London - Ever ditched the airport blockbuster for a serious book to read on the beach? Mentioned an opera you had seen? Or thrown a Shakespeare quote into conversation?
If any of the above triggered a slightly embarrassed “yes” for an answer, don’t worry – you’re not alone.
One in five of us, it appears, are so desperate to seem clever we will go to extraordinary lengths to pull off the pretence, according to researchers.
And it seems that men are worse than women in putting on an act such as wearing glasses with clear lenses to appear brainier or claiming to prefer Beethoven to Beyonce.
Other tricks include sharing someone else’s intellectual tweets or cultured Facebook posts, reading a “serious” magazine on public transport and pretending to like jazz.
Although the national proportion of adults who admit they have tried to impress others by making out they are more cultured than they really are is a fifth, that figure soars when Londoners are asked.
Among adults in the capital, 41 percent confess to pretentious tendencies, while the figure falls to just 14 percent in Scotland, where there appear to be far fewer airs and graces.
And while 26 percent of men admit to the acts of pretence, this falls to 14 percent of women, according to search engine Ask Jeeves’s survey of 1 000 adults.
The study found that social media is a vital arena in the battle to appear clever.
Sharing a post on politics or a celebrity’s tweet on metaphysics is reckoned to raise the intellectual profile more than a funny picture of a kitten. The survey found that our fears of seeming stupid extend beyond friends and family to strangers such as holidaymakers or other commuters – hence the heavyweight holiday books.
A spokesperson for Ask Jeeves said: “We were surprised by how many people think they should go to such lengths in order to impress someone else.
“But in the end, if they are really going to be liked then it is going to be for the person they really are, rather than the person they are pretending to be.” - Daily Mail