In guys, it’s the attitude that they have to be extra masculine to “make up” for being less than average height. This usually comes off as gratingly cocky and insecure at the same time.
it's only called that because the same exact behaviour is suddenly not an issue anymore when you're 6 feet and above. That 'Napoleon complex' has also been mostly debunked as a myth and it's much more likely that we simply notice negative behaviour more / stronger in people who lack features that are generally considered attractive to the other sex (studies like these are mostly done with heterosexuals because homosexuals are such a small sample size within the greater society that they're better served having an exclusive study for them). It's how cute looking girls get away with all kinds of shit. Same principle applies.
nd it's much more likely that we simply notice negative behaviour more / stronger in people who lack features that are generally considered attractive to the other sex
I'm not sure why you wrote "we are more attracted to and forgiving of attractive people" in such a sloppy, convoluted way, but none of this contradicts the fact that short men in particular often have a chip on their shoulder about their height - and this results in personalities that the population at large finds off-putting, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
but it doesn't manifest as special behaviour, it's just noticed more than it is not.
And also: it's not people we're attracted to per se. You can be straight male and still offer the better jobs to the better looking male. This is why I 'convolute' what I say - to get it right, not half-ass right.
Aggressively compensating for comparative flaws is absolutely a special behavior. If you don’t have those flaws, you have nothing to compensate for. The fact we treat attractive people better is somewhat innate (babies allegedly “prefer” in the sense of “stare at” attractive faces), but who has ever conclusively proven that it the preference (past infancy) isn’t because attractive people behave in more attractive ways? You can absolutely argue that attractive people don’t obsess about their perceived flaws because they’ve gone their whole lives never being told their flaws exist, and therefore they don’t fixate and develop more welcoming personalities, and it is indeed cyclical. But that doesn’t mean behavior is negligible in the equation. Behavior is the difference between somebody just being “unattractive” vs. “creepy”.
But anyway the fact that we treat attractive people better on the whole doesn’t mean “short guy syndrome” in terms of bad attitude doesn’t exist. The handful of studies cited in that Wikipedia page you linked directly conflict each other, too, so we really don’t have enough information to say it does or doesn’t exist. I’m going based on my experience browsing reddit, because I’ve rarely had bad experiences in my actual life with short men, whose attitudes I could definitively tie to their height, whereas on reddit people explicitly make comments about it. “The only reason I get turned down is my height, women are such shallow bitches”, that kind of stuff.
you get those results in social media sites because people with the same issues or interests gather and so it seems like it's some major part of the population, whereas it's just not. It boils down to general insecurity that they try to deflect on something else. The old 'I can't do y because I'm burdened with x' fallacy.
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u/merewenc Jan 08 '20
In guys, it’s the attitude that they have to be extra masculine to “make up” for being less than average height. This usually comes off as gratingly cocky and insecure at the same time.