HOW TO LOOK SMART
Are you fooling others about your intellect … or are they fooling you about theirs?
It isn’t easy to walk that fine line between pretentious and intellectual.
SHEEPISHLY, Kevin Adkins admits that when he’s feeling insecure, he uses big words to appear smarter. “Only when I need to impress the person,” says the 41 year old. “Dates with women? Definitely. At the grocery store? Not so much.”
Recently, when flirting with a stylist at the barber shop, he asked her to give him a ‘symmetric’ haircut, instead of just telling her to trim it evenly. And when he gave an attractive woman directions, he made a
point of telling her that the two options they discussed were ‘equidistant’ rather than simply saying that both were about the same distance.
Adkins isn’t alone. Researchers have documented how people try to appear smarter or use criteria to decide whether others are smart. Many judgments are rooted in stereotypes, yet they persist.
“PEOPLE LOVE TO TAKE shortcuts when forming impressions of people,” says Bogdan Wojciszke, a professor of
social psychology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Sopot, Poland, who studies how we form impressions of other people. “We tend to make judgments based on easy cues, without thinking too much.”
Because people know, consciously or unconsciously, that others form impressions of them after a glance or short conversation, they may work harder to give the ‘right’ impression so they’re judged favourably.
“It’s almost a game that two people are playing,” says Eric Igou, a social psychologist at Ireland’s University of Limerick, who studies the subject. “If the observer, person B, doesn’t have the same theory, it can backfire.” Person A may be perceived as pretentious instead of intelligent, he adds.
Want to look smarter? Here are some tips from the latest studies.
COMMUNICATE CLEARLY
If you use a thesaurus when composing emails, you may be guilty of trying to boost your intelligence perception.
Using big words just to impress people may have the opposite effect