Even Basketball Players Lie About Their Height

Illustration by Christa Jarrold Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story. A truism: men lie about how tall they are. Height exaggeration is one of the oldest and most well-documented forms of self-inflation. Joseph Stalin reportedly wore lifts and had photos of himself doctored so that he would look larger; historians have posited that he was between five feet two and five feet four, which is perhaps why Harry S. Truman (a respectable five feet nine) is said to have referred to him as a “little squirt.” And it’s not just dictators. Overstating—and straight-up manipulating—height has long been common in Hollywood: Alan Ladd, the nineteen-forties leading man (an estimated five feet six or five feet seven), once acted alongside a taller starlet, who stood in trenches that had been dug into set floors. Tom Cruise (five feet seven) has been known to stand on a wooden box.

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In recent years, the rise of dating apps—some of which allow users to set height preferences when browsing potential matches—has made height exaggeration even more ubiquitous. “I have gone on dates with multiple men that have all starkly lied about their height. STARKLY,” one woman shared on Reddit. “This has happened multiple times and I’m just so confused.” Some men argue that these lies are necessary to land a date at all: it’s common for women to specify on their profiles that they’re only interested in men taller than them, leaving shorter guys stuck between, on the one hand, being truthful and ignored, and, on the other, lying and getting more matches. Studies suggest that men are frequently opting for the latter. In 2008, a group of researchers found that more than eighty per cent of surveyed participants physically misrepresented themselves on dating profiles, with men distorting their height significantly more than women did. Perhaps doing so arose from a history of in-person rejection: social scientists have found, in both observational and experimental studies, that women overwhelmingly prefer taller men—one assessment of speed-dating trends identified that shorter men ended up with fewer matches than their taller peers. Behind the digital fortress of the apps, men have taken to upselling themselves to increase their odds of an in-person date, a development that prospective matches are none too thrilled with. Some women have even begun using A.I. tools to assess a man’s photos in hopes of using his proportions and surroundings to estimate his true height.