The nose knows August 2, 2006
Posted by Niels in : Personal , 2 commentsA friend of mine has an interesting take on cologne. “Everyone who likes me likes my cologne,” he says, “and everyone who hates me hates my cologne.” Girls he dated liked the smell while they were dating and hated it after the breakup.
Smell arouses feelings in a powerful way. Cologne is an anchor, a way to easily remind someone of all the good feelings you’ve shared. So I figured I’d just buy some cologne that I could stand and be done with it. Then I found Basenotes, a perfume review site for those who take scent seriously. Some samples:
“it has a nice top note of dates which blends nicely with the spices and the coriander to give it some pop. On dry down it has a slight vanilla/amber combination that sits calmly”
“Sparkling refreshing ‘green’ notes, not only watery, but also slightly
ozonic, lightful,gentle and pleasantly inconspicous”
 ”ginger lily gives it a beautiful, very quiet, final white flower basenote that begins to develop well into the drydown when the avocado note abates the sea salt note by adding to it a creaminess that rounds out the accord beautifully”
Maybe I’ll put a little more thought into this.
Your thoughts?Cognitive dissonance dooms another grad student August 1, 2006
Posted by Niels in : Graduate school, Life, the universe, and everything , 11 comments
My first year at Berkeley was incredibly depressing. Part of it was being overwhelmed by the work, part of it was being blown away by brilliant classmates, and part of it was just feeling like none of the professors cared whether we were there or not. I wasn’t alone though. According to the mental health survey that year, 67% of Berkeley grad students felt hopeless at some point in the past twelve months. 10% of Berkeley grad students had seriously contemplated suicide. In case you missed that, let me say it again. 1 in 10 grad students at Berkeley said they seriously contemplated killing themselves last year. About 1 in 200 actually attempted it.
The survey honestly made me feel a bit better. I was more depressed than I’d ever been before, but at least I wasn’t suicidal. I was beating the odds, kinda! And it did bring my classmates closer together. I don’t know a single person in my department who wasn’t really depressed at some point their first year.
So it blew my mind on visit day when the prospectives arrived and all my friends started telling them how great Berkeley was. Who are you people? Weren’t you telling me yesterday about how your fever just dropped below a hundred after you went four days without sleep to make a conference deadline that probably didn’t even matter? Didn’t we talk last week about how incredible it was that I was the only person in our class who managed to maintain any outside hobbies besides research and classwork? And wasn’t I failing because of it?
I guess it was all in my imagination. Prospective students arrive and all of a sudden everyone loves their advisor, the research is fascinating, and you can’t beat the weather. It didn’t make any sense.
And then, yesterday, I read a study on cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance theory states that people are troubled by inconsistency between their beliefs and actions, which motivates behavior to restore consistency. In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith had participants engage in a mind-numbingly boring “experiment” for an hour, turning pegs on a board around and around. They then told the participants that they needed them to brief the next subject, and to please tell the subject that the experiment was interesting. Half the participants were given $20 for this, the other half were given $1.
Afterwards, the original participants were interviewed and asked how much they enjoyed the experiment. The participants given $20 said the experiment was boring, as expected. But the participants given $1 said it was kinda fun! One measly dollar was not enough to justify the lie they told and the time they wasted. Instead, they reduced their dissonance by rationalizing that they really enjoyed the experiment.
Does this sound familiar to anybody else? A bunch of grad students are miserable for a year. They’re paid a pittance. But they stay anyway. It makes no sense for them to stay. Forced to explain themselves to a prospective student, cognitive dissonance sets in. “Oh, I guess I actually love it here!” they think. Oh, cognitive dissonance, you keep academia in business.
In my next post, I’ll explain how cognitive dissonance made me date Asian girls.
Your thoughts?