Hahahaha thousands of years. I must have forgotten that natural selection started around the time humans began to brew beer.
—William E. Borah
Heath Ledger as the Joker skate boarding over Christian Bale as Batman while they take a break on the set of The Dark Knight.
/—/ These results come from Stanford University, which surveyed students about their moods and what they thought their friends were feeling. When the researchers compared the friends’ actual moods, they found that students underestimate their friends’ negative feelings and overestimate the positive, which in turn made respondents unhappy because they felt less normal.
As lead researcher Alex Jordan says, “People think, ‘Why am I alone on a Saturday night’ or, ‘Why I am not in a relationship?’ When people overestimate the happiness of friends, they felt more negatively about their own lives.” The study revealed that the misattribution of friends’ feelings happened even between people who knew each other very well.
The more students underestimated the negative emotions of their friends, the more their feelings of loneliness increased—a trend that Catalina Toma of the University of Wisconsin says can be emotionally harmful to passive Facebook users. She writes, “People naturally compare themselves to those around them, a process known as social comparison. If you perceive yourself to be doing better than your friends in an area that is important for you the social comparison will make you feel good. However, if you think your friends surpass you in an area that’s important to your self-concept, you will likely feel dejected as a result of the comparison.”
Michael Jackson — “(I Can’t Make It) Another Day” w/ Lenny Kravitz
Someone is setting “Hipster Traps” in NYC, baited with Pabst Blue Ribbon, American Spirit cigarettes, and cheap yet colorful sunglasses. Be careful out there, Tumblrers.