Seriously, this is incredibly inane, but I figured I'd ask it here since I'm guessing at least some of the people reading this are probably interested in things like cultural assumptions, heuristics, and biases.
The average American woman is around 5 feet, 4 inches tall (at least according to most charts I've seen recently). I'm slightly below average height, at 5 feet, 2.5 inches tall. This isn't unusual for my family; most of the women I'm related to are around my height, give or take an inch or three.
And yet...for some reason, a majority of people who first meet me via e-mail or the Web tell me upon meeting me in person, "Huh, I expected you to be taller". When I ask them how much taller, they almost invariably guess 5'8" - 5'9".
So, I'm curious: is there such a thing as a "tall person writing style"? If so, what are its elements? Do I sound too ornery to be a short person or something?
I don't personally tend to assume anything about a person's height by reading their writing -- unless they're actually writing about how tall they are, I figure their writing gives me zero information on what their height might be, so it would seem pointless for me to make any assumptions.
I still feel kind of silly about this post but it just weirds me out a bit that the assumptions of my supposed tallness and the "5'8" - 5'9" guesses are so darn consistent. And I'm curious as to whether anyone else has run into something similar.
18 comments:
I'm 5'2" and everyone expects me to be 5'7" at least.
My suspicion is that part of it is that my hands and feet are not proportional, and therefore if you take them to be normal size I look really big. And the other part, I was told, was that I was taller than my fridge. Well it's a wheelchair-accessible apartment, so the fridge is only five feet high.
You, I expected to be tall, because your body type looks exactly like a 5'7" staff person I knew at the time that I saw videos of you.
Hmm. Well all those situations involve actually having seen a visual representation of someone. I know that in photos (and videos) it can be extremely difficult to judge height because of the way the picture ends up being framed.
But I'm mainly talking about cases in which people have only ever read stuff I've written, and not seen any pictures. One guy I recently met at work (who actually works in the Iowa office but who was visiting CA) told me (after confirming that he had, indeed, figured me to be 5'8" or so) that the assumption might be due to the subjects I write about and the fact that I'm an engineer. Even though people might know intellectually that I'm a woman, the subjects I write about are traditionally "male-dominated" so people might be subconsciously mapping me onto an average boy-height. I don't think that necessarily accounts for all cases but I thought it was an interesting theory.
I wonder if 5'4" being the norm might be based on a nationwide, worldwide, or some other broad measurement... I'm in the 5'2" range, but most women here are noticeably taller -- more like by three to five inches. That (along with people's expectations) might have to do with the distribution of various nationalities across the USA.
As for others making that leap without any pictoral suggestions... On top of your career/topic, it might also be linked to the tone/attitude of your writing; females in general are raised to be less direct, sound less sure of themselves, and more "emotional" in their writing. A woman that wasn't like that could be perceived as being masculine or dominant, both being identified with height.
We do have reversible intuitions about height that lead us to believe taller people to be fitter, more intellectually imposing, and successful, which we operate constructively to assume that fit, intellectually imposing, successful people are thus tall.
There is some good work on this by Nettle, in the UK, who has a series of studies on the correlation of height in status, reproductive success, etc.
This can also be seen often in candid video of people meeting celebrities and politicians, the meetee, particularly if an admirer, can be seen to double-take slightly, as if surprised to find the formerly abstract celebrity is of a normal size. Extra-humor points for meeting people like Micheal J Fox and Tom Cruise, who often dumbfound people by being rather short.
My answer would follow outlawpoet's lines - height is one of those things that people tend to associate with qualities they consider positive. It's part of a general halo effect - if a person only has somebody's writing to work with, and they like what they read, they're more likely to associate positive attributes to their mental image of the writer. (Which, in turn, is part of the even more general phenomena of tending to assume that people with some sort of positive characteristics are positive in other regards, as well - unless there's information to the contrary available.)
I think it's because our society considers it a virtue (I call it a necessity...then again, I play volleyball) that is most desirable in a person of intellectual importance...you know, prestige. In a tall person with distinguished or distinctive appearance, it is expected that the person will live up to their appearance. It seems fairly natural that those expectations would be reversed when people turn to such a non-physical communication realm as the internet (you can't even guess at the tone of the person's voice...sometimes I think that in an internet setting, everyone is rendered autistic to a certain extent because it's so hard to read something like sarcasm or teasing in a couple of lines of a post or IM).
Obviously, this particular example of deductive reasoning isn't quite in the ballpark. I think it's funny that culture has trained us (or some of us) to expect characteristics in groupings instead of individually (i.e. someone who is tall and good-looking is expected to be kind, clever, and polite whereas someone who is short, fleshy and rather homely will be expected to be rather slow and un-stimulating). It's so engrained in our heads that it is almost comical to imagine the fact that James Madison, one of our most intelligent Presidents ever, stood at roughly 5"0 and was also our shortest ever president. ^^
My mother used to be an ametuer ballerina, and as I mentioned earlier, I play volleyball. One might expect from that statement that I am roughly 5"10 or so. I'm 5"4.
(Not really a response to anyone's comment in particular, but I remembered this today, and it seems like it might relate to some of the points that have been brought up)
In third grade (when I was around 8) I was the smallest person in my class. This was actually determined by a group of girls in the locker room, who had me and another girl (who was also fairly short) stand back-to-back while they surveyed us. The really weird thing about that incident was how the entire group of girls was cheering the whole time for the other girl to be taller, as if it was some sort of competition. She did turn out to be about half an inch taller than me, and she got congraulated for this.
If it is true that many people associate height with certain positive characteristics, then this incident might be explainable in that context. Maybe since the other girl was more popular and better-liked than I was, the rest of the girls in the class "wanted her to be taller" because that would provoke less in the way of cognitive dissonance for them. My height wasn't what made me unpopular, but perhaps it was one of those things that people thought "fit" me as an unpopular person?
Hmm.
That's really strange...I've never heard of anything remotely like that before! Your idea that they wanted the other girl to be taller because she was more popular sounds likely though. I was *very* small in grade school, but it was never really brought up in that kind of context before. Mostly people mentioned my size when it came time to figure out what order should the grade school students should be arranged in for the 4th/5th grade chorus performance. And people sometimes commented (still do...) on how small and light I was/am. It never really bothered me until I started playing volleyball. Eh...that's why they invented the Libero position.
The politics of High School popularity will always dumbfound me. For some reason, most people seem to either like me or dislike me...because I'm smart and I like to challenge peoples' assumptions. And people either say "Hey, cool" or they overreact. I pay attention to it only if someone else brings it up--or if I'm making a joke about popularity. At my old school, everybody knew everybody, so it wasn't really a concern. Here, you know the people who are in your classes, and for me, those are mostly high level white kids. It's kind of sad from my perspective. Hey, it just occured to me that maybe it is desirable to be tall because most people who are really tall are white? Just something to contemplate.
That's really weird. It hadn't even occurred to me that anyone would ascribe a mental image of height to someone they've only seen the writing of.
That is very very interesting. I wonder what size people think I am. I guess I am boring average at 5'4" tall. Blah.
jemerson said: That's really weird. It hadn't even occurred to me that anyone would ascribe a mental image of height to someone they've only seen the writing of.
Exactly...same here. I've been really surprised to see the comments here so far indicating that it "makes sense" (at least per human psychology/cultural factors) that people might make assumptions about someone's height without knowing anything about them that would provide any factual data in that area.
I don't really visualize people by default at all when all I know of them is their textual output. If I see a picture of them, or if they describe themselves I will come to associate their writing with a visual image, but if I don't have any data my brain has no impetus or motivation to "fill in the blanks".
Gave you an award back at my blog. Maybe you have it all ready but I want to give it to you!
Not long ago, I realized that I had been assuming Ari Ne'eman was tall, based entirely on the strength of leadership shown in his writing. Of course that made no logical sense whatsoever, but expecting leaders to be tall is just one of those weird cultural biases that many people pick up without being consciously aware of it.
afbh: who's Ari Ne'eman?
Anne: I don't try to picture how the authors of what I read look like. I just read what they've got to say. If I want to know what they look like (which is rare) I look them up. But since you brought it up, and since I know for a fact that tall people tend to get higher wages than shorter people (as in 5"2 and lower I guess) do, along with other similar data I sort of took my theories and reasoning from there. I try not to presume anything about anyone.
Kakalina: Sorry, I should have mentioned who he is.
He's the president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and a very talented natural political leader.
I reckon it might be your picture (or your "pose" in your picture). I had kind of assumed you would be tall, and i think your picture played a role in that - it's posed as if the camera is just slightly looking up at you...
Also, i think one stereotype in my head goes "geek (in the positive sense of the word) = tall, thin person". I have absolutely no idea why that is, tho (and i don't think it's because i'm (relatively) tall and thin, because i don't really notice my own body shape most of the time), so i think it might be cultural (trying to think of "geeky" characters in fiction and what they look like now...) - so, rather than "tall person writing style", it might be "geeky writing style" plus "geek = tall". That's a guess, tho...
Shiva: That's a pretty good point.
Anne: I was just thinking that this point actually does sort of fall in line with your usual topics because it's all about the assumptions that other people make despite the lack of relative information.
afbh: Thanks!
Ari Ne'eman IS tall. He's my best friend from high school, and he's like twice my height- definitely over six feet. Granted, I'm 5'2", so that's not exactly saying much. But yeah, he's pretty tall. It's kind of annoying standing next to him.
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