Celebrity couple Zendaya and Tom Holland have been hailed by fans and social media users all over the internet. Tom is noticeably shorter than Zendaya, but their height difference has never been an issue. In fact, it feels like we’re living in a new era that embraces short men and everything they bring to the table. Some people say shorter men are less selfish and more likely to treat others with kindness because they don’t have the arrogance that comes with men over 6 feet tall. But that might be misguided.
Study suggests short men are more likely to be psychopathic, narcissistic and manipulative
A study of 367 men and women has been published in the Elsevier journal Personality and Individual Differences, and a group of Polish scientists have found fascinating results for short men. The study is titled “The Napoleon Complex, Revisited: Those with Dark Triad Traits Are Dissatisfied with Their Height and Are Short.” Of the 367 people who took part in this study, 63% of them were men, and the researchers concluded that short people, men in particular, “can compensate for their shortness of breath through antagonistic behaviors”.
“We conceptualized antagonism as individual differences in dark triad traits (i.e. psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) and found that they were associated not only with being shorter, but also to the wish to be taller; these associations were similar between the sexes. reads the study. “We discussed our results from an evolutionary (i.e. formidable ability calibration) perspective.”
The dark triad traits—psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian—have been classically associated with the Napoleon complex, a term referring to shorter men who possess antagonistic qualities because they attempt to compensate for their size. “The Napoleon complex could be a marker of inferiority as in complex theory or an adaptive strategy to compensate for diminished intrasexual competitive abilities,” the study says. The complex term Napoleon comes from Napoleon Bonaparte, French Emperor who was 5’2 and notoriously aggressive as a political leader.
Researchers say they are led to believe that ‘behavioral syndromes of dark triad traits’ may be part of nature’s psychological systems that allow short men to ‘always compete in life’s great challenges’ . In other words, because men are small, they are given aggressive, even psychopathic traits to properly compete with the big ones.
“Appearing more powerful can in turn make others perceive them as bigger than they really are,” says Monika Kozlowska of Poland’s Wroclaw University. “Smaller men with traits such as psychopathy can use them to demand respect, impose costs on others, and impress their romantic partners. We propose that formidable psychological ability may provide benefits in the areas of survival and mating that outweigh losses of formidable physical ability.
Some celebrities that come to mind are Kevin Hart and Tom Cruise. It seems that men like this (who are 5’6 or less) might have a tendency towards psychopathic behaviors. Take it with a grain of salt, but you’ll probably never be able to watch Joe Jonas the same way again.
