Edges meeting: The tallest man and the shortest man in the world met for the first time in 2010 - (Reuters)
The Napoleon complex is not just a thing, and now researchers have scientifically proven it.
A new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences indicates that people who are relatively short and unhappy with their height may engage in hostile behaviors in an attempt to compensate for their lack of height.
The researchers used Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing site, to recruit 367 adults, a mix of men and women, from the US for the study. Participants were asked to complete the Dirty Dozen Dark Triad questionnaire, designed to assess levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism - a personality trait defined as as manipulative, cynical and immoral. They were then asked to write down their height and find out if they were happy with their height or would like to be taller. The
researchers found that shorter people who were unhappy with their height were more likely to exhibit signs of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.
Height does matter.
People walking in the street (Photo: ShutterStock)
"Shorter people, especially those who wish they were taller, are more likely to show off, confront, and be interested in power," explained lead author Peter K.
Johnson, from the University of Padua in Italy.
"These relationships are best understood from an evolutionary framework, which suggests that when people cannot be physically threatening, they may instead be psychologically powerful," he added.
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According to the researchers, this behavior can also provide advantages in survival and mating.
When comparing the sexes, short men tended to have slightly more narcissistic traits than short women.
But gender did not affect a person's likelihood of exhibiting psychopathy and Machiavellianism.
"We expected these relationships to be stronger in men given evolutionary and Freudian considerations, but we found little evidence for these correlations to differ by sex," Johnson said.
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