You find it confusing that “looking up” is confused with “looking up”? I find it surprising that the well-known connection isn’t obvious to everyone. Perhaps the expression has fallen out of use? The expression is there: the meaning is obvious: the question is to what extent the derivation survives childhood.
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Good points to discuss here just above. I suppose I’d respond this way.
I would never consciously respect somebody due to their height. The idea I might do so consciously is very strange to me. Evidence is that many (most?) people seem to unconsciously accord something like respect or at least deference to people taller than themselves. I might be subject to some of that, but for damned sure if I notice myself doing it, I’ll consciously push back against it as just another form of dumb bias.
I can certainly see a parent being proud of a child’s accomplishments. And also proud that the kid who started out so little ended up bigger than Mom or Dad. And yes, Dad can respect what the kid has done as well.
Just don’t expect the other Dads in the crowd to react that way to your kid. They’re too busy doing it to their own kid.
Yes, the reason I posed the question to myself is, if anybody actually ever looks up to me, that would help reconcile me to my condition in life 
You conveniently left off the words “at” and “to” in your quote because those mean different things.
The expression “look up to someone” is common and everyone knows what it means. No one uses it to mean “showing admiration for someone taller.”
Are you instead asking an etymological question about why a phrase about admiring someone uses the language of “looking up to” implying that the person being admired is taller/bigger? That is a completely different question than you asked in your OP.
Going back to carefully read the OP & their mid-thread responses I now share @Eyebrows_0f_Doom’s confusion.
I’d like to see the OP completely restate whatever they’re trying to discuss assuming no context from anything already said by anyone in the thread.
Then maybe we can have a coherent discussion about whatever idea that might be.
I have to wonder if the other co-authors were named Maavericks, Ceeltics, and Buuls.
For another reason why taller men might be more successful, one possibility might simply be that significant height is easy to notice. Being noticed isn’t a guarantee of success, but it’s definitely necessary for it.
I’m also curious about the height-success relationship in women. My uninformed guess would be that women of above-average height are more successful than average or short women, but that women of extreme height (say, over 6’) are at a disadvantage (except in specific fields like some sports).
It’s not an expression I personally use much.
In general I sometimes wonder if tall people have a slightly wider normal distribution. It would not surprise me if, considering whole populations and not individuals, they turned out to be both more likely to be ingratiating with deep empathy and social skills, or more arrogant with far less skills. However, this might also be untrue, and related to the fact that some people are more noticeable and so are subject to more assumptions with less validity.
There have been studies on income difference for tall people. The studies I have seen add up to a few dozen thousand dollars over decades of work.
Pride in your kids is such a strange thing. It’s no reflection of my effort or achievement that my kid has grown up tall. My culture doesn’t value pride – I’m embarrassed to feel pride about something so unrelated as how tall my kid is. And yet there it is.
You conveniently replaced the word “to” with “at” in your post apparently because you wanted to mean something different. On that subject, I will agree that using “at” means something different. I invite you to respond to the question posed by the title of the thread: do you look up to people that are taller than you?
You may use the five links I posted above as essay prompts.
A simple “no” is a satisfactory answer: changing the question is also acceptable in My Humble Opinion, as is misunderstanding, but please don’t blame me for your re-writing.
I know about the statistics.
But when I think about the actual people who in my life I’ve either really respected or significantly not respected, I’m really not seeing it.
I wonder if the extent of the attitude is affected at all by one’s own height?
While one’s growing up, most people smaller than g-you are younger and less experienced. Maybe people who grow up to be in the taller half of the population tend to subconsciously keep thinking that people shorter than them must be younger and less experienced?
Excellent observation. Thanks for picking that out. I completely agree
But I’d emphasize looking at it from the opposite direction. …
We all grow from first consciousness through WAG mid-teen recognizing that both adults and older kids are both bigger, and wiser, more educated, and just generally better at being complete humans than we mere apprentice human littles. Each year we get better but the bigger kids get better too, retaining their lead.
The problem comes in when we carry the habit forward into our late teens and on into adulthood. Valuing full-grown size as a now-defective proxy for age, wisdom, leadership, etc. It used to be a good proxy. But not any more once adolescent growth ends and we’re just looking at full-grown size disparities.
I’m reminded of something the late comedian Bill Hicks said. When asked in Europe whether he was proud to be an American, he shrugged and said, “I didn’t have much to do with it. My parents fucked there”.
What are you even talking about? You replied to BigT’s post of “The confusion is about why looking up at someone would in any way mean anything about looking up to someone” and you wrote
Since you apparently are actually asking if people look up to strangers just because they are tall, I remain utterly baffled by the idea. No. Of course not.
Exactly. I was trying to be helpful because the OP claimed he couldn’t understand why people found his OP confusing. It’s because none of his examples seemed to have anything to do with looking up to people for being taller.
I then went on to clarify that most people were answering the question in the title with “No, I don’t look up to people who are taller than me. That would seem odd to me.”
I didn’t give an answer of my own, but, well, no. I don’t look up to family who are taller, and I don’t look up to strangers who are taller. I am a tall person. Someone being taller than me just makes me think “wow, someone taller than me? That’s rare!”
The only person in my family who is taller than me is very much not someone I look up to, as, among other things, he almost got his foot cut off because he refused to take medication despite having super high blood sugar. I don’t hate him or anything, but he’s very much not a role model.
As for if there is any connection between the idea of physically turning one’s head and thinking of someone as a role model? I personally doubt it. I suspect “looking up to” came from the idea of putting someone on a pedestal, a place of honor, and had nothing to do with their height.
Yes, there is a subconscious bias to see people who are taller as being better leaders and other such things. But I don’t think that’s where the phrase came from.
I was originally about 6’2" before I got shrunken by age, so this hasn’t been an issue for me. I do, however, apparently have other issues.
I recall with shame having once had a conversation about some technical issue with a beautiful young woman who worked in our office. It was only later that my demeanour dawned on me in retrospect, and I commend the young lady for her restraint in not saying to me, “Hey! My face is up here!”
I have to look up to people who are taller than me. I’m only 5’8".
But there are some taller than me, who look up to me. Oh, sure, they may be over six feet. But I’m their lawyer. “Looking up to Spoons’ knowledge and advice,” is kind of what my clients expect to do.
I would like to think that I’m completely immune to primate psychology and evaluate everyone purely on their merits, and do not form any kind of immediate gut first impression, but that’s kind of idealistic.
Talking about just gut first impressions of course, but when I meet someone tall, there’s the immediate assumption that they are probably higher status, higher power, and higher in all sorts of ways.
There’s the factor of visual commanding presence, but I think also the primate-social factor of, others probably look up to this person, they probably enjoy more deference and opportunities than others, they’re probably more well-connected than others, so I have to be a little more cautious in my estimation of them. There could be more to them than just their physical height.
Once getting to know someone of course all of that changes. I’ve known tall men that were complete idiots, but still had to be reckoned with, because everyone else admired them. It’s kind of infurating to be honest. Social animals don’t have the luxury of evaluating one another purely on their own merits, we have to reckon with others’ perception of them, and people defer to tall people.
Dilbert:
I read an article that advanced this theory years ago. Psychology Today maybe?
For the first 16 years or so of our lives, everyone stronger and in authority is taller than us. We become hardwired to associate “taller” with stronger, in charge, competent, etc.
Was 5’6" at my peak. Now 5’5 as my guess. If that. I was also at the young age in my grade.
I definitely do not look up to tall people, but if I’m honest with myself, I may be a bit uncomfortable around them, and even a bit intimidated at times? It is I think a sort of implicit bias. Subconsciously I think I don’t trust them as much as I do people closer to my own height. It’s not their fault they are that tall.
Back when I was single I did not have the confidence to go up and ask a woman much taller than me to dance at a party. Just intimidated.
