Decorating my apartment: on a budget

So when I moved into a new apartment a few months back, I got a chance to rethink what I wanted to do with all the bare walls in my new place.

Here's a few options I endorse that are way cheaper than buying original artwork, and allow you to have a bit of fun in the process.

For the living room:

1) Purchase a large piece of canvas. You can get this at a local hobby store. Throw on some paint, magazine cutouts, glue whatever you want to it really, it's your own work of art. Put that on the wall and you'll have lots to talk about when your friends show up at your next party.

For anyroom:

2) Buy colored contact paper. Glue it to the wall in any arrangement you like. Use bright colors and aim for a repeating pattern, but not too obvious.

3) Hang photographs in a very structured, organized manner. It can add color to any boring wall:




4) "Rasterbate" a photograph, then put it on a wall. Think of this as your own personal Seurat-like painting. See pictures of what these look like, here.

Here's an example:





So that should get you started with how to add some spice to your wall-space.

Go out there, have some fun, optimize.

I'll upload some photos once I've finished.

Impression Management: aka Acting Smart

"All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players"
-William Shakespeare

Academia is a wonderful place to be.

When you're not impressing others with your research, you can impress others by "acting smart".

In the business-world, this is referred to as "impression management".

So, like a good scientist, I looked to see if there is any empirical validity to the behavior of 'acting smart'. Does it help? Can it really be that important?

The single study I managed to find indicated that it does or doesn't help, depending on who you ask.

This study manipulated one group into 'acting smart' during a social interaction and compared them to controls.

What it found was that people who were instructed to "act smart" manipulated a few particular behaviors, but these had no influence on the IQ ratings attributed to them by the person with whom they were talking.

What this means is that, if you are in a one-on-one conversation, your partner is probably too busy thinking about the conversation to give any attention to your smart-acting behaviors.

However, when judges were asked to rate videos of the conversations, the people in the "act smart" condition were rated as slightly more intelligent.

So if want to use this knowledge to optimize your life, what you can take from this study is that if you are talking to one person, don't worry about behaving intelligently.

But if you are having a conversation with someone, and happen to have an audience, then, by all means, act as smart as humanly possible, if that's your interest. Your audience just might buy it.

As for impressing that audience, these data suggest that "looking while speaking" is used as a cue for intelligence. And having a "serious face" was not.

So go out there, stare people down while you are speaking, and deceive others into thinking you are more intelligent than you really are....

Until next time...