We can’t wait to be social. We're afraid to be social.
We may soon be able to return to our “normal” social lives, which means returning to our normal distorted thinking about our social lives.
Painting by Betsy Feuerstein
As spring emerges and more people get vaccinated, we’ll get reacquainted with our social selves. We may have spent the last year talking longingly about seeing our loved ones in three dimensions, but the impending return of real face time (not to be confused with FaceTime), inspires ambivalence in a lot of us. We’re afraid: that we’ll feel bad about ourselves if we don’t have plans on a Saturday night (a judgment that the pandemic has shielded us from); that our social skills have atrophied. So I thought this would be a good time to trot out a couple of recent studies that underscore how needlessly hard we can be on ourselves when it comes to our social lives.
The first, by Sebastian Deri, Shai Davidai, and Thomas Gilovich, conveys much of the story in the title: “Home Alone: Why People Believe Others’ Social Lives Are Richer Than Their Own.” The psychologists asked a wide range of people about how they believe their social lives compare to others’. Participants responded that they believe that their social life is inferior to their peers’ on every dimension they were asked about: they have fewer friends, narrower social networks, are part of fewer social circles, attend fewer dinner parties, see their extended family less frequently, and dine out less often. These results held up in a series of studies that tweaked the way the questions were asked and the types of people who were surveyed.
The researchers say that people have such a warped view of their social lives because they “do not conduct a representative survey of the social landscape.” Instead, they compare themselves to those who come to mind most easily: the people whose vacations and gatherings fill their social media feeds, the friends and coworkers who tell riveting stories about their lives. When participants were asked who came to mind for them as they assessed their social lives, 75 percent cited people above the middle of the sociality scale, while only 15 percent cited people below the midpoint. The study’s participants set the standard so high that they were bound to feel their own social connections were impoverished.
The researchers tried to reset people’s benchmarks and see if that could improve their perception of their social lives. Some participants were explicitly asked to think about unsocial people. These participants turned out to be less pessimistic in their assessment of their own social lives. Otherwise—if they were told to think of highly social people or weren’t given specific instructions—they believed they had less vibrant social lives than others do. Interestingly, those who were asked to compare themselves to less social people not only judged their social lives to be relatively richer than those who didn’t get that instruction; they also reported higher life satisfaction. In other words, if you offset this bias, you might also improve a person’s overall view of their life.
The “Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect,” by Amit Goldenberg and team, documents another kind of pessimism in our social lives. The psychologists wanted to know if people are accurate when they gauge the emotional tenor of a crowd. Participants were asked to estimate the average emotion for a set of faces that appeared on screen—kind of like viewing a bunch of people on Zoom. The faces looked happy, neutral, angry or somewhere in between those emotions. The studies found rampant inaccuracies in people’s perceptions. Participants estimated that the average expression of the crowd was more emotional than it actually was. The larger the number of faces and the longer they had to look at the faces, the higher their overestimation was. The type of emotion also mattered. When participants were looking at groups that displayed negative emotions, they overestimated the intensity of emotion more than for positive emotions.
The researchers tried to understand why people were inclined to overestimate negative emotions. They tracked participants’ eyes, measuring things like where the person’s gaze fixated and where it shifted. They found that people spent more time looking at more emotional faces. That bias in attention contributes to their distorted sense of the crowd’s emotion.
There are limits to what we can learn from this crowd paper because, like a lot of experiments that are helpful for parsing cause and effect, it also feels a little distant from real-world situations. But at the very least, its findings might encourage a kinder voice in the back of our heads that asks us whether those people on gallery view (or in real life) are actually as annoyed with us as we think. Both papers point to the way we selectively focus on some people, and as a result, have a skewed impression of our social realities.
I can’t stop thinking about:
Words: This article describes the shared challenges of polygamists and polyamorists yet the general lack of political cooperation between the two groups. On the privileges conferred by (monogamous) marriage, one of the interviewees, who’s polyamorous, said:
“I remember reading the list of eleven hundred and sixty-three federal benefits that marriage gave, and one of them that just stuck out to me was ‘family discounts at national parks,’...If the federal government says you’re a family, you get the family discount, but we wouldn’t. It’s fucking everywhere.”
Sounds: I recently spent a week in the Smoky Mountains, not far from where Dolly Parton grew up. On our eight-hour drive, I introduced my car-mates to Dolly Parton’s America, and I found it was a complete pleasure to re-listen. It really is a masterful series. If you don’t have time for every episode, I recommend the first two episodes plus “Dollitics,” and “The Only One For Me, Jolene.”
I made
I spent the last couple of months buried in a work hole, largely working on this Embedded series about the staff of the Capital Gazette newspaper who survived the shooting at their office in 2018. I know the subject sounds heavy, but I promise that the series will make you feel a lot of things that aren’t sorrow, including antipathy toward Slack. You can see some stunning photos of and learn more about the people you hear on the podcast here.
“Is It Better To Know?” was the last episode I worked on for Hidden Brain, a topic that leased a corner of my mind for more than a year before we actually went full bore on the reporting. It’s about the cognitive and emotional costs of recognizing that you’re in a group that’s discriminated against—and, on the flip side, the costs of remaining ignorant.
Now you know
For those of you slumping in your chair while you read this newsletter:
“In many American colleges, from the nineteen-forties through the seventies, compulsory nude ‘posture photos’ were taken of freshmen. Among the disquieting purposes: studying the connection between personality types and morphological traits, aiming ultimately to create a master race through matchmaking.”
[Source (I highly recommend reading the full piece.)]
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