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Does a taller husband make his wife happier?
Abstract
Although it has been known that women prefer tall men in mating for evolutionary reasons, no study has investigated whether a taller husband makes his wife happier. We analyzed two datasets (N. =. 7850) that are, together, representative of the Indonesian population to determine whether this is true. A greater height difference in a couple was positively related to the wife's happiness. This relationship gradually weakened over time and entirely dissipated by 18. years of marital duration. The husband's resourcefulness was a minor mediator in the relationship. We thus argue that the husband's height and its correlates made his wife initially happy, but their influence waned over time. Nevertheless, the long period of the dissipation indicates a powerful impact of male height on women's psychology, probably prepared by evolution.
... Accordingly, the role of height has changed in the marriage market. However, existing literature has not considered the effect of height differences between male and female partners on the process of social and structural change (Sohn, 2015b(Sohn, , 2016. Thus, there is a need to address this gap in the literature. ...
... In addition, if height is only valuable in the labor market, taller women are not preferred in the marriage market. Sohn (2016) analyzed the impact of height difference between husbands and wives on happiness in Indonesia and found that women with a taller spouse are more likely to be happy. 7 This observation is consistent with the argument that the gender division of labor becomes dominant in society because an increase in the number of women in the labor market increases the risk of marital disruption (e.g., Preston and Richards, 1975;Cherlin, 1992). ...
... The male preference for women mainly depends on socioeconomic conditions, while the female preference for men is often intrinsic and does not depend on socioeconomic conditions. Another possible interpretation is that the height difference between men and women is a critical factor for the marital couple (Sohn, 2015b(Sohn, , 2016; that is, women prefer men taller than themselves. Inversely, many men prefer women shorter than themselves. ...
This paper explores how the role of men and women’s height in the marriage market has changed across generations. Using individual-level data from Japan, we compared the effect of height on marriages between men and women, and investigated how the effect of height on marriage has changed across generations. Our key findings are: (1) for men born before 1965, a 1% increase in height led to an approximately 0.56% increase in the probability of being married. Conversely, for women born before 1965, a 1% increase in height led to an approximately 0.56% decrease in the probability of being married. (2) For men born in or after 1965, a 1% increase in height led to an approximately 1.05% (0.18%) increase (decrease) in the probability of being married (divorced). However, the height effect was not present for women. Japan experienced astounding economic development after World War II, which resulted in changes in its economic and social structure. These changes may have also altered the role of height for Japanese men and women in the marriage market.
... If the results are similar whether we included or excluded ever-married women under 30, selection bias is likely to be small. Sohn (2015dSohn ( , 2016a applied this idea in Indonesian marriage studies and demonstrated that selection bias in the IFLS was negligible. We followed the same logic and confirmed the null relation (Table A-1 in the ESM). ...
Researchers have claimed that the absence of a biological father accelerates the daughter’s menarche. This claim was assessed by employing a large and nationally representative sample of Indonesian women. We analyzed 11,138 ever-married women aged 15+ in the Indonesian Family Life Survey 2015. We regressed age at menarche on the interaction of father absence (vs. presence) and mother absence (vs. presence) at age 12 with or without childhood covariates. For robustness checks, we performed a power analysis, re-ran the same specification for various subgroups, and varied the independent variable of interest. All results produced a null relation between father absence and age at menarche. The power analysis suggests that a false negative was unlikely. Our review of the literature indicates that the claim of the relation between father absence and earlier menarche was based on weak statistical foundations. Other studies with higher-quality datasets tended to find no relation, and our results replicated this tendency. Therefore, the influence of father absence does not appear to be universal.
... We assigned a value of 1 to very unhappy and unhappy, 2 to happy, and 3 to very happy. The variable of happiness in IFLS4 appears to be valid because factors that are known to be associated with happiness in other countries have been also associated with happiness in IFLS4 to similar degrees [21][22][23]27]. ...
Purpose:
Although obesity and happiness are known to be negatively related in the developed world, little attention has been paid to this relationship in the developing world. We thus investigated the relationship in Indonesia and attempted to explain the underlying rationale.
Methods:
We considered about 12,000 respondents aged 15+ for each gender obtained from the Indonesian Family Life Survey 2007 by relating a measure of happiness to weight-related measures in ordered probit models.
Results:
The relationship between obesity and happiness was positive in Indonesia, and this relationship was robust. Our evidence suggests that the contrasting results for the two worlds result from affordability of obesity. That is, while even low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals in the developed world can afford to be obese, only high SES individuals in the developing world can do.
Conclusions:
Our findings imply that obesity prevention in the developing world requires different measures than those used in the developed world.
... In human mating, men are limited by access to fertile women while women are limited by access to resources for themselves and their offspring (Trivers, 1972). Therefore, it would be expected that men desire fertility-related traits in female mates more than women do, and women desire resource-related traits in male mates more than men do (Sohn, 2015b(Sohn, , 2016a(Sohn, , 2016b(Sohn, , 2016c(Sohn, , 2016d. When younger women are more fertile and older men have more resources, men would be more sexually attracted to younger women, and women to older men. ...
Both young and old men say that they are sexually attracted to young, fertile women, but older men tend to marry older women, including those who are peri- and post-menopausal. We assessed men's freely revealed preference for their mates' age using an unusual marriage phenomenon in South Korea: the practice in which men purchase their brides from developing countries. Presumably, the men's mate choice, at least regarding the brides' age, is unrestricted by women. We analyzed all first marriages reported in 2010–2014 in South Korea and compared men who married Korean brides (N = 1,088,457) with those who purchased their brides (N = 45,528); the age range of grooms and brides was 15–59. While the former exhibited the typical pattern where older men married older women, the latter, whether young or old, always married young, fertile women. This finding is consistent with men's stated preference for young, fertile women in mating and suggests that the typical pattern is generated by women's limiting role in mating.
... Cognitive capacity was a proxy of contemporary cognitive skills and related to risk incomprehension (Table A.3 in the online appendix). Height is widely known to reflect the nutritional and disease environment prior to adulthood (Sohn, 2014a(Sohn, , 2014d(Sohn, , 2015b(Sohn, , 2015c(Sohn, , 2015d(Sohn, , 2015e, 2015f, 2016a(Sohn, , 2016b, while weight is a measure of the present nutritional and disease environment (Sohn, 2014b(Sohn, , 2014d. By controlling for both at the same time, we indirectly controlled for body mass index. ...
Almost all theoretical and empirical studies implicitly assume that every economic agent understands the concept of risk. We exploited a unique feature of the Indonesian Family Life Survey and argued that this assumption may not apply to the developing world. A third of working men failed to understand the concept of risk, and this incomprehension did not result from a mistake or a preference for simple answers. Moreover, after applying OLS, we found that relative to risk comprehensive men, risk incomprehensive men earned 11.9 per cent less and possessed household assets worth 9.8 per cent less.
... We controlled for age because it is a basic demographic factor related to both smoking and weight-related outcomes; its squared term was intended to capture a potentially nonlinear relationship between the two. We controlled for height because tall people are generally heavier and height reflects early life conditions [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. We entered marital status because it is another basic demographic factor, but we found that it contributed little to explaining w. ...
Background:
It has been known that smoking is negatively related to weight-related outcomes. However, it has been difficult to determine whether the relationship is causal, and if so, how strong it is. We attempted to estimate the approximately causal effects of smoking on weight, body mass index (BMI), and obesity.
Methods:
The Indonesian Family Life Survey provided a sample of over 9000 men aged 15-55 years-each of them was observed in 1993, 1997, 2000 and 2007. The preferred method was a fixed effects model; that is, we related changes in smoking status or smoking intensity to changes in weight-related outcomes, while controlling for time-varying covariates. We also compared these results to those estimated by ordinary least squares and assessed the importance of controlling for time invariant individual heterogeneity.
Results:
Although the effects of smoking were precisely estimated in a statistical sense, their size was minuscule: a quitter would gain weight by at most 1 kg, or a smoker would lose weight by the same amount. The results were similar for BMI and obesity. When we did not control for time invariant individual heterogeneity, the size of the relationship was overestimated at least three times.
Conclusions:
Smoking exerted little influence on weight, and it was important to control for bias stemming from time invariant individual heterogeneity.
Objectives:
Height preferences and mating patterns related to body size vary across cultures yet it remains unclear why such between-population differences exist. Here, we test a hypothesis that nonrandom assortative mating is negative (mating with nonsimilar partners) in small isolated populations, and positive (mating with similar partners) in larger populations.
Methods:
We compared preferences for sexual dimorphism in stature (SDS, male height/female height) among men and women living in small isolated communities (as few as 60 inhabitants) vs larger urban areas (as many as 70 000 inhabitants). To increase generalizability, data were collected from heterogeneous populations in the South Pacific (Rarotonga vs Palmerston, Cook Islands) and Northern Europe (capital city of Tromsø vs villages in the Troms County of Norway).
Results:
Norwegians preferred a significantly larger difference in height between partners (median SDS ratio of 1.14) than did Cook Islanders (median SDS ratios of 1-1.04). Indeed, while 30% of Cook Island men and women preferred a partner of the exact same height, this preference was observed among less than 3% of Norwegian men and 7% of Norwegian women. Critically, distributions in SDS preferences did not differ by sex or population size. Thus, rural and urban dwellers within both countries showed similar positive assortative preferences for height, wherein own height explained up to 62% of the variability in preferred partner height.
Conclusions:
Our results do not support negative assortative preferences in small-scale communities, and further indicate that the "male-taller norm," while weaker among Cook Islanders than Europeans, is observed to some extent in the South Pacific.
In developed countries, the self-employed have been found to be more satisfied with their jobs than paid employees. We found the exact opposite for a developing country after analyzing 8732 respondents in the Indonesian Family Life Survey. The job dissatisfaction of the self-employed was not fully explained by earnings, personal traits, job characteristics, anticipation, or adaptation, but mostly by segregation into a small number of industries with few job benefits. This finding is consistent with the dual labor market theory. We also found that among the self-employed, those with the highest probability of being paid employees were the least satisfied. Paid employment was highly sought after in developing countries, and these were presumably self-employed workers with high abilities. This finding cannot be explained by the dual labor market theory alone. To explain this inconsistency, we enriched this theory with relative deprivation. Our results suggest that the existence of the dual labor market and relative deprivation are important determinants of the job satisfaction of the self-employed in developing countries.
Entrepreneurship is known to be important for innovation and economic growth, but relatively little attention has been paid to entrepreneurs in developing countries. We examined an important aspect of entrepreneurship: risk-taking. We analysed the Indonesian Family Life Survey and compared risk preferences between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs. We found that risk tolerant workers were more likely to be entrepreneurs than risk averse workers by about 5 percentage points, or about 20 percent of the proportion of entrepreneurs in the labour force. The results imply that not all entrepreneurs in Indonesia are pushed into the sector; some actively take risks and seek innovations. © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Bulletin of Economic Research and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Background:
Researchers typically use height to understand the growth environment, but recent evidence suggests that height does not reflect it well; height can be even misleading.
Aim:
We compared age at menarche and height to assess which better reflected the growth environment.
Subjects and methods:
We employed the Indonesian Family Life Survey to extract information on age at menarche from 7831 women and height from 7946 men, both aged 15-49 and born in 1944-1983. We drew on GDP per capita in childhood to represent the growth environment. We calculated the means of the two anthropometrics by birth decade. We then compared the trends in the two and regressed each on the growth environment and a time trend.
Results:
Between 1944-1953 and 1974-1983, the mean age at menarche decreased from 14.5 to 13.9, while height increased from 160.9 cm to 162.6 cm. Despite the expected broad trends, age at menarche was more closely related to the growth environment than height in graphs, correlation coefficients, and regression results.
Conclusion:
The results recommend using more than one anthropometric to investigate changes in the biological standards of living.
Body height influences human mate preferences and choice. A typical finding in Western societies is that women prefer men who are taller than themselves and, equivalently, men prefer women who are shorter than themselves. However, recent reports in non-Western societies (e.g., the Himba in Namibia) challenge the view on the universality of such preferences. Here we report on male and female height preferences in two non-Western populations-the Hadza (Tanzania) and the Tsimane' (Bolivia)-and the relationships between body height preferences and the height of actual partners. In the Hadza, most individuals preferred a sexual dimorphism in stature (SDS) with the man being much taller than the woman. Preferences for SDS and actual partner SDS were positively and significantly correlated in both men and women, suggesting that people who preferred larger height differences also had larger height differences with their partners. In the Tsimane', the majority of men preferred an SDS with the man being taller than the woman, but women did not show such a preference. Unlike in the Hadza, SDS preference was not significantly correlated to actual partner SDS. We conclude that patterns of height preferences and choices in the Hadza and Tsimane' are different than those observed in Western societies, and discuss possible causes for the observed differences between non-Western and Western societies.
This is the first initiative to collate the entire body of anthropometric evidence during the 19th and 20th centuries, on a global scale. By providing a comprehensive dataset on global height developments we are able to emphasize an alternative view of the history of human well-being and a basis for understanding characteristics of well-being in 156 countries, 1810–1989.
Pair formation, acquiring a mate to form a reproductive unit, is a complex process. Mating preferences are a step in this process. However, due to constraining factors such as availability of mates, rival competition, and mutual mate choice, preferred characteristics may not be realised in the actual partner. People value height in their partner and we investigated to what extent preferences for height are realised in actual couples. We used data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK) and compared the distribution of height difference in actual couples to simulations of random mating to test how established mate preferences map on to actual mating patterns. In line with mate preferences, we found evidence for: (i) assortative mating (r = .18), (ii) the male-taller norm, and, for the first time, (iii) for the male-not-too-tall norm. Couples where the male partner was shorter, or over 25 cm taller than the female partner, occurred at lower frequency in actual couples than expected by chance, but the magnitude of these effects was modest. We also investigated another preference rule, namely that short women (and tall men) prefer large height differences with their partner, whereas tall women (and short men) prefer small height differences. These patterns were also observed in our population, although the strengths of these associations were weaker than previously reported strength of preferences. We conclude that while preferences for partner height generally translate into actual pairing, they do so only modestly.
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This article identifies the effects of both own and spouses' education levels on individual economic satisfaction for European households. To that end, it estimates several specifications based on the family collective approach, for each of the 14 EU countries, by using the eight waves of the European Community Household Panel, 1994-2001. After demonstrating that the IV Hausman-Taylor procedure is the selected estimation method in the majority of cases, the empirical results show that male and female income satisfaction significantly increases when the husband achieves higher education qualifications in the majority of European countries. However, the positive effect of the wife's higher education on female income satisfaction only appears in a very limited number of countries. Additionally, increases in individual wage and nonwage incomes generally lead to higher satisfaction levels.
This paper tests whether one partner's happiness significantly influences the happiness of the other partner. Using 10 waves of the British Household Panel Survey, it utilizes a panel-based GMM methodology to estimate a dynamic model of life satisfaction. The use of the GMM-system estimator corrects for correlated effects of partner's life satisfaction and solves the problem of measurement error bias. The results show that, for both genders, there is a positive and statistically significant spillover effect of life satisfaction that runs from one partner to the other partner in a couple. The positive bias on the estimated spillover effect coming from assortative mating and shared social environment at cross-section is almost offset by the negative bias coming from systematic measurement errors in the way people report their life satisfaction. Moreover, consistent with the spillover effect model, couple dissolution at t + 1 is negatively correlated with partners' life satisfaction at t.
Answers to the questions ‘Does education influence happiness and if so, how and how much?’ depend on how one defines and operationalizes
‘education’, ‘influences’ and ‘happiness’. A great variety of research scenarios may be constructed from our three essential
variables. What public policies one ought to adopt and implement regarding the influence of education on happiness depends
minimally on which of the great variety of research scenarios one adopts and maximally on lots of other things as well. My
personal preference is for a robust definition of the three terms. Because human beings are complex organisms, an adequate
construction of the idea of human wellbeing must also be complex. Therefore, any discipline-driven, reductionist definition
that pyschologizes, medicalizes, economizes, geneticizes, socializes or politicizes the idea should be avoided.
We estimate mate preferences using a novel data set from an online dating service. The data set contains detailed information
on user attributes and the decision to contact a potential mate after viewing his or her profile. This decision provides the
basis for our preference estimation approach. A potential problem arises if the site users strategically shade their true
preferences. We provide a simple test and a bias correction method for strategic behavior. The main findings are (i) There
is no evidence for strategic behavior. (ii) Men and women have a strong preference for similarity along many (but not all)
attributes. (iii) In particular, the site users display strong same-race preferences. Race preferences do not differ across
users with different age, income, or education levels in the case of women, and differ only slightly in the case of men. For
men, but not for women, the revealed same-race preferences correspond to the same-race preference stated in the users’ profile.
(iv) There are gender differences in mate preferences; in particular, women have a stronger preference than men for income
over physical attributes.
KeywordsMate preferences-Dating-Marriage
JEL ClassificationC78-J12
In Western societies women prefer relatively taller men as potential partners, whereas men prefer women to be slightly shorter than them. Here we report data on relative height preferences in a traditional ethnic group, i.e. the Himba, in which men and women do not show such a strong preference. Thus our data challenges the view of a universal preference for taller men, by suggesting that height preferences may be influenced by environmental and ecological conditions.
Assortative mating for human height has long attracted interest in evolutionary biology, and the phenomenon has been demonstrated in numerous human populations. It is often argued that mating preferences generate this pattern, but other processes can also induce trait correlations between mates. Here, we present a methodology tailored to quantify continuous preferences based on choice experiments between pairs of stimuli. In particular, it is possible to explore determinants of interindividual variations in preferences, such as the height of the chooser. We collected data from a sample of 200 individuals from France. Measurements obtained show that the perception of attractiveness depends on both the height of the stimuli and the stature of the individual who judged them. Therefore, this study demonstrates that homogamy is present at the level of preferences for both sexes. We also show that measurements of the function describing this homogamy are concordant with several distinct mating rules proposed in the literature. In addition, the quantitative approach introduced here fulfills metrics that can be used to compare groups of individuals. In particular, our results reveal an important disagreement between sexes regarding height preferences in the context of mutual mate choice. Finally, both women and men prefer individuals who are significantly taller than average. All major findings are confirmed by a reanalysis of previously published data.
This paper focuses on preferences for specific characteristics in a potential partner using data from 1993 to 1999 provided by a French marriage bureau. We perform an econometric analysis of the various traits either sought or rejected in a potential partner, respectively by men and women. Our results are consistent with investment in marriage. On the one hand, men tend to reject vulgar and unfaithful women, meaning that they are likely to suffer serious fitness costs from infidelity. On the other hand, women dread meeting potential partners who are alcoholic, selfish or violent.
Indonesia's regional socio-economic data base extends over 30 years, so it is now possible to draw conclusions about regional development dynamics since the 1970s. We examine economic growth, inequality, convergence, structural change, demographic dynamics and social indicators over this period. There continues to be great diversity in economic and social outcomes, but growth and social progress have been remarkably even: the poorest regions, located mainly in Eastern Indonesia, have generally performed about as well as the national average. The better performing regions include those that are the most 'connected' to the global economy. In this respect, Jakarta stands out, growing richer than the rest of the country over time. As expected, conflict is harmful to economic development. There is no clear natural resource story: the performance of the resource-rich provinces has varied considerably.
Human mate preferences are known to be related to a number of morphological traits. Those relating to female waist-to-hip ratio or body mass index and to male height appear to be distinctive mate-choice criteria and are known to be related to reproductive success. In addition to absolute height, a possibly important mate-choice criterion may be relative height, i.e. the extent of sexual dimorphism in stature (SDS = male height/female height) between oneself and a potential partner. Here, I demonstrate that people adjust their preferences for SDS in relation to their own height in order to increase the potential pool of partners. This causes nonlinearity in assortative mating in relation to height and shows that in relation to intrapopulational SDS both men and women are responsible for stabilizing selection.
According to the hedonic treadmill model, good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality. The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure. The recent empirical work outlined here indicates that 5 important revisions to the treadmill model are needed. First, individuals' set points are not hedonically neutral. Second, people have different set points, which are partly dependent on their temperaments. Third, a single person may have multiple happiness set points: Different components of well-being such as pleasant emotions, unpleasant emotions, and life satisfaction can move in different directions. Fourth, and perhaps most important, well-being set points can change under some conditions. Finally, individuals differ in their adaptation to events, with some individuals changing their set point and others not changing in reaction to some external event. These revisions offer hope for psychologists and policy-makers who aim to decrease human misery and increase happiness.
We present evidence that psychological well-being is U-shaped through life. A difficulty with research on this issue is that there are likely to be omitted cohort effects (earlier generations may have been born in, say, particularly good or bad times). First, using data on 500,000 randomly sampled Americans and West Europeans, the paper designs a test that can control for cohort effects. Holding other factors constant, we show that a typical individual's happiness reaches its minimum - on both sides of the Atlantic and for both males and females - in middle age. Second, evidence is provided for the existence of a similar U-shape through the life-course in East European, Latin American and Asian nations. Third, a U-shape in age is found in separate well-being regression equations in 72 developed and developing nations. Fourth, using measures that are closer to psychiatric scores, we document a comparable well-being curve across the life cycle in 2 other data sets (1) in GHQ-N6 mental health levels among a sample of 16,000 Europeans, and (2) in reported depression-and-anxiety levels among 1 million UK citizens. Fifth, we discuss some apparent exceptions, particularly in developing nations, to the U-shape. Sixth, we note that American male birth-cohorts seem to have become progressively less content with their lives. Our results are based on regression equations in which other influences, such as demographic variables and income, are held constant.
This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons of well-being between spouses, i.e. aversion to unequal sharing of wellbeing inside couples. To our knowledge, this effect has never been taken into account by existing economic models of the household. The relation between happiness gaps and divorce may be due to the fact that couples which are unable to transfer utility are more at risk than others. It may also be the case that assortative mating in terms of happiness baseline-level reduces the risk of separation. However, we show that assortative mating is not the end of the story. First, our results hold in fixed-effects estimates that take away the effect of the initial quality of the match between spouses: fixed-effects estimates suggest that a widening of the happiness gap over time raises the risk of separation. Second, we uncover an asymmetry in the effect of happiness gaps: couples are more likely to break-up when the difference in life satisfaction is unfavourable to the wife. The information available in the Australian survey reveals that divorces are indeed predominantly initiated by women, and importantly, by women who are unhappier than their husband. Hence, happiness gaps seem to matter to spouses, not only because they reflect a mismatch in terms of baseline happiness, but because they matter as such.
Nutrition science is a highly fractionated, contentious field with rapidly changing viewpoints on both minor and major issues impacting on public health. With an evolutionary perspective as its basis, this exciting book provides a framework by which the discipline can finally be coherently explored. By looking at what we know of human evolution and disease in relation to the diets that humans enjoy now and prehistorically, the book allows the reader to begin to truly understand the link between diet and disease in the Western world and move towards a greater knowledge of what can be defined as the optimal human diet. Written by a leading expert Covers all major diseases, including cancer, heart disease, obesity, stroke and dementia Details the benefits and risks associated with the Palaeolithic diet Draws conclusions on key topics including sustainable nutrition and the question of healthy eating This important book provides an exciting and useful insight into this fascinating subject area and will be of great interest to nutritionists, dietitians and other members of the health professions. Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists will also find much of interest within the book. All university and research establishments where nutritional sciences, medicine, food science and biological sciences are studied and taught should have copies of this title.
This paper analyzes the Indonesian Family Life Survey to estimate the relationship between height and happiness in a developing country, Indonesia. This paper finds that tall men and women are happier than their short counterparts and that the magnitude of the relationship is large. More important, a parsimonious set of channels is identified to substantially explain the relationship between height and happiness: education and earnings for men, and education and relative position of earnings for women. However, for men but not for women, height still exhibits a non-negligible relationship with happiness even after controlling for an extensive array of covariates.
Background:
It has been argued that sexual stature dimorphism (SSD) can serve as an indicator of living standards. This argument is based on evidence that boys' physical growth is more sensitive to environmental conditions than girls' physical growth. Korea's economic growth in the second half of the 20th century has been unprecedentedly rapid, therefore it is likely there has been an increasing trend in SSD.
Aim:
To determine whether SSD can serve as an accurate indicator of living standards for a population that would exhibit a pronounced trend in SSD, providing that the logic for use of SSD is correct.
Subjects and methods:
We employed nationally representative Korean men born in 1941-1990 (N=17,268) and women born in 1941-1991 (N=22,543) and estimated mean heights by sex and birth years. We then calculated SSD values and charted the trend.
Results:
Although male height increased faster than female height, the SSD trend was flat for the pooled observations and for subgroups by socioeconomic status.
Conclusion:
Our results cast doubt on the argument for using SSD as an indicator of living standards.
Literature on the effect of birth month on height has generally considered regions in temperate climates. However, because many climatic conditions there change with seasons, it is difficult to isolate potential causes. This study estimated the effect of birth month and season on terminal height by analyzing the population of a country with only a few factors driving its climate.
The sample was derived from nationally representative data of the Indonesian population. We considered 9,262 men and 10,314 women 20-50 years of age. We applied cosinor analysis to a time series of height by birth month. We then applied a more flexible approach by regressing height on a series of dummy variables for birth month (and, subsequently, season) and birth year fixed effects by sex.
There was no statistically significant difference in height by birth month. However, although weakly significant, men born in the dry season (June-September) were 2.3 mm shorter than those born in the wet season (the remaining months). The corresponding figure for women was 2.6 mm, a statistically significant difference.
We eliminated some potential factors previously suggested in the literature, including insolation, the position of our planet with respect to the sun, food availability, and maternal workload. We speculate that babies born in the dry season were affected in the third trimester by the high disease burden that characterizes the wet season. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Few studies have examined spousal income in the context of happiness. This paper analyzes the Indonesia family life survey and finds a positive relationship between the husband’s income and his wife’s happiness. Specifically, a 100 % increase in the husband’s income is related to a 0.72 % point increase in his wife expressing very happy, which is about 11 % of the proportion expressing that response. Surprisingly, among the husband’s characteristics, only his income (along with health) is statistically significantly related to his wife’s happiness. This positive relationship is particularly strong among old, educated, and poor (in absolute and relative terms) urban residents.
This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth to examine how health-related characteristics and behaviors affect first marriage rates among young American adults. The results emphasize the importance of including health variables in models of marriage choice by demonstrating that persons with unhealthy behaviors (such as high levels of alcohol consumption and the use of hard drugs) and with physical characteristics that are typically associated with poorer past and future health statuses (obesity and short stature) have lower marriage rates than their healthier counterparts.
Objectives
While one group (Positive Group) has argued that leg length is a more accurate biomarker of early life conditions than height, another group (Negative Group) has challenged this argument. Analyzing Indonesian data, we attempt to reconcile these contrasting arguments.Methods
The sample consists of 4,193 men and 4,684 women, aged 40–70. We regress leg length, trunk length, and height each on education (a proxy for early life conditions), age, and ethnicity. We also adjust for hip size and shrinkage.ResultsThe relationship is statistically significant for leg length, which is generally consistent with the assertion of the Positive Group. However, the relationship is smaller than that for height, which is generally consistent with that of the Negative Group. Specifically, an additional year of schooling is associated with a 0.080 cm longer leg length for men and 0.078 cm for women. The corresponding figures for height are 0.260 cm and 0.201 cm. This remains true when the magnitude of the relationship is compared with the mean length.Conclusions
Small sample sizes appear to drive the Negative Group's finding that leg length is not statistically significantly related to early life conditions. However, the magnitude of the relationship confirms the Negative Group's argument that leg length is not a more accurate biomarker of early life conditions than height. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey, this paper elucidates the factors related to happiness in Indonesia. Some factors yield results consistent with those in the literature, but other factors such as unemployment and the female gender turn out not to be robust. Some attempts are made to purge endogeneity for past income mobility, social trust, and political environment. Also, measures with a more immediate impact on happiness are exploited for social trust and political environment. The sign of the coefficient on past income mobility is reversed once the variable has been purged of endogeneity. In addition, social trust and political environment are found to have little relationship with happiness.
Some important aspects of returns to education in Indonesia have been neglected. This paper draws on the Indonesia Family Life Survey, a longitudinal survey, to shed some light on these aspects. This paper finds in a Mincerian specification that a more recent rate of return is in line with the rates found in previous research. A quantile regression is applied to show that the rate varies little in the conditional distribution of earnings, which stands in stark contrast to findings from some developed countries. In addition, the rate of return in self‐employment is estimated to be lower than that in paid employment for person‐ and sector‐specific reasons. In addition to monetary returns to education, happiness returns to education are considered. This paper advances evidence that education has important and robust implications for happiness above and beyond absolute and relative levels of income.
Objectives:
We test (McIntyre and Kacerosky's [2011]: Am J Hum Biol 23:305-312) prediction that the relationship between age at menarche and height switches from negative to positive, in a unidirectional and smooth manner, as the society industrializes. According to this prediction, a mid-level industrial country should exhibit a weak relationship between the two variables.
Methods:
The 8,013 observations are extracted from the Indonesian Family Life Survey, a nationally representative survey. Indonesia is an intermediate case that exists between the small-scale agrarian societies and industrialized societies examined by McIntyre and Kacerosky. While age at menarche is a recalled and self-reported variable, height is a measured one. The relationship is informally provided in a figure and formally estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS).
Results:
The informal finding clearly shows no relationship between age at menarche and height. The OLS results also agree that the relationship is very weak. Specifically, despite the large sample size, the relationship is not statistically significant in a linear manner, regardless of whether the outlier group (age at menarche 10) is included or excluded. Various robustness checks are performed to confirm this finding.
Conclusions:
Our results lend support to McIntyre and Kacerosky's explanation as to why the relationship between age at menarche and height switches from negative to positive as the society industrializes. Furthermore, our results imply that the model (the Day and Rowe model) and theory (life history theory) on which this explanation is based are plausible.
We use large-scale register data on 450,000 Swedish males who underwent mandatory military enlistment at age 18, and a subsample of 150,000 siblings, to examine why tall people earn more. We show the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills, as well as family background and muscular strength for the height-earnings relationship. In addition, we show that a substantial height premium remains after these factors have been accounted for, which originates from very short people having low earnings. This is mostly explained by the sorting of short people into low-paid occupations, which may indicate discrimination by stature.
Analyzing the Indonesian Family Life Survey for the year 2007, this paper estimates that a 10cm increase in physical stature is associated with an increase in earnings of 7.5% for men and 13.0% for women, even after controlling for an extensive set of productivity variables. When the height premium is estimated by sector, it is 12.3% for self-employed men and 18.0% for self-employed women; a height premium of 11.1% is also estimated for women in the private sector. In the public sector, however, the height premium estimate is not statistically significant for either men or women. This paper provides further evidence of discrimination based on customers' preferences for tall workers.
The number of responses to personal advertisements can be a good source of information about preferences within the human mate market. From an analysis of responses to 551 advertisements placed by males in a local Lower Silesian (Poland) newspaper and 617 placed by females, we assessed which particular traits influenced the “hit rate” (the number of responses), using the Generalized Linear Model (GLM) with the number of responses as the dependent variable and traits offered by advertisers such as age, education level, place of residence, marital status, height, weight, offered resources, and attractiveness as the independent variables. The traits that appeared to influence the hit rate for advertisements placed by males were, in order of importance, education level, age, height, and resources offered, all of which were positively correlated with the hit rate. In contrast, certain traits advertised by females such as weight, height, education, and stated age were all negatively correlated with the hit rate. Resources offered by men had only a small positive effect and the advertising of general attractiveness by women had no effect at all on the hit rate, suggesting that respondents to personal advertisements rely much more on relatively objective traits, such as achieved education, male height, and female weight, than on those traits which are more open to subjective error or manipulation.
Despite the importance of marriage for the economic and demographic history of the nineteenth-century United States, there are few published estimates of the timing and incidence of marriage and no published studies of its correlates before 1890, when the Census Office first tabulated marital status by age, sex, and nativity. In this article I rely on the 1860 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series census sample to construct national and regional estimates of white nuptiality by nativity and sex and to test theories of marriage timing. I supplement this analysis with two new public use samples of Civil War soldiers. The Gould sample, collected by the U.S. Sanitary Commission between 1863 and 1865, allows me to test whether height and body mass influenced white men’s propensity to marry. Additionally, a sample of Union Army recruits linked to the 1860 census, created as part of the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death project, allows me to combine suspected economic, demographic, and anthropometric correlates of marriage into a multivariate model of never-married white men’s entrance into first marriage. The results indicate that nuptiality was moderately higher in 1860 than it was in 1890. In contrast to previous studies that emphasize the primary importance of land availability and farm prices, I find that single women’s opportunity to participate in the paid labor force was the most important determinant of marriage timing. I also find modest support for the hypothesis that height affected men’s propensity to marry, consistent with the theory that body size was a sign to potential marriage partners of future earnings capacity and health. [End Page 307]
Myers and Diener (1995) asked “Who is happy?” but examined the question of who is more and who is less happy In fact, most people report a positive level of subjective well-being (SWB), and say that they are satisfied with domains such as marriage, work, and leisure People in disadvantaged groups on average report positive well-being, and measurement methods in addition to self-report indicate that most people's affect is primarily pleasant Cross-national data suggest that there is a positive level of SWB throughout the world, with the possible exception of very poor societies In 86% of the 43 nations for which nationally representative samples are available the mean SWB response was above neutral Several hypotheses to explain the positive levels of SWB are discussed
Two meta-analyses were conducted to assess whether females desire male romantic partners who are as tall or taller than themselves more so than males desire female romantic partners who are of equal or shorter stature than themselves. A directional significance test of the difference between the weighted mean effect sizes (rs) for males and females showed that the strength of the effect of body height on dating/mating preference was greater for females evaluating males (r=.41)than for males evaluating females (r=.36). Homogeneity tests indicated, however, that the height effect was not consistent across studies included in each of the analyses. Overall, the findings render support for the male-taller norm in romantic attraction. Directions for future research based on potential moderators of the relationship between body height and dating/mating preference are provided.
This . . . book is the first to present a unified theory of human mating behavior. [It] is based on the most massive study of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide.
If we all want love, why is there so much conflict in our most cherished relationships? To answer this question, we must look into our evolutionary past, according to David M. Buss.
The book discusses casual sex and long-term relationships, sexual conflict, the elusive quest for harmony between the sexes, and much more.
Buss's research leads to a radical shift from the standard view of men's and women's sexual psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examines the role of height in the process of mate selection in two Italian populations at the turn of the twentieth century, Alghero, in the province of Sassari, and Treppo Carnico, in the province of Udine. Based on a linkage between military registers and marriage certificates, this study reveals a negative selection of short men on marriage and a differential effect of tallness by population in the process of mate choice. These findings emerge once SES is taken into account in the risk models of marriage.
Subjective well-being (SWB) comprises people's longer-term levels of pleasant affect, lack of unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction. It displays moderately high levels of cross-situational consistency and temporal stability. Self-report measures of SWB show adequate validity, reliability, factor invariance, and sensitivity to change. Despite the success of the measures to date, more sophisticated approaches to defining and measuring SWB are now possible. Affect includes facial, physiological, motivational, behavioral, and cognitive components. Self-reports assess primarily the cognitive component of affect, and thus are unlikely to yield a complete picture of respondents' emotional lives. For example, denial may influence self-reports of SWB more than other components. Additionally, emotions are responses which vary on a number of dimensions such as intensity, suggesting that mean levels of affect as captured by existing measures do not give a complete account of SWB. Advances in cognitive psychology indicate that differences in memory retrieval, mood as information, and scaling processes can influence self-reports of SWB. Finally, theories of communication alert us to the types of information that are likely to be given in self-reports of SWB. These advances from psychology suggest that a multimethod approach to assessing SWB will create a more comprehensive depiction of the phenomenon. Not only will a multifaceted test battery yield more credible data, but inconsistencies between various measurement methods and between the various components of well-being will both help us better understand SWB indictors and group differences in well-being. Knowledge of cognition, personality, and emotion will also aid in the development of sophisticated theoretical definitions of subjective well-being. For example, life satisfaction is theorized to be a judgment that respondents construct based on currently salient information. Finally, it is concluded that measuring negative reactions such as depression or anxiety give an incomplete picture of people's well-being, and that it is imperative to measure life satisfaction and positive emotions as well.
In contemporary Western populations, some physical characteristics are sexually dimorphic, and it is known that these traits also affect human mate preferences. Height is one such characteristic, and evidence suggests that females prefer taller over shorter males, indeed, taller males have been found to have greater reproductive success. However, relative height is also important with ‘Sexual Dimorphism in Stature’ (SDS) calculated as male height/female height. Pawlowski (2003) showed that people adjust their preferences for SDS in relation to their own height in order to increase their potential pool of partners. The aim of the present study was to replicate Pawlowski’s study on a larger sample of participants, and to investigate the universality of the reported preference adjustment within European societies. We present data of 1102 men and women from three countries (Germany, Austria, and the UK) that confirm Pawlowski’s original data on a Polish sample. Moreover, the mechanism of an adjustment of SDS preferences in relation to own height was found in all three countries, suggesting that height dependent partner preference is a genuine feature in Western societies.
To investigate the choices that people make in dating partners, we analyzed data provided by HurryDate, a commercial dating service aimed at adult singles living in major metropolitan areas. Here, we report data from 10,526 participants in HurryDate sessions, in which roughly 25 men and 25 women interacted with each other for three minutes and subsequently indicated which of the people they met they would be interested in having contact with in the future. We had general survey information collected by HurryDate for all the participants and additional survey information for 2,650 participants. Our main findings are that (1) HurryDate interactions are driven primarily by generally agreed-upon mate values and less by niche-based or assortative patterns, (2) the agreed-upon mate values for both men and women derive almost exclusively from physically observable attributes like attractiveness, BMI, height, and age and are not substantially related to harder-to-observe attributes such as education, religion, sociosexuality, having children, or desiring future children, and (3) small positive assortative trends arise in the areas of race and height. Our results provide rare behavioral evidence regarding people's preferences in dating partners. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)
This paper asks whether a gap in spouses' subjective happiness matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three large panel surveys to explore this question. Controlling for the life satisfaction levels of spouses, we find that a larger happiness gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. This association even holds for couples where both spouses are identified as being better off than in their outside option. We interpret this observation as reflecting a concern for relative utility. To the best of our knowledge, this effect has not been taken into account by any existing economic models of the household. The relationship between happiness gaps and divorce is consistent with the fact that couples who are unable to transfer utility are more at risk than others. It is also possible that assortative mating by happiness baseline level reduces the risk of separation. However, assortative mating cannot entirely explain the finding, as a widening of the happiness gap over time increases the risk of separation. We also uncover an asymmetry in the effect of happiness gaps: couples are more likely to break-up when the difference in life satisfaction is unfavorable to the woman. De facto, divorces appear to be initiated predominantly by women who are less happy than their husband. This asymmetry suggests that the effect of happiness gaps is grounded on motives of relative deprivation, rather than on a preference for equal happiness. The presence of this new argument in spouses' utility is likely to modify their optimal behavior, e.g. in terms of labor supply. It should also be taken into account for public policy measures concerning gender-based labor incentives.
Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for the husband to be taller than the wife, can help explain these ethnic-specific gender asymmetries. Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this significantly affects their marriage prospects with whites. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data from the Millennium Cohort Study. Specifically, we find that ethnic differences in propensity to intermarry with Whites shrink when we control for the proportion of suitable partners with respect to height.
Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience--the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.
The well-known association between height and earnings is often thought to reflect factors such as self esteem, social dominance, and discrimination. We offer a simpler explanation: height is positively associated with cognitive ability, which is rewarded in the labor market. Using data from the US and the UK, we show that taller children have higher average cognitive test scores, and that these test scores explain a large portion of the height premium in earnings. Children who have higher test scores also experience earlier adolescent growth spurts, so that height in adolescence serves as a marker of cognitive ability.
We examine the physical and mental health effects of providing care to an elderly mother on the adult child caregiver. We address the endogeneity of the selection in and out of caregiving using an instrumental variable approach, and carefully control for baseline health and work status of the adult child using fixed effects and Arellano-Bond estimation techniques. Continued caregiving over time increases depressive symptoms for married women and married men. In addition, the increase in depressive symptoms is persistent for married men. Depressive symptoms for single men and women are not affected by continued caregiving. There is a small protective effect on the likelihood (10%) of having any heart conditions among married women who continue caregiving. Robustness checks confirm that the increase in depressive symptoms and decrease in likelihood of heart conditions can be directly attributable to caregiving behavior, and not due to a direct effect of the death of the mother. The initial onset of caregiving, by contrast, has no immediate effects on physical or mental health for any subgroup of caregivers.
Contemporary populations of Homo sapiens are sexually dimorphic on a variety of traits. In terms of stature, men are reliably between 4% and 10% taller than women in well-sampled human populations. Are cross-cultural differences in the magnitude of sexual dimorphism consistent with expectations from sexual selection theory? Prior studies have provided conflicting answers to this question in part because they failed to agree on how the force of sexual selection should or could be operationalized. Here we offer a simple and unbiased method for operationalizing sexual selection and retest two separate predictions from earlier work (Alexander et al., 1979) about its expected impact on stature dimorphism in a sample of 155 societies. Neither prediction matches the observed cross-cultural distribution of dimorphism. However, this is not the consequence of a random distribution of dimorphism across societies. Instead, the data exhibit a robust and unexpected pattern.
Whether marriage causes people to live longer or whether healthier people select into marriage is an open question. In this study I followed a sample of men from age 18 to first marriage and ultimately to death. Health in early adulthood was represented by height and weight around age 20. The probability of ever marrying and the conditional probability of marriage in a given time period were lower for smaller men and greater for larger men. Marriage significantly lowered mortality risk even after controlling for health in early adulthood. Thus I found support both for selection into marriage and for protective effects of marriage.
Final body height is achieved as the result of a combination of genetic and environmental factors. The aim of this article is to review past studies on body height that have followed different scientific traditions. In modern Western societies, about 20% of variation in body height is due to environmental variation. In poorer environments, this proportion is probably larger, with lower heritability of body height as well as larger socioeconomic body height differences. The role of childhood environment is seen in the increase in body height during the 20th century simultaneously with the increase in the standard of living. The most important non-genetic factors affecting growth and adult body height are nutrition and diseases. Short stature is associated with poorer education and lower social position in adulthood. This is mainly due to family background, but other environmental factors in childhood also contribute to this association. Body height is a good indicator of childhood living conditions, not only in developing countries but also in modern Western societies. Future studies combining different scientific traditions in auxology are needed to create a more holistic view of body height.
What do social survey data tell us about the determinants of happiness? First, that the psychologists' setpoint model is questionable. Life events in the nonpecuniary domain, such as marriage, divorce, and serious disability, have a lasting effect on happiness, and do not simply deflect the average person temporarily above or below a setpoint given by genetics and personality. Second, mainstream economists' inference that in the pecuniary domain "more is better," based on revealed preference theory, is problematic. An increase in income, and thus in the goods at one's disposal, does not bring with it a lasting increase in happiness because of the negative effect on utility of hedonic adaptation and social comparison. A better theory of happiness builds on the evidence that adaptation and social comparison affect utility less in the nonpecuniary than pecuniary domains. Because individuals fail to anticipate the extent to which adaptation and social comparison undermine expected utility in the pecuniary domain, they allocate an excessive amount of time to pecuniary goals, and shortchange nonpecuniary ends such as family life and health, reducing their happiness. There is need to devise policies that will yield better-informed individual preferences, and thereby increase individual and societal well-being.
Short men are less likely to be married or live in a permanent relationship than their taller counterparts. This pattern is not due to their social status. While blue-collar workers are shorter on average than managers, the effects of height on finding a mate are similar in the two social groups. Being tall is also economically advantageous for men. With identical educational attainment levels, tall men have better careers than short men as they are given greater supervisory responsibilities. In making a commitment, some women might take height into account as an anticipated indicator of future resources of the household. Choice of partner is also influenced by social norms--i.e., partners should be physically well-matched--which is more difficult for shorter men.