Rick Santorum Doesn't Look Presidential

[pebblegrain]



"Mitt claims he's 6'2"." If he really claims it - tall people usually don't fudge their height.

They do when their competition is taller than them

 

[mensimageconsultant]

Just a note about Carter: it appears that his image was more dominant before he became President. Then he aged rapidly, became known as a sweater-wearer, etc.

Well he also ran against Gerald Ford, who didn't generally appear all that Presidential - especially after Chevy Chase's impressions on SNL. Plus, there were a lot of extenuating circumstances including the fact that Ford hadn't actually been elected as VP or President... Oh yeah, and there was that little thing called Watergate and the fact that Ford made the decision to pardon Richard Nixon.

There's much more to these things than appearance. Image, however, is underestimated. Carter also had to win the primary. Arguably against weak competition. One of the stronger opponents being Jerry Brown, who must have looked too young then in the eyes of many voters.

 

[Svenn]



They do when their competition is taller than them

Yea, I think there's a misconception out there that tall guys are more secure in their height, but I've found they fudge and fret over it just as much as middle-heighters, possibly because it's an important component of their personality or vanguard of their confidence... I've noticed it's short guys that are often the most honest with their stature. Though folks like Sarkozy aren't really helping their cause

 

[mensimageconsultant]

Statistics on height-related lying in online dating suggests that the tall men are in fact relatively secure about their height. "For both men and women, short participants tended to overestimate their height more than tall participants."
https://www.msu.edu/~nellison/hancock_et_al_2007.pdf
When tall men say they are taller than they are, it's probably because they are mistaken about their current height. Perhaps that includes Romney.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6823/7/2
The second source happens to say that, "Among the fathers there was a trend of more substantial height overestimation in the group of average men than the group of taller or shorter men." Which suggests that short men might be more aware of their true height than other men, among some possibilities. Random question: in absolute or relative terms, do tall people generally shrink more in old age than other men? Edit: Data is suggestive of that - "taller men lost height faster than shorter men did."
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/150/9/969.full.pdf