When the commander said that he did not feel comfortable being much taller than his emperor, Napoleon replied: “You may be taller, but I am bigger.”
This story exemplifies what is known as the Napoleon complex, or the tendency of short men to compensate through aggressive and ambitious behaviors for their disadvantage compared to taller men. It is not known when the term was first coined, but it is believed that it was the renowned Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler who popularized it with his theory of the inferiority complex.
To test the extent to which the aggressive behaviors and competition mechanisms of shorter men reach, a team of psychologists prepared an ingenious investigation with three separate evaluations. In total, 206 men participated and competed in a series of economic games. In it dictator gameone of the players had unconditional power over all the resources in the game, while in the ultimatum game, plays could be rejected by opponents and they could even receive retaliation from their players. To evaluate direct aggressiveness, the researchers added the hot sauce taskin which participants had to prepare a sample of food for their opponents and could add 0 to 5 ml of hot sauce with a syringe for their opponents to try.
With these games, the researchers expected that shorter men would appropriate the greatest amount of resources when playing against taller men and that they would add a greater amount of hot sauce (physical aggression) to their opponents.
By comparing the results, the psychologists found preliminary evidence for the Napoleon complex, in other words, the idea that shorter men try to compensate for their disadvantages when faced with higher values.
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The results showed that shorter men kept more resources for themselves as a strategy of competition and indirect aggressiveness. On the other hand, no relationship was found between men with better stature and greater physical aggressiveness in the tomato sauce task.
It is clear that this study cannot determine precisely whether the shorter men are actually more indirectly aggressive or whether they were simply more miserly than the rest of the participants in competitive situations.
What is interesting about the study is that it induces a competition situation to a group of participants according to their height and evaluates the strategies they use to win and it seems that the shorter men or those who feel shorter try to compensate for this possible disadvantage.
Original study reference: P., J.E., Blaker, N.M., & Vugt, M.V. (2018). The Napoleon Complex: When Shorter Men Take More. Psychological Science, 29(7), 1134–1144.
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