Short men have more psychopathic traits, study finds

Nicole Kidman and maybe the most famous short king of them all, Tom Cruise. Photo / Getty Images

It seems like only yesterday that we were heralding the arrival of “short king spring”.

Women took to TikTok to propose that tall men had dominated the dating scene for too long. Something was in the air, and that something was the reign of males less than 172cm (5′8″) in stature. If it was good enough for Zendaya, it was good enough for the rest of us.

“Short king status is, more than anything, a state of mind, if you will: an openness to everything that life at a slightly lower altitude has to offer, which can apparently be a lot,” Kylie Cheung wrote in a recent article for Jezebel, where she pondered what, exactly, makes a short king a short king.

“Short kings embrace who they are and who their partners are; they treat everyone, including themselves, with respect.”

Like big d**k energy, the short king’s height only compounded their magnetism. On top of which, the Journal of Sexual Medicine found they enjoy more frequent sex, and are 32 per cent less likely to divorce if they’re under 5′9″ (175cm).

But if we’ve learned anything in 2022, it’s that cancel culture comes for us all in the end.

If you were about to embark on a search for a short king of your own, know that it may come at a cost: a group of Polish scientists have found that short men “may actually be evolutionarily hardwired” to what’s known as the “dark triad” personality traits, associated with more confrontational behaviour.

For the unversed, those include psychopathy (lack of empathy and anti-social behaviours), narcissism (self-centredness), and Machiavellianism (manipulation and indifference towards mortality).

“Our study provides the first assessment (we know of) of how the dark triad traits relate to height and height attitudes,” the researchers wrote in the study of 367 men and women, published in the Elsevier journal Personality and Individual Differences.

“We showed that not only are people high on the dark triad traits less satisfied with their height, but this may be because they are actually shorter.

“This leads us to believe that the behavioural syndromes of the dark triad traits may be part of a suite of psychological systems designed by natural selection to better enable those of shorter stature a way to still compete in life’s great challenges.”

While shorter women “can use deception to appear more desirable or to gain protection and resources”, the scientists did not see the same link between the dark triad personality traits and their height.

The research was rooted in investigating the so-called Napoleon complex – named after the (allegedly) 157cm (5′2″) leader who sought power through aggression and was mocked by British newspapers for his height during the French revolution – and found the myth was grounded in truth.

They theorise that when a person is not physically formidable and does not have an intimidating presence, they have to impose themselves in other ways, becoming “psychologically formidable” instead, lead author Monika Kozlowska, from Poland’s University of Wroclaw, said.

“Appearing more powerful may in turn make other people perceive them as taller than they really are,” she added.

“Shorter men with traits such as psychopathy can use them to demand respect, impost costs on others and impress romantic partners.

“We propose that psychological formidability may provide advantages in survival and mating domains that offset losses in physical formidability.”

In short (whoops), if your man’s smaller than 172cm, he might be more Patrick Bateman than Prince Charming. Sorry, Tom Cruise.

For more on dating and relationships, listen to the NZ Herald’s new podcast, It’s a Date with Lillie Rohan