Study shows that taller people are happier

Deaton called the study “a minor frill” on research done by Wilson School dean Christina Paxson and Wilson School professor Anne Case GS ’83, who “found that taller people on average do better in income and education than shorter people.”

“Education and income are positively associated with good emotional outcomes and life evaluation, so that is why height makes life better,” Deaton said.

In fact, the study found that after education and income are accounted for, height has an independent effect on an individual. Deaton called the research “a backward-looking study, confirming a prediction of earlier work, not a forward-looking one.”

The study used data from Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily polling, which interviewed 454,065 adults from January 2008 to April 2009. The poll asked respondents for their height and then had them gauge their lives. The poll also asked respondents to answer yes or no questions about feelings of “enjoyment, physical pain, happiness, worry, sadness, stress, and anger” from the day before they took the questionnaire.

In an July article for the journal Economics & Human Biology, Deaton and fellow researcher Raksha Arora reported that, when comparing the effect of an additional inch of height on a person’s happiness versus the effect of a change in income, they found “each additional inch of height has the same effect on reported life evaluation as a 3.8 percent increase in family income for women, and [a] 4.4 percent increase for men.”

Deaton and Arora found that taller people, on average, also reported higher levels of education and income, which may lead to a happier lifestyle. Men who do not hold a high school diploma are “half an inch … shorter than average, and are more than an inch … shorter than the average college-educated man,” and a similar but weaker effect was found for women.

The researchers associate the differences in education level and income to a person’s cognitive and physical development, even suggesting that there is good evidence that cognitive and physical characteristics develop together.

“Height is an indicator that you were well-nourished in childhood, when your brain and body were developing,” Deaton explained. “So taller people are less likely to have been nutritionally deprived as kids, so they get more education and more income.”

Chao Long ’13, who identified herself as being “average height,” said she has never noticed a difference in happiness based on height with those she interacts with.

“I don’t think it makes a difference,” Long said. “I think most of my shorter friends are actually happier … They’re small, cute and bubbly, so I’ve noticed no correlation.”

Other students, however, said their height did affect their contentment. “That is definitely true,” Andrew Slottje ’12 said when asked about a correlation between height and happiness. “I would definitely be happier if I were taller!”