The Luck Laboratory

Do you seem likeable? Just look at your Facebook page

Via the World of Psychology, I just came across a study published in this month’s Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “On being liked on the web and in the “real world”: Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior.” (Download here.)

The key finding was that participants rated as more likable in the flesh also tended to be rated as more likable based on their Facebook page. Video-recordings of the face-to-face contacts suggested it was participants who were more non-verbally expressive (through facial expression and tone of voice) who tended to be rated as more likable.

Similarly, participants with more expressive Facebook pages — for example having more photos available to view — tended to be judged as more likable.

Since this test was only conducted on 37 college students, it’s good sense to take the results with a “grain of salt,” according to PsychCentral’s World of Psychology, where I found the study. But there’s good reason for WoP’s apparent defensiveness: the title of their response, Your Facebook Page is a Mirror Reflection of How Well Liked You Are, doesn’t accurately relay one of the study’s main themes of impression management.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who knows someone with a ‘high degree of webpage expressivity’ whose apparent warmth is offset by other personality traits. As I’ve written about before with regards to dating websites, people are experience goods, meaning they’re impossible to judge on something as static as a Facebook page. Your impression of someone is different than how you’d actually get along, since we vary in differing situations, change over time, and other people’s personalities bring out differing aspects of our own.

People who displayed cues to social expressivity on their personal webpages also displayed nonverbal cues to social expressivity during the face-to-face interaction. Likewise, people who disclosed a lot of information about themselves on personal webpages also disclosed a great deal of information about themselves during the face-to-face interaction.

Of the study’s many unanswered questions, I’m most curious about what effect age has to do with this perception about high expressivity. It’s funny how non-digital natives see openness in person as a positive trait, but on the web, call it exhibitionism, obviously related to whether you think the internet is showing an extension of yourself, or that your web presence is something else entirely.

How to avoid the weisure lifestyle: deem yourself important enough for a break

I just read a new article on CNN.com that expounds on the increasingly intertwined lives of work and leisure, creating a so-called ‘weisure’ lifestyle. This is all a part of NYU sociologist Dalton Conley’s new book, Elsewhere, USA, in which he, according to the NY Times review, “shows himself to be a much more acute observer than analyst in his book on techno-distraction.” I’m going to ignore the atrocious decision to call the spillage of work into your everyday life ‘weisure’ because NYU is my alma mater. (But seriously, it’s hideous.)

Oriel Sullivan has done a lot of great work in this field, with studies like Inconspicuous Consumption: Work-Rich, Time-Poor in the Liberal Market Economy, and Busyness, Status Distinction and Consumption Strategies of the Income Rich, Time Poor. He’s shown that as income increases, time pressure increases: someone who makes $50 an hour feels much more pressure when he’s not working to maximize that “down time,” experiences more fragmented leisure time, and is more likely to take his work with him. Someone who’s making $9 as a data entry clerk, however, doesn’t have the same problems leaving their job when they clock out.

So, in the new ‘always-connected’ global economy, as income and disposable income increases, leisure time decreases. Oversimplification of the day: on one end, you have a lot of people with dusty yachts, and on the other, you have people with a lot of free time who can’t afford health insurance, who are often perceived as being lazy. A perceived lack of time, in a way, is the new marker of status, one in which people want to be seen as one who can’t take an hour off, lest the world crumble beneath them.

I’m reading Alain de Botton’s brilliant new book on the topic, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in which he summarizes the shift that occurred when work evolved past a necesary evil, and became something that could give us inherent meaning, overlapping with our passions and preferred leisure activities. The downside of this can be a little thing called burnout, when people don’t see the benefits of downtime. Maybe I’m missing something, but why do we say, ‘I am important and can’t stop working.’ Wouldn’t it make more sense to say, ‘I am so important that I am going to take some time off, because my genius must rest, and you will all have to deal with it’?

How to increase your luck: start today

Finally! It’s been a few days a week since I finally bought karlastarr.net, in anticipation for my new project. This is very blatantly inspired by various things I was reading last week, more or less simultaneously: Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, and John Mayer’s Twitter page. I pray that this is the only time in history those things have been combined in any fashion. (In the past few weeks, I’ve also: listened to everything of David Sedaris’s, including The SantaLand Diaries, finished Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and been thinking about life in general. I’m deep like that rethinking everything I know because of an impending birthday.)

Here’s the gist of what I want to know:

• How much of luck is truly random?
• Are some people are consistently luckier than others? Can’t we learn from them?
• How can we use or manipulate the laws of probability and randomness in our everyday lives?
• Can I increase my own luck? How?

There’s not as much written on luck as there is on, say, happiness, largely because of the very definition itself:
“the force that causes things, especially good things, to happen to you by chance and not as a result of your own efforts or abilities” (Cambridge International Dictionary of English)

I usually define it as probability interpreted personally, an unexpected or unforeseen beneficial occurrence; the kind of thing you can’t plan, which seems outside of your control. (Notice that the pushy American in me is already looking to manipulate this.)

New website! Same beloved Karla Starr

This new website is something I’ve needed for a long time. Why, you ask, when it pains you to know that you won’t be able to visit every website in existence before you die? Well, my old website wasn’t quite doing the trick; even my cat knows that .net is the new .com. (’.tv’ was the new thing, but now that Tuvalu, the island country whose internet domain is .tv is sinking, we’ve had to look elsewhere.)

Secondly, this isn’t just a domain change but a career change. The “country blues artist” period in my career, when I was content to grab a leopard print v-neck and go hang out by the creek with a tallboy for a few hours, is going the way of Tuvalu. Not it takes more than crap rock and song titles like “Dreamin ‘Bout Her Again,” songs that “[leave] an ailing heart comforted by a warm blanket” for me to be creatively fulfilled.

Writing–like calligraphy, film developing, or pony-training–is a stable, ages-old profession. Why not give this whole writing thing a spin while also trying my hand at displaying my other interests like design, photography, and the occasional hit of gratitude?

Managing time and finishing things when you can’t focus

I’ve read a few recent articles on attention and concentration, timed to the release of Winifred Gallagher’s new book, Rapt. The NY Times piece in particular, I feel, does a good job of exploring the difference betwen the urgent (checking your email) and the important (finishing that book). In short, it’s tricky because our brains are hardwired to respond to the urgent; more often than not we’re left scratching our heads at the end of the day, tired and wondering exactly what we accomplished that day that’s making us so tired.

“People get caught up in what happens to grab their attention,” says Leaf Van Boven of Cornell University, whose world-renowned psychology studies examine how our actions affect our happiness. “That is, what happens to call for their consumption in the moment, and they tend not to think very purposefully or mindfully in the decisions that they make. People are very adept at identifying the kind of experiences in line with their overall life goals. The challenge is really to be mindful of making decisions and consuming in a way that reflects underlying values.”

One key for me, I’ve discovered, is to make sure this doesn’t happen by removing all possible distractions. Not just through external means of turning off the internet, blocking addictive websites or turning off your phone, but with internal reinforcers:

• Having a clearly stated goal or task at hand that is to be accomplished in the time you’re sitting down (”finish this chapter” works better on a To Do list than “get my Master’s”)
• Write it down on a piece of paper in front of you alongside the related, overall goal, eg: ’study these words = become fluent in Mandarin’
• Giving yourself a sense of urgency by imposing a deadline
• Rather than waiting for the right time, allotting time in which you are to do nothing else
• Whenever you are tempted to check the score or interrupt yourself, just look on your sheet of paper: remember that every innocent Twitter update can turn into a lost 45 minutes online, which are preventing you from reaching your overall goal

Has the internet and technology killed expat life?

Part of the lag between my recent posts has been my recent move back to the U.S. after a year and a half in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I wanted to be a flaneur in a cheap, hip city that would let me enact my Gertrude Stein dreams while was still young, childless, and relatively untethered to life in the U.S. I was lured by the number of times that I’d read that Buenos Aires was “to the ’00s what Paris was to the ’20s,” envisioning a vibrant cultural scene and the next Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the make. But having just left that so-called expat paradise after a year and a half, I wouldn’t say that the famed “Paris in the ’20s” feeling isn’t in Buenos Aires; in fact, it’s not likely to ever exist again.

For starters, the so-called Lost Generation depended on physical locations to bring expat writers together, such as English-language bookstores, cafés, and periodicals: The Paris Review got its start during Paris’s second wave of expatriates in the 1950s; Shakespeare and Co. was founded in Paris a few decades prior, and published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. There are a few English language bookstores in Buenos Aires, and thanks to tourism boom since the economic crash, many regular bookstores now have English language sections. But compared to the ’20s, current writers and artists have no inherent need to find any such physical community to have their work validated or published. Maya Frost, a U.S. expatriate living in Buenos Aires, has a book forthcoming from Crown on May 19th of this year. While in Buenos Aires, she got her agent because of her blog, and arranged the entire deal—from proposal development to manuscript proofreading—via e-mail. Any writer or artist today only needs the internet to work or network. Literary magazines there have a much smaller potential audience than a literary magazine in the states; as a result, the best work is emailed overseas. At last year’s Buenos Aires Book Fair, one of the few panels featuring expat writers was a writing group that expounded on tips on how to use the internet to further your writing career. There wasn’t a need for a 21st century Shakespeare & Co. before the crash–and there’s no need for one now.

Many expats earn their living by telecommuting; who can afford the good lifestyle if you’re making pesos? While Hemingway earned his living in a similar fashion, by reporting for newspapers, budgets for freelance writers or foreign reporters aren’t what they used to be. So here’s a key difference: lots of expats have computer-based jobs, posing as consultants based in Washington, D.C.; it’s a Thomas Friedman article come alive, but with protagonists who spend more time on Facebook. Because they’re competing with others in Bangalore and NYC, their intensive work cut down on face-time. A recent MIT study showed that the internet is more isolating than TV.

Even if your friends have no need for jobs and enjoy hanging out face-to-face, transportation isn’t what it used to be. In the 1920s, a 4-5 day transoceanic liner was the only way to make the trek from the U.S. to Paris. The subsequent expansion of air travel has turned this process into one that’s comparatively cheap and painless. This relative lack of an initial investment in living in Buenos Aires also makes for an extraordinarily transient population: many rent apartments online—you can have a place lined up before you get there—stay for two months, and leave. Since it still seems like a great deal compared to Europe, study abroad programs are growing like weeds.

And yet, because it’s so easy for anyone to hop in and out, Buenos Aires is suffering from the same real estate problem of many large cities: the most affluent people in the world are buying lofts in Willamsburg, Paris, and Buenos Aires—spending a week in one before moving on—and helping to drive up rents for everyone else. Because of the opportunity for quick transportation and telecommuting, expat communities have sprung up all over; Shanghai, Beijing, Berlin, Jakarta. You can find a website for nearly every international city, each claiming to be an expat hub. But each filled with people who may:
-spend less time abroad, frequently going home for holidays
-can easily work and socialize with other foreigners