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Height is one of the most important physical characteristics when it comes to attracting romantic partners and seeing off potential rivals. Psychologists have long known that taller people are perceived as more attractive, dominant, and competent. Taller people are more likely to be promoted to management roles and elected to public office. These effects are particularly strong for men.
Because tallness carries 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 claim to be taller than they really are tend to be more intrasexually competitive—more competitive with other men. Shorter men also express more intense jealousy and may be more antagonistic. Some psychologists term this phenomenon the “Napoleon complex” in a reference to the famously belligerent French emperor, who was of middling height but was often depicted as diminutive by contemporary cartoonists.
Daniel Talbot of the Australian Catholic University and Peter Jonason of the University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw recently observed that much of the research on height and psychology is limited because it focuses on actual height rather than height dissatisfaction. They reason that a person’s height may be less important than how that person feels about their height.
Talbot and Jonason had 300 heterosexual men and women complete the Intrasexual Competition Scale, a questionnaire that requires respondents to indicate the extent to which they agree with statements such as “I tend to look for negative characteristics in attractive [people of my own gender]” and “I just don’t like very ambitious [people of my own gender]”. Responses on this scale reveal a person’s jealousy (motivation to protect what one has), envy (desire for what others have), and competitiveness (belief that one is better than others).
Participants also reported their height and stated to what extent they wished they were taller and how satisfied they were with their height. The psychologists found that there was a tendency for both men and women to wish they were taller. They also confirmed the findings of previous studies that shorter men are more jealous, and more envious of and competitive with other men. They found no connection between height, jealousy, envy, and intrasexual competitiveness in women.
Height Dissatisfaction Drives Jealousy and Competitiveness
But what the psychologists term their “psychological measures of height” complicate the results. Both men and women who wanted to be taller were more jealous, envious, and competitive. Talbot and Jonason observe that their results demonstrate “the importance of examining psychological aspects of height, particularly for women; the desire to be taller rather than physical height itself is a more influential aspect in intrasexual competition. That is, irrespective of women’s physical height, those who want to be taller show elevated envy and jealousy and more competitive intrasexual behavior.”
Actual height and height dissatisfaction were connected, such that persons who were of shorter stature and were more dissatisfied with their height were particularly jealous and intrasexually competitive. “Evidently, it is not just height, but rather the combination of height and how one feels about their height, that predicts intrasexual competition,” conclude Talbot and Jonason.
Then again, this result should be considered preliminary as the participants in Talbot and Jonason’s study were recruited online and so their heights were self-reported. This is a problem because we might expect persons who are particularly dissatisfied with their stature to be less accurate when reporting their height. In future, psychologists might conduct laboratory rather than online studies so that they can collect objective measures of height and combine these with the psychological measures.
Talbot and Jonason also concede that their height dissatisfaction scale is limited because it only assesses the desire to be taller. Some people may, in fact, be dissatisfied with their heights because they would prefer not to tower over their peers. Talbot and Jonason note that tall women “may want to be shorter in stature to suit the most commonly preferred heterosexual relationship dyad: a taller man and shorter woman.”
