HEIGHT-RELATED STUDIES & ARTICLES MEGATHREAD

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#Socioeconomic Disparities

• 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."

• "Height is positively related to income after controlling for sex, age, and weight. "

• 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."

#Debunking The Napoleon Complex/Small-Man Syndrome

• "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."

#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."

• r/ShortGuys poll on height preferences in short men