Just a couple of months ago, TikTok declared the season unofficially "Short King Spring."
Even though it's not like the internet to completely change its mind at the drop of a hat, the time of the Short King appears to be over, because a new study has shed some light on what personality traits short men tend to carry more than their taller brethren.
The study found that that short men "may actually be evolutionarily hardwired" to what's known as the "dark triad" personality traits, which is associated with more "confrontational behavior."
In the study, which was published in the Elsevier Personality and Individual Differences, researchers wrote, "Our study provides the first assessment (we know of) of how the dark triad traits relate to height and height attitudes. 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 behavioral 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."
Apparently, it's all rooted in the "Napoleon Complex," where shorter individuals have to impose themselves in other ways to make them appear larger than they actually are.
The study's 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."
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