The Luck Laboratory

Retouched photos, changed impressions

I’ve been reacquainting myself with Photoshop lately, that great application that lets you and Fox News do creepy things like this (a manipulated photo of a reporter at the New York Times) and it begs to be said: it’s so easy to manipulate a photo. I, who am unable to draw a straight line with a ruler, could have made Jacques Steinberg look even uglier; hell, with Adobe’s infamous “charisma filter,” you can give Obama the impression of being quite similar to Rush Limbaugh.

I have a few photographer friends, and they’re constantly tweaking their photos, post-production, aiming for aesthetic excellence. Some of these revisions are technical, like changing the color levels to more clearly see a face, or cropping out unwanted scenery. But how much of a photo do you have to change to bend the truth? After the New York Times got wind that Edgar Martins, a Portuguese photojournalist they’d hired to document halted construction projects, had digitally altered the photos, they took them down. You can still see his unnatural love of symmetry here, here and here; there’s a great discussion of it all on Metafilter.

I applaud the New York Times for its decision, but can’t help but wonder about all of the photos that fall through the cracks: journalists are notorious watchdogs of other journalists, but rarely do any trained eyes with a public format scrutinize visual media in such a way; when they do, we find out about Reese Witherspoon’s changing face, not photos of everyday events. But why would anyone accept a photograph that’s been altered at all, and why does that seem so much less heinous than altered quotes or statistics?

Ubiquitous photos and videos have made people demand them (it’s the “I call BS unless you give me photos” syndrome), but most people don’t seem to realize how easy it is to alter them. And how quickly we form first impressions: we only need to see a face for 100 milliseconds before drawing a conclusion about it, and our first impressions are overgeneralized, even though we know we shouldn’t. Is there any hope for us at all?

Want to be happy? Invest in experiences, not things

How can we maximize our happiness this summer? As Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich have demonstrated in numerous studies, including “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question” (pdf available here), experiences provide people with more happiness than things.

“The things we own deteriorate over time, and we habituate to them quickly,” Van Boven told me last year. Later, we’re not left with the initial rush we get from driving out of the lot of the BMW dealership, but with the reality of its poor mileage, obsessing over its care, getting the transmission replaced, and worrying about it getting stolen. Memories from the end, thanks to a cognitive quirk known as recency effect, are especially prone to standing out.

What makes experiences so much better–or why should you go on vacation instead of getting a new car? For one, memories of static events “age like fine wine,” and are later open to positive reinterpretation.

Large events like trips can change lives; moments are a meaningful part of our identity. We tend to reminisce about our trips in Tahiti, not expensive watches.

Most importantly, experiences contribute to relationships, and quality of our relationships is the number one predictor of happiness. Goods we buy can isolate us. Having a car means you never get to meet anyone on the bus; having your own exercise bike means you never meet anyone at the gym or the park. Special memories are made of moments. A flat screen TV in itself is no good; inviting friends over and having a party for the game is what makes it great. You don’t bond over clothes, you bond over browsing for clothes with a friend, or going to someone’s house to borrow something.

It’s true that there’s gray area; some goods, like a bicycle, you get to have experiences. If the goal is to ride your bike rather than show it off, any bike will do. In the example above, a cheap fishing pole would do just as nicely. The key is getting to the lake in the first place.

Anxious about money this summer? You need a vacation more than ever

Recently, the State Department altered its estimate of how many passports it will be issuing in 2009; in December, fiscal year 2009 seemed poised to grant 17 million passports. Now, it’ll be lucky to hit 12 million. A recent poll conducted by Allstate found that this year, nearly half of all Americans are reducing their travel plans.

In hard times, the first thing to go is actually the most important: a vacation. Though traveling has long been seen as a frivolous venture ripe with classist guilt, it’s been proven to decrease stress levels, act as a buffer against illness, increase sense of self-efficacy, and change perspectives.

A 2007 study from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (”The Recovery Experience Questionnaire”) found that of the four classifications that the researchers used to quantify recovery from burn-out—psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery, and control—psychological detachment from work “might be the most relevant recovery experience.”

Why is getting away from work so important? Because, as science has proven since 1986, as anecdotes have shown since the advent of the family getaway, and as stated in the very definition, a vacation forces us to spend lots of time with non-work areas of our life. Other life domains such as family and leisure life gain salience; if iPhones can be turned off momentarily, we begin to realize that our cubicles and nameplates may not be everything. And many of the small joys or transcendent experiences of a vacation often revolve around small things experienced anew: walks in nature, lots of unstressed time to play, leisurely card games, going to sleep without setting the alarm. “A Vacation from Work,” by John W. Lounsbury and Linda L. Hoopes (download here), puts it best: “Life satisfaction… showed a significant increase after a vacation.”

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.)

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

Why Living Abroad Makes You Creative

A great new study was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the relationship between living abroad and creativity. There’s now abundant evidence to add to what generations of expats have known all along: living in a foreign environment, or in a multicultural experience, mitigates creativity. Interestingly, this increased creativity doesn’t hold true for people who had spent time traveling abroad, just for those who had lived abroad. The level of cultural immersion, not the length of time spent abroad, emerged as a key factor determining creativity.

Living abroad, in my experience, is an exercise in 24-hour creative problem-solving. The daily activities of going to the bank or eating at a friend’s house, while time-consuming, become repeated to the point of automation. In contrast, living abroad–

-makes you break down each activity and rework unmanageable steps
-prompts you to navigate cultural or linguistic unknowns on a regular basis; try talking to the guy at the hardware store when you’ve completely forgotten the name of what you’re looking for
-relax your ideas of functional fixedness, wherein you are only able to conceptualize things according to one set of norms
-lets you pretty much second-guess everything you do the entire time, which in turn prompts different ideas about how to walk, eat, etc.

While it’s certainly true that the study may have been an examination of correlation and not causation–the kind of person who would live abroad may have already been more open to new experiences–but even priming the experience of living abroad raised the participants’ creativity level. My theory that living abroad is cognitive calisthenics still stands.

Why online dating fails: people are experience goods

Online dating doesn’t work. But this has implications even if you’re not on eharmony.com. The sexily-titled “People Are Experience Goods: Improving Online Dating With Virtual Dates,” published late last year in the Journal of Interactive Marketing, provides some clues. We can’t just match people with each other the way we’d match people with static products, the way Amazon.com’s recommendation service does. (I wrote a feature a while back on recommendation technology.)

What can be searched for in profiles–eye color, income, weight–aren’t at all related to the actual experience of dating someone. On paper or online, Brad Pitt is perfect. But there’s a sizable gap “between the kinds of information people both want and need to determine whether someone is a good romantic match and the kind of information available on online dating profiles.” Sites like eHarmony.com that test and match people on “29 dimensions of compatibility” can’t reliably transfer over to real life. On-the-fly interactions are crucial for interpreting personality and sense of humor; things like loyalty can only be gauged over time. As study co-author Zoe Chance told me, “Dating is much more complicated because our personalities change depending on whom we’re with.”

Another study (”‘Shopping’ for a Mate: Expected versus Experienced Preferences in Online Mate Choice,” available here) examines the effect of choice overload and its consequences on dating behaviors. Yes, there is such a thing as having too many options–especially since, as stated above, even though you may want a partner with blue eyes, whether he or she has blue eyes has no bearing on your actual interactions together. And then there’s the whole value inherent in stepping outside of your comfort zone. As I’m reminded in the excellent book The Black Swan, one of the problems with prediction is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We’re notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy, despite a tendency to cling to certain ideas about what kind of profession, brand of jeans, or tattoos our ideal partner would have.

So for people who mistakenly think that they’re saving time by going online to find things like dating partners or new careers, just remember that there’s no shortcut to going out on an actual date.

Short blog posts = good. For some.

I was cleaning out my Bloglines account of unread articles–I’m convinced that having 22 unread emails, 117 articles pegged for immediate reading and 3,209 unread posts cannot be good for you or your anxiety levels–and came across one on the pros of having shorter blog posts.

I get that the blog post is short. I get that people who read blog posts are probably doing it the way I’m doing it, just skimming a bunch of things in the off-chance that something catches your eye. My problem is that nearly every comment is somewhere between “I lost interest after 500 words” and “…. what?” Seriously, people, are we that inept? The “gosh, that was long” comment seems especially common in articles that seem to attract the type of person you’d associate, albeit in a stereotypical manner, with having a short attention span. Such as those who like to read about video games.

To those who leave lots of ‘I can’t focus’-type comments, I say this: I find it hard to believe that there isn’t one single topic in the world that would hold your attention for longer than 350 words or a minute, especially since you’re taking the time to leave comments. That has to take what, like a minute? At least? Didn’t anyone ever warn you about what happens to people with short attention spans?