If you consider yourself to be a short person, you may have experienced endless torment when you were younger.
Some people try to cheer you up about your height by telling you that "good things come in small packages," while others are full of jokes and love to ask you, "how's the weather down there."
As someone who has been called short her entire life, I can't say if my height has played a factor in my personality, but there is a possibility.
According to research at the Centers for Disease Control, scientists have found that short men are angrier and more violent than tall people.
Does this shock you? The average height for an American man is almost six feet tall, so does that mean that men shorter than those measurements are more at risk of committing a crime?
Scientists quizzed 600 men aged between 18 and 50 on how they perceive male gender, self-image, and behavior in relation to drug-taking, violence, and crime.
This government-led study discovered that men who feel the least masculine, suffering from what's known as "male discrepancy stress," were three times more likely to commit a crime, especially violent ones.
"These findings suggest that gender role discrepancy and associated discrepancy stress, in particular, represent important injury risk factors and that prevention of discrepancy stress may prevent acts of violence with the greatest consequences and costs to the victim, offender and society," the study, published in BMJ Journals, read.
This study ties in with another one that was conducted by a team of researchers at Oxford University.
"Short Man Syndrome" or "Napoleon Complex" has been proven by a study published in the University's Department of Psychiatry to be a real thing.
They reported that a person's height can increase anxiety and feeling of vulnerability, which can lead to paranoia.
Another study, published in by the Association for Psychological Science, also suggests that small men are more likely to show aggressive tendencies when in competition with taller men.
The researchers note that taller men have more advantages in life when it comes to their overall health, social status, and education, which can have an effect on how shorter men see themselves.
How much truth is there to these studies?
While notorious leaders like Napoleon, Franco, Hitler, and Stalin measured between 5'4" and 5'8", these findings by no means suggests that all short men are angrier and more violent.
However, famous figures like Gandhi, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, and Beethoven were all considered short, and they're not considered to be violent in any way.
[H/T: IFLSCIENCE / ShortList]
