The Warren Harding Error

Recently I was reading about the subconscious decisions we make. On the conscious level we do not treat tall people differently than we treat short people. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that height---particularly in men---triggers a certain set of very positive unconscious associations. About half the companies on the Fortune 500 list were asked questions about its CEO. Overwhelmingly, the heads of big companies are white men. But they are also almost all tall: on average, male CEOs were just a shade under six feet tall. Given the average male is five foot nine, that means that CEOs as a group have about three inches on the rest of their gender. This statistic understates the matter. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or taller. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six feet two or taller. Among the CEO sample, almost a third were six feet two or taller.

It is possible to staff a large company with white males but it is not possible to staff a large company without short people. There simply aren't enough tall people around. Yet few of those short people ever make it to the executive suite. Being short is probably as much a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African American.

This stereotyping is not limited to the executive suite. Researchers who analyzed four large studies that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood calculated that when corrected for variables such as age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary. That means that a person who is six feet tall but otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five will make on average $5,525 more per year. One of the authors, Timothy Judge, points out, "If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage."

It appears when making some very important decisions we may not be as rational as we think.

What is called the Warren Harding Error is, in its simplest form, the decision he would make a good president based solely on his appearance which was tall, dark, and handsome. The word "Roman" was occasionally used in descriptions of him. He served two years before dying unexpectedly of a stroke. He was, most historians agree, one of the worst presidents in American history.