THE POWER OF IMPRESSION
On January 14th the New York Times published an interesting article by Sue Shellenbarger about appearing to be an intelligent person. I was once again struck by the fact of how powerful our impressions are and even more than our rational analysis. The article discussed research about how people form an impression about how intelligent another person might be. It turns out things we do to promote an impression of intelligence may do that or they may do the opposite of what we intended. In general, things that…