forty-nine percent of women only wanted to date men who were taller than they were, whereas only 13.5 percent of men only wanted to date women shorter than they were. By contrast, only 1.7 percent of women said they would only date a shorter man — a conveniently similar figure to the 1.3 percent of men who say they would only date a taller woman."
"Men in the 6’3”-6’4” range, for example, receive about 60% more first contact e-mails than men in the 5’7”-5’8” range"
"According to probability theory, the chance expectation for the occurrence of couples with females taller was 2/100. The actual value found was only 1/720, which was seen as supporting the notion of a male-taller norm."
“Don’t bother about going to the gym, don’t bother about putting on new flashy clothes… be tall” - BBC Documentary on speed-dating
A NYC speed-dating event that explicitly bans all men under 5'11" while allowing women of all heights to participate
91% of short men on r/ShortGuys would be willing to date a taller woman
From Reddit
"Experiments prove that employers prefer not to hire or promote short employees, and that they do not adequately compensate them. According to various studies, controlling for other variables, every inch of height is worth hundreds of dollars in annual income, which is no less severe than the wage gap associated with gender or racial discrimination"
The Economist: Short Guys Finish Last
"Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium... Using a cross section of 13 countries, we show that there is a consistent height-wage premium across Europe and that it is largely due to occupational sorting. We show that height has a significant effect for the occupational sorting of employed workers but not for the self-employed. We interpret this result as evidence of employer discrimination in favor of taller workers."
"Finally, our results suggest that it is not simply the case that height operates as a proxy for gender, even though men are on average taller than women. Indeed, the results of four earnings studies show that whereas height and gender are correlated, it appears that height has a more important effect on earnings than gender."
Height changes the way a person's resume is graded, and that the effect was stronger than other well known effects like ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and more.
"5 separate groups of 22 students were asked to estimate the height of a man presented before them whose academic status changed with each of the 5 groups. Results indicate that as ascribed academic status increased, students' estimation of height increased."
"Because we expect people to prefer more physically formidable leaders, we predicted our subjects would tend to draw a taller leader meeting a shorter citizen, with height measured by the vertical size of the figures. In fact, that is what we found. More than twice as many subjects drew a taller leader..."
In this experiment showing the halo effect, people instinctively assume the taller man is more successful than the shorter man.
Our main finding is that height does have a strong positive effect on life satisfaction.
"Short women are in luck. There was no real household income difference between short and tall women."
Malcolm Gladwell: "In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6’2″ or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6’2″ or taller. Of the tens of millions of American men below 5’6″, a grand total of ten–in my sample–have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American... That means that a person who is six feet tall but otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five will make on average $5,525 more per year. As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the height-salary study, points out: “If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we’re talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage.” Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It’s because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon."
"During one of the Republican presidential debates before the 2016 election, the web search company Google tracked what terms Internet users were searching for while watching on TV. The results were surprising. The top search wasn't ISIS. It wasn't Barack Obama's last day. It wasn't tax plans. It was: How tall is Jeb Bush? The search analytics unearthed a curious fascination among the voting public: Americans, it turns out, are fascinated with how tall the presidential candidates are. And they tend to vote for the tallest candidates, according to historic election results and research into voter behavior."
"We found a twofold higher risk of suicide in short men than tall men... The pattern didn't seem to stem from socioeconomic or prenatal influences, the researchers write. The results also didn't change much when the researchers excluded men with psychiatric diagnoses."... In fully adjusted models, a 5-cm increase in height was associated with a 9% decrease in suicide risk.
"Overall, tall women were rated as more intelligent, affluent, assertive and ambitious than shorter women. A perceiver-sex difference was found such that men rated short females more highly than tall females on expressive characteristics while women raters did not."
"We found that individuals with shorter height had lower belief in a just world compared to their taller counterparts, and this effect can be partially mediated by life satisfaction."
The Big Short: How Height Discrimination Hurts Chinese Men
Size matters: Men perceived as more masculine if they are taller and heavier, regardless face shape
"According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives."
"We find that a large part of the effect of height on well-being is driven by a positive correlation between height and economic and health conditions. However, for young men the effect of height on happiness persists even after controlling for these variables, implying that height is associated with some psycho-social direct effects on well-being. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that men care not only about their own height but also about the height of others in their reference group."
"In the UK Biobank study, shorter stature and higher BMI were observationally associated with several measures of lower socioeconomic status. The associations between shorter stature and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in men, and the associations between higher BMI and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in women. "
"Findings demonstrate that the consequences of short stature experienced by participants extend beyond body dissatisfaction to interpersonal processes and functioning in social, professional, and romantic domains. We suggest that height dissatisfaction primarily arises due to negative attributions relating to interpersonal experiences and internalized pejorative social attitudes toward men of short stature. In conclusion, short stature is a significant and pervasive issue for some men that is often—and unjustly—trivialized and overlooked."
Debunking The Napoleon Complex/Small-Man Syndrome
"Even so, Adler himself did not invent the term. Despite identifying numerous “complexes” of various Napoleon Complex kinds, the Napoleon complex was not included among them, nor was Napoléon used to illustrate overcompensation. Moreover, the complex does not constitute a recognized personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the term is seldom granted an entry in encyclopedias and dictionaries devoted to psychological science and practice. In addition, the Napoleon complex is almost never the explicit subject of scientific research in the professional journals of psychology, psychoanalysis, or psychiatry. In the main, it represents a pseudoscientific term that is popular among journalists who want to provide an apparent explanation for the behavior of politicians, entrepreneurs, and other celebrities who happen to be shorter than average. It has also become a mainstay of folk psychology, the expression at times being evoked to explicate the odd behavior of a friend or acquaintance." (On page 3029 of the PDF)
Research found taller men were more likely to lose their temper. The research was designed to test Short Man Syndrome - or "Napoleon complex."
"Also as predicted, stronger men had a greater history of fighting than weaker men, and more strongly endorsed the efficacy of force to resolve conflicts--both in interpersonal and international conflicts."
Short boys are victims of bullying more often in school, less likely to perpetrate bullying
"Despite previously reported links between short stature and poorer psychosocial adaptation, no evidence was found that stature per se significantly affected the functioning of the participants in these areas as young adults."
"Indeed, we found that, compared to shorter people, taller people were more likely to blame innocent victims, and this effect was mediated by by BJW-self [belief in a just world]."
"Archival data concerning more than 1600 respondents to the 2014 and 2018 iterations of the United States' General Social Survey confirm this hypothesis, with taller respondents (as the proxy for formidability) likelier to approve of police officers hitting male citizens in several circumstances, as well as corporal criminal-justice punishment in the form of the death penalty."
“Using data from the British Household Panel Study, we find that taller individuals are more likely to support the Conservative party, support conservative policies, and vote conservative; a one-inch increase in height increases support for Conservatives by 0.6%.”
Dating/Relationships
On the Bumble dating app, 90% of women pursue 6% of men, in terms of height.
Additionally, while larger upper bodies boost attractive ratings for taller men, they don’t appear to have the same effect for shorter men.
Dutch men are the tallest in the world because that’s what women prefer.
Sperm banks require that men be at least 5 feet 8 inches tall.
"Infidelity studies have found that when a woman cheats she is more likely to do so with a mate who is taller than her current partner. Consistent with the theory of sexual selection for height, taller men have been found to have more offspring than shorter men. There is also evidence that taller men are more likely to have long term mating partners and to have more partners than shorter men."
The top word men are drawn to in online dating is "love." The top thing women look for in a man's bio is 6'.
"If you think of marriage as a market and tallness as a valuable commodity, short men “make up” for lacking it by earning more money... This further confirms an existence of height-based status exchange in which short men compensate for their lower physical status with higher proportional earnings, while tall men appear more likely to use their status to attract women..."
Consider a man who is 5' 2" tall. In order to be as desirable to a woman as a man who is 5' 11.5" tall and who earns $62,500 per year, he needs to have an additional income of $269,000 (i.e., he needs to make $331 ,500 per year).
Tall men have more reproductive success.
Short men do more housework than tall men
Experiment about height & dating (women admit they would only date a short doctor if all the other men were convicted criminals.)
"Women are most satisfied when their partner was 21. cm taller, whereas men are most satisfied when they were 8. cm taller than their partner."
"Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this significantly affects their marriage prospects with whites."
"A greater height difference in a couple was positively related to the wife's happiness."
"The study found that women’s height preferences are far stronger than men’s. Forty-nine percent of women only wanted to date men who were taller than they were, whereas only 13.5 percent of men only wanted to date women shorter than they were. By contrast, only 1.7 percent of women said they would only date a shorter man — a conveniently similar figure to the 1.3 percent of men who say they would only date a taller woman."
"Men in the 6’3”-6’4” range, for example, receive about 60% more first contact e-mails than men in the 5’7”-5’8” range"
"According to probability theory, the chance expectation for the occurrence of couples with females taller was 2/100. The actual value found was only 1/720, which was seen as supporting the notion of a male-taller norm."
“Don’t bother about going to the gym, don’t bother about putting on new flashy clothes… be tall” - BBC Documentary on speed-dating
A NYC speed-dating event that explicitly bans all men under 5'11" while allowing women of all heights to participate
91% of short men on r/ShortGuys would be willing to date a taller woman
From Reddit