The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

There’s a fascinating finding in economics that taller men earn more money throughout their careers, but that it is their height at sixteen, not at thirty, that best predicts their earnings. The reason for this, as other studies have shown, is that this is when men decide their status, and shape their personalities accordingly. So what employers are rewarding are the attributes of self-confidence and ambition that came partly from being a tall, strong football player at school, rather than the height of the person today. Women tend to decide their status based largely on relative attractiveness, and they judge their attractiveness based on how others seem to judge them. In both sexes therefore, says Harris, there is a tendency to settle some aspects of your personality in the mid-teens, based on how high you think your relative status is amongst your peers. That, she thinks, is the likely cause of the differences in personality that are not directly or indirectly genetic.