Why does it seem like when you’re little, high schoolers seem so tall and big. But when you reach their age you don’t even seem that tall?
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Besides what others have said, there’s also confirmation bias and sample bias. I’ll give you examples for both.
When I was a high school freshman… I didn’t look like I belonged in high school. I was the smallest in my class and was actually mistaken for being 11 once (and when I was a senior, I was mistaken for a freshman). Had you seen me, you would have probably thought “Oh, he cannot be a high schooler, because high schoolers are tall and big, and that kid isn’t.” That would have been an attempt to confirm a wrong idea you already had: confirmation bias.
And as a reply to ajcpullcom: when you were a teenager you thought 40-year-olds were old and lame, because you only met a small, specific category of 40-year-olds: namely, teachers. They had power over you, they ordered you around, they told you to stop doing what you considered fun, they wanted discipline, and they were genuinely not fun. But then you applied a generalization: you believed that if all 40-year-olds you met (a small sample of the population) were like that, then absolutely every 40-year-old in the world was like that. That was sample bias.
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