Pilfered by aberrants

It is a truism that how you present yourself is important – that consciously or unconsciously you telegraph messages to others in the manner that you dress, the way you speak, how you carry yourself, etc. I believe that how you present yourself is a dramatically underrated aspect of success. It is too common that in our desire to demonstrate that we are open-minded, we refrain from correcting others. We accept deviation from the norm in order to demonstrate that we are tolerant. It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who coined the term “defining deviancy down” and he was one of the earliest to point out the high personal cost to individuals when they believe that because they can deviate, they for some reason ought to.

Which is all well and good except that there are consequences always nipping at our heels. We can pretend that manners and speech and behavior and variance from the norm are all perfectly OK (and they are at a theoretical level) but reality will always exact her dues. If you don’t know how to speak well, carry yourself, present yourself, behave, etc. you will always suffer costs and lost opportunities. All of this will usually be attributed to bad luck. Sometimes by being tactically accepting and tolerant, we are setting others up for strategic failure over the long term.

There was an interesting article on NPR this morning documenting this, Reading 'Maxim' Can Make You A Theft Target by Shankar Vedantam.

"The experimental condition created the perception that the driver of this particular vehicle was perhaps a deviant," he said. "And what we did in order to trigger that perception was place a men's magazine on the front seat to suggest some sort of interest in sexuality and a couple crushed beer cans underneath the seat to suggest that the person probably had been drinking and driving."

Kinkade found that the cash was twice as likely to be stolen from when the magazine and beer cans were present. He also found that larger amounts of money were taken from the car, compared with when the magazine and beer cans were absent

The upshot is that the more you signal that you are different from the expected norm, the more likely you are to suffer negative consequences. In this case, the more aberrant you seem, the more likely other aberrants are to rob you.

Food for thought. Dress well and behave.