Why we lie about our heights
We have proof everyone exaggerates. That matters.
I don’t want this newsletter to be a lecture. Nor do I want it to be my personal sop-story.
I just wanted to host a better conversation. Because, per the last chapter, I think that people feeling increasingly compelled to look for medical solutions to shortness is definitive proof - if you still require it - that height still matters.
It would be nice if we acknowledged that once in a while. Particularly when it comes to the physical and mental health implications of shortness. The kind of suffering that drives people to do gruesome things to their bodies to try and claw back what they think they’ve lost.
We are desperate to keep up appearances in any way we can. You will have encountered this in your daily life, I am certain, but there is a significant statistical difference in how tall people say they are, and how tall they actually are, born of insecurity and worry about public perception. It’s unsurprising we do this given the wide-ranging negative impacts of shortness I’ve outlined so far.
A 2010 study in the European Journal of Public Health found that height was overestimated in all of the regions they studied. That was across both sexes too; height was over-reported by between 1.1cm and 2.2cm for females and 1.7cm and 2.1cm for males. The general trend the paper finds is that the shorter the person, the more they tend to overestimate their height, and younger people tend to overestimate their height more than older ones.
It’s obvious why we’ve relied on self-report data in the past. It’s cheap and easy. You don’t have to physically get a group of subjects together and put them up against a ruler. You can get a much wider set of individuals providing their information if you just take their word for it, and if you’re just measuring an average across a big sample, the outliers might just cancel each other out anyway.
But if it was really all the same to society whether we were one height or another, why would anyone feel the need to hype up how tall they are? The fact is it does make a difference, so we do. Given what we learned in my chapter on relationships, can we be shocked that data from US users of dating site OKCupid suggests they inflate their height by a full two inches above what it is in reality?
Even politicians - those bastions of honesty - do it. As Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews notes: “Trump said he was 6’3’’, a number that still circulates in online search results, but in the televised 2016 primary debates he was clearly shorter than 6’3’’ Jeb Bush, who stood next to him. Politico found evidence that Trump’s 2012 driver’s license put him at 6’2’’. And while Hillary Clinton was 5’5’’ in 2008, according to her spokesperson, by 2016 the anonymous brain trust of Google had decreed that she was 5’7’’.”
A review by the magazine Men’s Health looked at the real compared with the published heights for celebrities; actor Charles Bronson over-exaggerated by four inches, Burt Reynolds by three inches, and the not-so-titanic Arnold Schwarzenegger by four inches.
I’d love to see an updated version of that European Journal of Public Health study on our need to inflate our measurements. I can only imagine that the over-exaggeration has been exacerbated by digital platforms and cultural norms that have entered into our lives very recently, with males particularly likely to ramp up their credentials even more as a result.
I would wager that all this one-upmanship leads to an upward spiral of height anxiety. When I’ve asked people what they think the average male height in the UK is, many have come back with an answer nearer to 6’ than 5’9’’, which isn’t surprising given that’s what we see on our screens and that’s what we want to report for ourselves. The result is people thinking they are much further from the mean than they actually are, and then feeling the mental and physical health pressure of that.
I’ve already documented a number of cases where my friends, who I believe to be incredibly normal people, have nudged up the height they report to the world, and revealed a discrepancy with reality. I imagine, particularly with the way dating apps work today, over-exaggeration would be particularly rife on those platforms, and end up even more so as daters become more accustomed to the filtering processes.
Surely I’m just splitting hairs here. Why on earth would it matter if we mismeasure height by a couple of centimetres? It might sound like just a trivial difference, but the European Journal of Public Health researchers allude to an important consequence of getting it wrong for our physical and mental health.
Height forms part of the public health equation. If you wanted to measure the prevalence of obesity in a population, for example, you might use the body mass index indicator, which looks to control for height when deciding whether someone is overweight. Change the height input by just a smidgen, and it can make a big difference to the BMI score, and therefore whether an individual should be classified as healthy, overweight or obese. For officials deciding on resource allocation, this could lead to too little or too much being afforded to particular areas, or a mis-prioritisation of nutritional needs.
Reporting the same weight on a frame three inches taller is such an issue, medically speaking, that the over-exaggeration can lead us to incorrect public health conclusions. A 2009 Canadian study found that we over-linked being fat with the likelihood of suffering from diseases because of how people lied about their height.
“Based on self-reported data, a substantial proportion of individuals with excess body weight were erroneously placed in lower BMI categories,” it found. “This misclassification resulted in elevated associations between overweight/obesity and morbidity.”
This kind of issue presented itself in hilarious fashion during the Covid-19 crisis, as a perfectly healthy man in his 30s was offered a vaccine because a misplaced decimal point led to records listing him as 6.2cm tall. This gave him a BMI of 28,000. For context, a BMI of between 18.5 and 24.9 is normal. Between 30 and 39.9 technically makes you obese. So no wonder he got a letter saying he might be at high-risk of succumbing to the virus: he was apparently 10,000 times a healthy weight.
It’s not just healthcare, but planning for public spaces and transport needs that can also be optimized based on the individuals that will actually be using them.
Governments can learn from this for things like public health programmes, but there are implications for private sector actors too. From office and home design to entertainment and leisure venues, if you don’t understand averages and variance in body shape, you won’t be able to create the conditions that ensure accessibility.
We saw it with car makers earlier; imagine one building a model with a seat that was consistently a handful of centimetres too high, or a supermarket with barely reachable shelves, or a bike maker where most people could only just reach the pedals, and you get an idea about why companies might need to understand the full range of human anatomies. To marshal an everyday example, I am far from alone in not being able to reach the handholds in London Underground carriages without having to stand on tiptoes, which somewhat defeats the object of using them for stability.
You might have seen a host of similar examples in Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women about how many things are not designed for people who are shorter than the average man. In many ways the topics of my discussion in this book are also gendered issues, given that women are on average smaller than men - that’s just a fact that will mean issues impacting shorter people more generally will disproportionately hit women too.
Crash test dummies in cars being tested on typical male physiques is a great example of this. That’s a big reason why the statistics around short people being injured so much in car accidents referred to earlier exist.
Some of the issues the likes of Perez very astutely point out are uniquely gender linked - medical trials disproportionately favouring male participants, say, when physiological differences between the sexes are far wider than references to height alone. But for others, the real problem is with the height difference, which just happens to coincide with gender difference.
That’s not to say that tall people don’t also suffer physical discomfort in their daily lives. Most beds are built to a 6’4’’ frame. Most doors to accommodate those 6’6’’ and under. Economy airline seats are sub-optimal at best for the gangly.
That we are often so far off in how we design things at both ends of the spectrum is evidenced in failure to cater for what researchers term ‘flat slope syndrome’. This is the notion that it is not just shorter people who overestimate their height; tall people can lowball it too. We all want to appear nearer the average or mean value in any characteristic than we actually are, our way of making sure we fit in.
While the European Journal of Public Health’s team did not specifically find this in their work around tallness, the underestimation of extremely high height values is consistently reported in other papers alongside heightened exaggeration of the lowest figures. Basically, we can be pretty sure that there are far more of both very short and very tall individuals hanging around than we would be led to believe by self-reported data.
While there may be some differences across geographies - one study comparing Italy, the Netherlands and North America found that Italians overestimated their height more than the other two countries - the fact is that the phenomenon appears to apply globally, indicating that it isn’t just a unique cultural difference that leads certain populations to boast excess height credentials.
In another 2010 study published in the Cadernos de Saúde Pública based out of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, mean difference in reported height was 1.98cm for men and 3.97cm for women. While self-reported and observed weight readings fell neatly in line, this means that self-reported height is far less reliable.
The authors cite numerous other studies that men overestimate their height, whereas women can underestimate it - potentially in line with social expectations of female smallness. Again, this prompts a question about the importance of getting it right; is clinical research still valid, are medicinal dosages still appropriate if we assume a significantly different physiology than a self-reported ‘average’ user?
When short people can bear both a biological and psychological strain, that is an important question to answer, which I’m not sure many people have ever considered.