Height is one of the most important physical characteristics when it comes to attracting romantic partners and warding off potential rivals. Psychologists have long known that taller people are more attractive, dominant, and competent. High-ranking people are often promoted to positions management roles and are elected to public office. These effects are especially severe for men.
Since height is a privilege, psychologists have also investigated whether a person’s height affects the way that person thinks and feels. There is evidence that shorter men and men who think they are taller than they really are are more competitive – more competitive with other men. Shorter men also express more aggressively jealousy and can be more antagonistic. Some psychologists call this phenomenon the “Napoleon complex,” referring to the famous warlike emperor of France, who was of average height but often portrayed as short by modern cartoonists.
Daniel Talbot of the Australian Catholic University and Peter Jonasson of the University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw recently observed that much research on height and psychology is limited because it focuses on actual height rather than height dissatisfaction. They think that a person’s height can be more important than how that person looks feels about their height.
Talbot and Jonathan completed 300 heterosexual men and women Competition The scale, a questionnaire that asks respondents to indicate the extent to which they agree with statements such as: “I tend to look for attractive negative qualities (in my own people). sex)” and “I just don’t like very ambitious (people of my own sex)”. Responses on this scale reveal an individual’s jealousy (motivation protecting what one has), envy (desire for what others have) and competitiveness (belief of being better than others).
Participants also reported their height, indicating how much they wished they were taller and how satisfied they were with their height. Psychologists have found that there is a tendency for both men and women to wish they were taller. They also confirmed the findings of previous studies that shorter men are jealous and more jealous and competitive than other men. They found no relationship between height, jealousy, envy and intrasexual competitiveness in women.
Dissatisfaction with height breeds jealousy and competitiveness
But what psychologists call “psychological measures of height” complicate the results. Both men and women who wanted to be taller were jealous, envious and more competitive. Talbot and Jonason observe that their results “highlight the importance of considering the psychological aspects of height, particularly for women; the desire to be taller, rather than physical height, is a more influential aspect of intersexual competition. That is, regardless of women’s physical height, those who want to be taller show more jealousy and greed.”
Actual height and height dissatisfaction were related to the fact that individuals who were shorter and more dissatisfied with their height were particularly jealous and competitive. “It appears that not only height, but the combination of height and how one feels about their height, predicts intersex competition,” Talbot and Jonathan conclude.
Again, this result should be considered preliminary because the participants in the Talbot and Jonason study were recruited online and therefore their height was self-reported. This is a problem because we might expect individuals who are dissatisfied with their height to be less accurate in reporting their height. In the future, psychologists may conduct laboratory rather than online studies so that they can collect highly objective measures and combine them with psychological measures.
Talbot and Jonathan also acknowledge that their height dissatisfaction scale is limited because it only assesses the desire to be taller. Some people, in fact, may be unhappy with their height because they don’t seem superior to their peers. Talbot and Jonason note that tall women “want to be shorter in order to conform to the most common dyads of heterosexual relationships: a taller man and a shorter woman.”
