Reasons for cheer

Technology can only do so much to change height discrimination, but small changes can help us all

That every moment of our modern lives is captured on camera is one reason we’ll never truly be able to nullify the impact of our height.

The advent of the television turned the tide of US presidential elections in the favour of larger candidates, for example; since the first time wannabe commanders-in-chief could be watched on screen in the 1950s, the taller man has won 12 of 17 run-offs - a success rate roughly 10 percentage points above the longer-run average.

But let’s imagine that technology really does come on leaps and bounds. That we do practically everything in some kind of enhanced virtual reality, including both social and professional tasks. (Imagine a version of the Steven Spielberg film Ready Player One, but significantly more boring, with significantly more administrative tasks and busybody middle managers).

Odds are that at least some of the physical advantages of the real world would translate across into that simulated reality. In a long-running study of thousands of video gamers, former Palo Alto Research Center wonk Nick Yee’s Daedalus Project found that not only do players creating online avatars - virtual bodies - tend to make them taller than average, but that the taller people are in real life, the taller the avatar they create or pick is likely to be. Even in a purely digital world people prefer to have a taller character.

Hand in hand with this is the finding that players prefer attractive avatars as opposed to hideous ones, so any grouping of attractive characters would tend to disproportionately represent those that are taller than average.

The idealism of the virtual world, one where we jack our heights up, is the same for weight. Those who are obese create thinner mirrors of themselves, Yee’s research suggests, and having a taller character will confer some of the same benefits as it would do in our reality. In other studies, Yee has found taller avatars are linked with greater assertiveness and confidence when asked to conduct a negotiation. Taller and prettier means confident and outgoing, even when that height is little more than a series of ones and zeros in a computer simulation. That impact would translate directly into the world of business in terms of the additional income it can bring in if we moved our commerce entirely into the online realm.

“Like in the real world, we first make an observation about our avatar, infer something about our character, and then continue to act according to our perceived expectations,” gaming psychologist, author and academic Jamie Madigan writes in a blog post about Yee’s work. “We needn’t make a conscious decision to do it.”

This hits on a truth about how not just height, but other socio-biological differences between individuals impact on our view of them. It is not always proactive discrimination that makes us change our behaviours, but passive forces that cause us to mindlessly conform to pre-existing judgments about the kind of person someone is and the kind of things that person does.

This, and a whole host of other factors, mean that the lot of short people is not going to radically change overnight, whatever the shape of our domestic, social and economic practices.

Entrenched thought patterns are incredibly difficult to shift. Decades after social movements secured high-profile legal victories for a wide range of marginalised groups, we continue to battle to ensure true equality in a practical, everyday sense. It will take a conscious effort from wider society to look at our unconscious biases when it comes to shorter people, in the same way as we have done with other groups, combined with a conscious effort from shorter people themselves not to consider themselves limited, before we can begin to control for height - a characteristic I trust I’ve shown is little more than a quirk of fate, but has significant implications people across their whole life.

Trying to “fix” height with potentially damaging physical procedures only ends up happening if society starts with the premise that to be short is to be somehow inferior. If you remove that premise, you also remove a lot of the mental difficulties short people face, the kind that lead them to think they need to be cured somehow.

Just because the answers sound like dull, well-worn tropes that could apply to so many other types of people - more and better representation of short people in aspirational roles, more careful use of language, more knowledge of the size of the gap in height outcomes - doesn’t invalidate their truth. The problems exist, and the solutions are not beyond our reach.

In fact, many are incredibly easy to incorporate into our daily lives. You don’t need to go hunting around for shorties who are being dumped on by society and parachute in to save the day. You just need to treat them with exactly the same care and consideration you should be treating everyone else with.

You might call engendering such compassion the march of “wokeness”. If you want to defend your right to talk like a d*ck to people purely because they look different to you, then go ahead. But I’m actually pretty positive that thanks to our heightened focus on social issues around equality, most people have become more aware of how their actions can impact upon others, and the struggles they face, and society is much the better for it.

When individuals have been given the occasional dose of “political correctness” and been called out for using demeaning language against smaller people, it teaches others that might not have realised that their language has such power, or that short people face an uphill battle at all.

I’m not blaming anyone for not reading all the research that shows that is the case. And I know not all of it shows that people who are a little shorter than average are this completely downtrodden segment of society. I’m certainly not.

But it costs you very little not to use a particular word. Using it, on the other hand, could cost an anxious child, bullied because he’s not grown appropriately high, an awful lot.

If nothing else, I hope this work has shown everyone why that minor sacrifice is worth it. Amid all the negatives I have marshalled - and I know there have been many - I truly remain positive about the path forward once people become more aware of the issues at play. I am glad to have played my small part doing that - both literally and metaphorically.