Top 10 traits of likable people

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

From ReadySetPsych:

Sociable
Friendly
Reliable
Open-minded
Emotionally stable
Confident
Emotionally intelligent
A positive influence
Similar to others
Easy to read

* Sociable people are likable because they spend more time around people. More social interaction means more opportunities to make good impressions on others and form strong friendships.

Sociable people are also likable because they genuinely like being around others. This means that socializing makes them feel happier and more fulfilled, and a happier person is always more pleasant to be around than an unhappy one. If your friend joins you on a trip, it is much more enjoyable if they actually want to be there, after all.

* Likable people tend to be more emotionally stable. This means their moods tend to be more stable and consistent. They rarely fly off the handle and are not prone to mood swings. This is the type of person who is calm and collected, even in tough situations.

Emotionally stable people are liked because it is easier to predict their moods. It is easy to like someone who is able to stay level headed. This is the person that can help keep others calm in a crisis because of their stable demeanor.

* Likable people tend to be easy to read. This means that they are straightforward and easy to figure out. What you see is what you get. If they are excitable and flighty, they let you know it. If they are moody and shy, they are open about it. Even if they are not the most likable person in the world, you will like someone just that tad bit more if you can read them well.

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How To Make A Good First Impression

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

From ReadySetPsych:

Practice self-awareness
Take care of your appearance
Use your social skills
Learn to read a room
Understand situations
Really listen
Practice confidence
Have a good attitude
And always be yourself

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How To Get To Know Someone

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

From ReadySetPsych:

Do things with them
Pay attention
Don’t make assumptions
Ask them questions
Watch what they do
Make them comfortable
Talk to their loved ones
Build a genuine friendship
Give it time

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Academic Horror Stories

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books:

* Among the best known involves an adjunct at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh who taught French for twenty-five years, her salary never rising above $20,000, before dying nearly homeless in 2013 at the age of eighty-three, her classes cut, with no retirement benefits or health insurance. At San José State University in Silicon Valley, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, one English teacher lives out of her car, grading papers after dark by headlamp and keeping things neat so as to “avoid suspicion.” Another adjunct in an unidentified “large US city,” reports The Guardian, turned to sex work rather than lose her apartment.

* One Princeton undergraduate in 1942 claimed that “the Negroes are not improved by their admission to a group with relatively high standards, but the group is corrupted to the lower level of the new members.” An alumnus in 1969 said, “Let’s be frank. Girls are being sent to Princeton less to educate them than to pacify, placate, and amuse the boys who are now there.”

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Whose Nationalism

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books:

French nationalism contained the seeds of something very different from English nationalism. Greenfeld places English and American nationalism on a spectrum that runs from individualist, voluntary civic nationalism at one end to “ethnonationalism” at the other, the latter being hereditary, nonvoluntary, and anti-individualistic. In this classification, French nationalism was in the beginning largely civic and individualistic but became more collectivist as the eighteenth century went on. In contrast to Anglo-American nationalism, it subordinated the autonomous individual to the one and indivisible nation. It nonetheless remained voluntarist, in the sense that to be French is a matter of committing yourself to being French, and that is open to foreigners under appropriate conditions. Conversely, one can cease to be French by emigrating.

It was Russian nationalism that introduced what became ethnonationalism. Nationalism beyond England begins in resentment—ressentiment is Greenfeld’s term, reflecting its semi-technical, sociological meaning, which refers to the envy a society may feel for the achievements of some other society or societies. Envy may result in two different responses. The first is an attempt to emulate the envied society; the second is a denigration of it and an assertion of the superiority of the envious society. Because France was culturally secure, resentment was not an enduring feature of French nationalism. Russia was quite different. Emulation proving impossible, Russians took refuge in asserting that a spiritual Russian culture was superior to Western European rationalism. This made national identity a natural, or biological, rather than a political matter. The impact in due course on German racism, Greenfeld assumes, is obvious enough.

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