For example, a person who feels inferior because they are shorter than average (also known as a Napoleon complex) due to common modern day heightism may become overly concerned with how they appear to others.
[3] It may also cause an individual to be prone to flashy outward displays, with behavior ranging from attention-seeking to excessive competitiveness and aggression, in an attempt to compensate for their either real or imagined deficiencies.
[7] It was also used on occasion by Freud's sometime colleague Carl Jung,[8] (who first employed the term complex in general as the denotation for a group of related ideas that conform to a certain pattern).
In his PhD dissertation, Guy Hutt found that in students who display difficulty with math classes, the subject can become associated with a psychological inferiority complex, low motivation and self-efficacy, poor self-directed learning strategies, and feelings of being unsafe or anxious.
Additionally, inferiority complexes show small, negative relationships with conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion, but are positively related to Machiavellianism and narcissism.
Differentiated by Adler from a normal desire for social recognition, the superiority complex results in vulgar displays of self-worth or status, stemming from underlying feelings of inferiority – sometimes judged by observers to appear as a form of imposture.