DOES HEIGHT CORRELATE WITH PSYCHOPATHY

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Psychopath Podcast, a podcast that discusses everything
about psychopathy. Here's your host, doctor Carlos.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Researchers are investigating the link between night and Dark triad traits.
Dark triad is a measurement to look at psychopathy, narcissism,
and machavelianism and try to predict whether or not this
individual will be manipulative, have psychopathic tendency, so forth and
so on. It is valid. The assessment of the dark

(01:03):
triad is valid, though they are showing weakness in determining
the narcissistic component of it. So let's see the study now.
I have a little concern with the study because it's
a correlational study. It did have a good size. It
was three hundred and sixty seven people male and female.
I couldn't find much on the study itself. I try
to link several times and all the links were broken.

(01:26):
But if I might be my own issue of not
being able to find it. They said they found a
link between all three traits in the dark triad and
dissatisfaction with height. Shorter men tended to score more highly
in narcissism while women did not. I remember narcissism again
was the weakest link of the dark triad assessment. The

(01:47):
study found shorter men tended to display more narcissistic tendencies
to compensate for lack of power or control. The Napoleon
complex or the short man syndrome is a domineering or
regress of attitude displayed by shorter people. We've heard of
it for decades, again compensating for the lack of height
and power, inferiority and things of that nature. Elite author

(02:11):
Monica Kosloska from the University of Poland who said, when
people cannot be psychological or physically formidable, they may become
psychologically formidable instead. Short of people with traits such as
psychopathy can use them to demand respect and pose costs
and others and impress romantic partners. Appearing more powerful may
in turn make other people perceive them as taller than

(02:32):
they really are. Let's see here. According to the study,
when we look at the dark triad, it consists of
three personality traits. Just make sure you understand it, narcissism, psychopathy,
and Machaveelianism. If you're following this podcast, you're probably familiar
with a little bit with these already. When all three
traits are found in a single person, it implies them
a levolent personality. They're all conceptually distinct but have been

(02:57):
shown to overlap. So psychopaths can be narcissists as well
as macavelian Now interesting because the criteria to be a
psychopath Macavilianism has manipulation and exploitation of others. You really
don't even need that category because it's already in there
in the criteria for psychopathy. It's also linked disregard for morality.

(03:19):
We know psychopaths have that, and a focus on self
interest and deception, which they already have. So what they're
really focusing on is the other characteristics of psychopathy. That's
why they brought it in, and it's characterized by their
anti social behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, which is overlaps in the evanism, callousness,
and remorselessness. There's four breakouts for psychopaths. You probably know

(03:42):
this already as we've talked about it. There's the affect component,
which is the emotional component or lack of certain emotions
like empathy, and then they have callousness. There's the anti
social component. There's the interpersonal component, which is usually manipulative,
charming deceptive behavior. You can see where Macavilianism encounters there.

(04:08):
And then there's a lifestyle component, usually a parasitic one,
which means they tend to leach off of others, they
can't have stable relationships. On the anti social one, that's
also included as criminal behavior. So again, what they're looking
at in the dark triad the lack of empathy, anti
social behavior for psychopaths, narcissism and self standard personality style,

(04:30):
and Macavilianism demonstrating manipulation and difference. Honestly, most of this
is already in the psychopath I don't know why you
need three other why you need two other categories, but whatever.
The researcher surveying three hundred and sixty seven minuted women
using the Dirty Dozen Dark Triad questionnaire, where participants were
asked how strongly they agree with phrases such as I
tend to manipulate others to get my way. Most of

(04:51):
us do, but it depends on the degree from the
response that they were given a score that indicated how
strongly did the demonstrate its psychopathy narcissis in Macaveelianism. Each
participant also had to disclose their height as well as
indicate how satisfied that were with their height and how
frequently they felt this way. The results shows shorter participants

(05:11):
of both sexes who wish to be taller tended to
score more highly for all three dark triad traits. However,
narcissism was particularly strong with male participants in the category,
while this trend was not existing for women. Shorter men
can demand respect and posed costs and others, acquire resources
and impress romantic partners of the researchers. Shorter women can

(05:32):
use deception to appear more desirable to gain protection and resources. Additionally,
appearing more powerful may in turn effect other perceptions of
ones estimated height. They propose that psychological formulability may provide
advantages and survival and mating domains, so they're using here
evolutionary psychology it looks like to interpret this. Researchers have

(05:53):
revealed men with dark personality traits such as macavilianism, narcisisms,
and sadism are more likely to be repeated cheaters. Survey
results also show that men obtain higher scores and women
both in moral disengagement and dark personality traits. People with
dark personality traits can establish short term relationships more easily
because they generally have low expectations about their future partners. Again,

(06:15):
it's a correlational study. Doesn't mean it's terrible, but it
makes us a little bit more cautious at interpreting the findings.
We've always said the best one is the goal standards
are randomized control trial study. There's a systematic review, which
means you would look at various studies that cover this

(06:35):
similar topic. And there's also a meta analysis which again
looking at several studies, but looking at it from a
statistical point. You wouldn't be able to do a statistical
well you could, I guess you can do a statistical
one here, but this is only one study. Remember, studies
are just a piece of the puzzle, so I don't
know if this seems to be the first study on
this topic. So that's the first piece of the puzzle.

(06:56):
It'd be really interesting as they continue to do the
research to look at others. I was trying to find
the study to see the limitations, but I couldn't find it,
so we don't have that, But it would be interesting
to see what limitations they found. And again there's some
subjectivity there of how you feel about being short. It's

(07:17):
relative to the country, it's relative to the social media,
it's relative to how much that person in that society
feels impacted by height. There's a lot of questions there
either way, interesting studies, So psychopathy and short height, there
seems to be some correlation. We'll have to find out
more in the future to find out how strong that
correlation really is, because if not, there's going to be

(07:41):
a lot of overgeneralization and stigmatization for people, for males
who are shorter,