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The tall and the short of love

Date: 2007-04-13

With April temperatures stubbornly holding in the 40s and 50s, you’re more likely to catch a cold than spring fever.

Nonetheless, this is the season our thoughts turn to baseball and mating rituals. And while I am delighted to see the Red Sox in first place, it is the second topic that concerns me today.

Earlier this week, John Tierney of the New York Times offered a pair of columns on the mysteries of dating — why we seek or avoid certain people. Along the way, he pointed to a recent study and contains some remarkable findings.

The study, by Gunter Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu of the University of Chicago Department of Economics and Dan Ariely of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, used a huge pile of information from an online dating service “to draw inferences on mate preferences and to investigate the role played by these preferences in determining match outcomes....”

In other words, they wanted to see what influenced the 22,000 users of the dating service when they picked out a potential romantic partner.

The study is filled with all kinds of technical symbols and jargon, but some things are in plain English and make you go, “Wow!”

First, let me back up a step.

Last May, I wrote a column about Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 best-selling book, “Blink,” in which he discusses the role that height plays in financial success.

He found that about 15 percent of all men in the U.S. are 6 feet tall or taller — but that 58 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are that tall. Fewer than 4 percent of American males are 6-foot-2 or taller, but 30 percent of the CEOs.

He cited research showing that at all levels of employment, each inch of height is worth an extra $789 a year in salary.

In short (as it were), size matters in the marketplace.

What Hitsch et. al. found was that size matters just as much in the matingplace (and stop smirking).

The data they collected included information about height and income. In the study sample, the median height for a male was 5-foot-11.5 and for a female, 5-foot-5.5 — both a bit taller than the national average. The “baseline” income was pegged at $62,500 a year for men and $42,500 for women.

What the researchers wanted to know was: All other things being equal, if your height varied from the median, how much income above the “baseline” would you need in order to get as many positive responses from other date-seekers as those at the median height?

The answers are startling.

To be as successful as a guy 5-foot-11 making $62,500, a guy 5-foot-10 needs to make $86,500. A guy 5-foot-6 needs $237,500. And at 5 feet nothing, a guy needs to make $379,500 — just to even the playing field!

This may not pose a problem for people like actor Danny DeVito and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, both 5 feet even, or director Martin Scorcese at 5-foot-2 — but that’s a challenge for the average shortie.

And men over the median hardly need any money to get lots of offers. At 6-foot-2, you need only $32,500. At 6-foot-4, it’s $11,500.

But for women, it’s exactly the opposite — tall is terrible.

A woman 5-foot-4 doesn’t need any income at all to get the same rate of positive response as a woman 5-foot-5.5 tall making $42,500 a year.

And women anywhere over 5-foot-8 can’t match the rate of success of a woman 5-foot-5.5 — no matter how much money they earn!

Memo to parents: Give your kids a good start in life. Stretch your boys; shrink your girls.

Hitsch, Hortascu and Ariely pulled out another interesting detail for your consideration: the relationship between looks and loot.

The researchers broke the dating-service users into 10 “deciles,” with the 10th decile being the most handsome or beautiful.

Now, on that scale of 1-10, how much extra money would you need “to be as successful as a man or woman whose looks rating” was in the 10th decile who make that $62,500 (men) or $42,500 (women)?

Well, if you’re an “average” looking guy (in the 5th decile), you’d need an annual income of $205,500. Those at the bottom (1st decile) need $248,500.

Or you can wear a mask like Batman or the hero in “V For Vendetta”.

Again, the results are much different for women.

It is not possible for a woman to get the same results as the most beautiful dating candidates (the 10th decile) no matter how much she earns.

Overall, the researchers write, “(T)he looks ratings variable has the strongest impact on outcomes among all variables used.”

Of course, the study includes lots of other variables that go into the mix, including race, education and even hair color (“Men with red hair suffer a moderate outcome penalty. Blonde women have a slight improvement in their outcomes, while women with gray or ‘salt and pepper’ hair suffer a sizable penalty. Men with long curly hair receive 18 percent fewer first-contact e-mails than men in the baseline category, ‘medium straight hair.’ For women, ‘long straight hair’ leads to a slight improvement in outcomes, while short hair styles are associated with a moderate decrease in outcomes.”).

But the idea that height (which seems so trivial an attribute) and beauty (which is, after all, only skin deep) are such powerful influences in our mating choices suggests that when it comes to the “birds and the bees,” we are indeed still functioning very much like our winged friends.





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