Curb appeal: manicuring your home and language
Imagine you’re walking or driving down a street where every house looks like a Beverly Hills MacMansion. The lawns are thick & green, with flowerbeds that are perfectly trimmed, and the front doors are painted in high-gloss colors. In real estate, this is called Curb Appeal. It’s the art of making the exterior look so flawless that you don't even think to check if the pipes are leaking or the basement is flooding. This effect is based of your own intuition and expections, no one would assume of Beverly Hills mansion extoiroir would look like a crack house in the interior. But this effect isn’t only limited to real estate, but it has very real world carryovers into language, specifically with informal speech as we have seen in class with ‘words don't mean what they mean.
If you’re like majority of people, you picked the bottom photo. But why? Mathematically, it’s the same square footage. Logically, a new coat of charcoal paint and a symmetrical stone walkway don’t actually prove the people inside are kinder or more successful. Yet, your brain instantly "filled in the blanks." This is the power of Curb Appeal: it tricks our intuition into believing that a polished exterior equals a functional interior.
But then again, a big part of curb appeal is perspective, for some people, they would pick the upper photo which may be due to some more inter-personal architectural preferences, maybe they like the color? Maybe they see it as less gentrified? Maybe it just looks more cozy in there mind. But none the less, the general idea still stands. In his essay, Steven Pinker explains that we do the exact same thing with our words and speach. When we use "manicured" language such as politeness, professional jargon, or trendy slang, we are essentially “painting our home”.
Getting deeper into the psychology of it. According to social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson in their 1977 study on human judgment, they found that: "The Global evaluation of a person can induce altered evaluations of the person's specific attributes." In plain English: if the "curb appeal" is high, we’re wired to ignore the leaking pipes (the red flags, or the more obvious bais’s). We don't just think the family in the bottom house is nicer, our brains actually rewrite the reality of the interior based on how good the exterior looks.
Still not convinced? What do you think about these?
This was a really interesting comparison. The idea that language can have “curb appeal” just like houses makes a lot of sense, since people often judge things based on appearance before substance. It’s interesting (and a little unsettling) how easily our brains fill in the blanks.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you brought up curb appeals. This is a a very nuanced things too talk about yet it fits so well into everything that we have been talking about. I also like how you actually added the photos inot the blog so that you can actually see how you favor one house.
ReplyDeleteI like how you pointed out our biases by giving us an interactive segment where we can look at the two houses to recognize the power of the Curb appeal. That was very creative, well done!
ReplyDeleteI liked how you used the "Curb Appeal" metaphor to perfectly illustrate how we use polished language to mask our internal flaws and biases.
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