Alex Burns

These habits help form what Hall and his co-author Andy Merolla, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, call the social biome, a way of thinking about the entire range of your social interactions. A healthy social biome is one with variety — among the types of people we talk to and the kinds of conversations we have — as well as... See more

It would make sense to say that, despite appearances, third-order vanity ratchets up the neuroticism, rather than quiets it down. But what I find most interesting about third-order vanity is that often its most prolific purveyors seem so lost in their role that they’re almost unaware they’re performing at all.