When we think about the people in our lives who we interact with on a daily basis, strangers rank low on the list. How often do the Starbucks barista who serves your coffee in the morning, the Uber driver who shuttles you and your group of friends into Boston, the student who holds the door open for you as you walk into class make lasting impressions in our memories? When such interactions are so frequent and menial compared to our deeper relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners, they become easy to disregard. However, what happens when we completely remove strangers from our lives?
The start of the pandemic marks a striking period of time when the world had little to no interactions between strangers. Transitioning from life at Harvard to life confined in my home was difficult. Suddenly, the minute interactions with strangers I had overlooked before were gone. For months, there were no more tourists who asked me for directions in the Yard, T passengers to make small talk with about the weather, or any opportunity where I could merely occupy the same space as a group larger than my family. While I could call my friends on FaceTime, entertain myself with multiplayer video games, and consume vast amounts of time on social media, the lack of in-person interactions with strangers made something essential feel missing. The silence in my neighborhood was eerie.
A series of 2014 studies by Gilian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn address the importance of peripheral social interactions on well-being. Their experiments demonstrate how weak social ties contribute to our subjective social and emotional well-being. The researchers found that participants who had, on average, more weak tie interactions than others reported greater feelings of belonging. Furthermore, they also found that participants reported greater feelings of belonging on days when they interacted with more weak ties than usual (Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014, p. 919).
I found it particularly interesting to learn that the effect of additional weak ties on subjective well-being and belonging is stronger on days when people have fewer strong tie interactions than usual (p. 916). This would indicate that the negative effects of lacking weak tie interactions during the pandemic were especially magnified due to our likewise dwindling strong tie interactions. Indeed, as hard as I tried to maintain the close friendships I had developed at Harvard, it was difficult to feel as close to my friends as I did before. Over time, I noticed a growing apathy for scheduling FaceTime calls and increasing “Zoom fatigue” among my friends, which made it even more challenging to keep in touch.
The Social Brain Hypothesis states that our cognitive temporal limitations place limits on human sociability (Perry, 2022, p. 30). During the height of the pandemic, it seemed that our already limited social resources had somehow shrunk to only accommodate a handful of strong ties we had the energy to maintain throughout isolation. Truthfully, I was most successful in maintaining only one to two of my closest friendships during the pandemic and lost touch with most others. Because I had less strong ties than usual, my world without strangers felt even more discomforting.
An Atlantic article by Joe Keohane echoes the benefit of interacting with strangers. “Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic,” the author writes (Keohane, 2021). Although my personal discomfort in isolation prompted me to flock back to making weak tie social connections when possible — even if it meant just a short conversation with my neighbor six feet apart as we walked our dogs — Keohane noticed that the pandemic produced an opposite effect in others. Despite findings that weak tie interactions benefit well-being, many people still maintain a “stranger danger” mentality, “especially after the coronavirus pandemic limited our social lives so severely.” These observations suggest that perhaps some find greater comfort in silence and solace in stillness than I did.
Furthermore, perhaps even more lie in between. As noted by Keohane, Sandstrom believed that people simply didn’t know how to talk to strangers and fill silence; once they did, they found it similarly as essential and rewarding as studies indicate. Thus, it is important to realize that there are both differences in how people seek out weak tie interactions, as well as barriers that might prevent people to do so, in order to better support our overall social and emotional well-being — even in times of extreme isolation like the pandemic.
Arlo: Post-Pandemic Social Fatigue
Jess discusses the often overlooked value and power of weak ties in our daily lives, and how this became quite apparent during the most isolated parts of the pandemic. During isolation, I realized that a really important weak tie interaction in my life was saying hi to various acquaintances while walking through campus. Every day on my walk to class I would see a couple of people I knew, ranging from closer friends to people I’ve only talked to once or so. These interactions are often quite brief, maybe just a wave or a little flare of chatter. While these interactions, similarly to most other weak tie interactions, don’t seem that important at first glance, I’ve come to realize how much these little greetings actually lift me up. For me these interactions seem to somewhat subconsciously put me into a positive and lighter state; they feel like belonging, like I’m being slightly held up by all these people and they care, not just about me but about the world, and this would often feel motivating. I think it also gives me some sort of sense of being a part of something, which is comforting.
Once the pandemic hit, it was at first quite rare that I would have that same feeling. Many of us went for at least a couple of weeks only interacting with a small set of people, often family or friends we were already quite close with. Similar to Jess, I feel like I was able to maintain just a few friendships throughout the pandemic to the extent of closeness that we had before the pandemic. These were particularly people I lived with or was in a tight circle with. Within these specific relationships, there reached a point where we as friends became closer than we had ever been before. After spending so much time together, our social dynamic felt quite deepened and somewhat raw. Yet I also felt that my general social capacity was lowering. With little new social interactions, my time was spent more and more on hobbies and other interests, creating an increasing sense of social fatigue. After isolation, I found that my capacity for general social interaction had decreased. I used to choose hanging out with friends over pretty much any activity, but now I often find myself wanting to stay in and work on music or watch a movie over going out.
This change in social pace made me think about my parents and their social interaction with friends. For a while, I’ve always wondered why my parents don’t socialize that much in general, apart from the occasional dinners with friends or a book club meeting. At first, I thought it was just my parents but it seems like it is quite common. In an article from The Atlantic entitled ‘How Friendships Change in Adulthood’, the author Julie Beck describes, “As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it’s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid’s play or an important business trip. The ideal of people’s expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their lives, Rawlins says.” While this definitely applies to my parents and their friends, it seems as if the pandemic has accelerated me into this a bit as well. When I think back to Freshman year, it was much more common for me to just hang out in a dorm room and talk with someone. These days much more of my socializing is at a meal or a party (aside from quite close friends and roommates). I’ve tended to categorize socializing into a more specific time frame, placing it as less spur of the moment and sometimes less valuable as maybe another activity in the day. As I get older I hope to still maintain at least some level of curiosity and spontaneity in various socialization.
Perry, J. (2022). Acquaintances & Friends [lecture]. Department of Psychology, Harvard University.
Sandstrom, G. M. & Dunn, E. W. (2014). Social interactions and well-being: The surprising power of weak ties. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(5), 910-922.
This week, our class considered “friendship” in its broadest possible terms. We talked about connections so transient that one party never learns the other’s name—but we also talked about how to make deep friendships last a lifetime, and about what makes relationships easy or difficult. To capture our entire week’s worth of content, we (your blog post writers) each focused on a different tier of friendship. Stephanie wrote about weak ties, Esther wrote about the importance of connection, and Iris wrote about individual differences in friendship. Thanks for reading!
Stephanie (weak ties):
As important as our close friendships are, weak ties also have many important benefits and play an important role in our wellbeing. Think about the person that always holds the door open for you before class or maybe the Black Sheep worker that knows your order by heart. Those people, even though you might only just know their name, are an important part of your daily life and have an effect on your need to belong. As we learned in the lecturette, people with more weak ties and acquaintances have greater creativity, perspective taking, empathic accuracy and well being.
In the reading by Sandstrom & Dunn (2014), there is evidence that proves how weak ties have important benefits such as the diffusion of information. The study shows how people who interacted with more classmates reported greater happiness. I definitely agree with that and feel that on days where I have a lot of class, even though I am more busy I feel happier to be around people as opposed to just sitting around in my room alone. The paper extends to show how with more daily interactions with weak ties, people are happier and experience greater feelings of belonging. Overall, we find that people in general feel a greater sense of belonging with more weak ties.
More personally, I can think of certain weak ties in my life that create a sense of normalcy as well as always put a smile on my face. One in particular, is a HUDS employee who I see every day at dinner time. Without fail, we say hello to each other every day and as how the other’s day has been. Sometimes we catch up about each other’s breaks or weekends as well as upcoming events in the house. Even though I would not consider her to be a close friend of mine, I definitely rely and always count on that relationship to always put a smile on my face. Another acquaintance that I interact with daily is somebody that I often see in the dining hall. Even though we just met this year, I feel I am always greeted with a big smile and we sometimes sit together to have a meal. While it is not somebody that I interact with often, he is definitely someone that is part of my daily routine that I can learn a lot from.
However, the concept of weak ties was especially hard during COVID, when we were unable to leave our houses and interact in our normal ways. It was a strange shift to go from seeing many people in a day to only seeing faces over zoom classes. However, even so, I also found ways to create weak ties, like waving and talking to people in the neighborhood when I would go on my daily walks. Therefore no matter the setting or circumstances, interacting with different people can not only expand your relationships of weak ties, but can also lead you to create more friendships. Whether it is one thing that connects you to someone else or a shared experience you are a part of, weak ties are integral to our lives.
Esther (importance of ties):
“You’re my person.”
“My person” made its first appearance in 2005 on “Grey’s Anatomy,” showcasing Cristina Yang and Meredith Grey’s intimate friendship. The term’s charm is that it isn’t defined by blood or law. Your person is your best soul friend, ride or die, platonic life partner. They might stay the same or change. The phrase was coined when it became evident that millennials put off marriage to focus on their friendships and professions. Despite these changes, the notion that a monogamous love partnership is the planet around which all other relationships should revolve hasn’t changed. We need a phrase for the humans who show up for us as Cristina and Meredith do for each other until there is a life partner in the picture, or even if there never is.
Despite their importance, friendships are understudied compared to other intimate relationships, while romantic relationships have gotten a lot more attention. (Pratscher et al., 2018).
Active friendships require active maintenance. You get to sit back, do nothing, and enjoy the benefits of a meaningful relationship. But action is especially important to friendship which carries no familiar expectations. If you don’t take action to mark it as important and keep it alive, a friendship will not survive. However, placing a friendship at the center of one’s life unsettles the norm (Cohen, 2020). I want a world where friendship is appreciated more. I want holidays to commemorate friendship. I want thousands of songs, movies, and poems about the intimacy and connection between friends.
Harvard can be a lonely place. It can feel like standing in the middle of a crowded intersection with everyone around you and no one around you at the same time. The loneliness can be crippling and suffocating. I often invalidate my own feelings, especially when I’m not as “smiley” as people usually think I am. Despite advice that I give to others, I find myself feeling that I don’t “deserve” to be upset – to feel what I feel – because my problems will only burden others for the worse if I share them with them.
Ultimately, people will notice that there is more to you than you let on. They will look at you closely and listen to you attentively enough to know that there are stories hidden in your bones that you’ve never told anyone. Such people will ask you about things that others never made an effort to understand. They will come to value who you are because they will take the time to really know your story. Sometimes souls instantly click. Some friendships allow us to feel safe like home. These bonds are special and last forever no matter what city you live in or how often you talk. I’m forever grateful for the people in my life who know this side of me and offer me encouragement, support, and an outlet to express myself. They let me feel that it’s okay to not be okay and to let down my facade at times. So, if you ever see me on campus, feel free to say hi – I promise you it will make me happier than I already am! 🙂
Iris (lack of ties):
In the toddler class I teach this year, I have an autistic kid whom I’ll call F. F is adored by all the grown-ups in his life, I assume because he’s unusually adorable. In addition to winning people over with his goofy laugh and enthusiastic opinions, his favorite toy is a plush egg, which, how could anyone not fall for that? One of my co-teachers just bought a bubble gun solely because it made F. smile. His fan club includes most of the adults who’ve ever met him.
F. struggles to communicate with his peers, however, and the biggest fear I have for him is that as a nonverbal person, he’ll have a hard time making friends. One can (and activists rightfully do) blame an unjust society for its lack of acceptance—but even if the deficit lies with the world and not with F., the result is the same. I don’t want him to be lonely. The readings this week were somewhat damning for folks like F. McPherson et al.’s “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” (2001) compiles evidence suggesting that similarity undergirds friendship; F.’s brain works in a demonstrably different way than his peers’. Pratscher et al.’s “Interpersonal Mindfulness” (2017) puts stock in our ability to take others’ perspectives; F. is specifically bad at basic theory-of-mind tasks. It would be easy to look at F., as many have, and write off his ability to form social relationships. In general, our readings this week support that narrative.
And yet. I wonder, when I think about F. and his future, if my neurotypical frame of reference is capable of comprehending how he wants to relate to others. Does my conceptualization of friendship—informed by studies of college students who are likely, in aggregate, neurotypical—pertain to his experience of the world? What if he doesn’t want friends the way I want friends for him? Who am I to tell anyone that they are socially suffering? While I did the readings this week, I couldn’t get past the lingering thought—influenced by F.—that these studies leave people out. It is notoriously easy to nitpick psychology research, but the examples of exclusion are endless: disabled folks. People from non-western countries. Older adults or younger children. It is not obvious that these data on college students are applicable to other types of humans.
Accordingly, while neurodiversity represents a specific case, I find the question of group differences in friendship attitudes to be more broadly interesting. Proximity may be useful, except when it isn’t; weak ties could be helpful unless, like F., your discomfort around strangers supersedes any benefit. I understand the impossibility of designing a perfect study, and the utility of studying something anyway. But I also think—at least when considering how I personally define a friend—that it is at least as important to remember marginal experiences as it is to attend to the dominant narratives we promote around friendship.
References
Cohen, R. (2020). What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life? The Atlantic.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 415–444.
Pratscher, S. D., Rose, A. J., Markovitz, L., & Bettencourt (2018). Interpersonal mindfulness: Investigating mindfulness in interpersonal interactions, co-rumination, and friendship quality. Mindfulness, 9(4), 1206-1215.
Sandstrom, G. M., & Dunn, E. W. (2014). Social interactions and well-being: The surprising power of weak ties. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(7), 910-922.
Tom’s Blog: Importance of Empathy in Social Connection
Empathy plays an important role in human’s ability to form and maintain meaningful social bonds. Being empathetic means being able to understand the emotions of another person, especially when these emotions are not outwardly expressed. In most cases, empathy means being able to put oneself into someone else’s perspective to figure out what emotions or thoughts they may be experiencing. Trying to decipher another person’s inner emotions comes from being attentive to little things such as their tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, or other verbal and non-verbal social cues. Being attentive to these aspects of communication can help one be more selfless and altruistic which is supported by the Pickett et al. (2004) study. The experimenters state in their introduction, “Empathy is motivated by our desire to connect with others, and when we experience it, it can lead us to be kind, compassionate, and altruistic.” In their study, they address the question of whether someone’s need to belong affects how empathetic that person is in social situations. Through their three experiments, they found that when someone is in a situation where they have a social pressure to belong or fit in, they are more attentive to social cues, specifically tone of voice and facial expressions.
I personally noticed that this was evident during the beginning of Freshman year at Harvard. During the days of orientation, everyone was very social and tried to form lasting social bonds. The pressure of finding a friend group is something that makes everyone at least a little bit anxious. I remember during these nerve-wracking times, everyone was very attentive and engaged in individual conversations, more so than usual. I personally remember being obsessed with thinking of what others think of me when having conversations with new people. While meeting new people early Freshman year, I found myself looking for small details in people’s social cues. For instance, if someone looked away while I was talking with them, I would think that they may not be interested in the conversation. Conversely, if someone was laughing/smiling and holding eye contact while talking, I would be focused on the fact that they are interested. I also experienced a similar situation when first meeting my football teammates during the pre-season of Freshman year. Even though myself and my 30 other Freshman teammates have some similarities, it was still slightly nerve-wracking to form social bonds with them Freshman year. Especially since we are teammates, there is a pressure to get along and be friends with everyone. Because of this, I was also very focused on small social cues when talking with my fellow teammates. In accordance with the Prickett et al. study, I believe that since I and everyone else during Freshman year had a pressure to belong or fit in, that people were very attentive to social cues and had an increased sense of social empathy.
In addition to the study by Pricket et al., Chow et al. studied if an increased sense of empathy helps adolescents and young adults form long-lasting social connections and have an increased sense of “interpersonal competence”. They found that when someone has empathy and can share another’s feelings, they are more likely to have a strong sense of interpersonal competence which promotes healthier relationships. Personally, I have noticed that when I am able to think of how others are feeling, it is easier to form social relationships. Specifically, I noticed this was the case when trying to form a bond with my girlfriend’s brother named Mike. Mike is 17 and has high-functioning autism. He struggles with communication and has a limited vocabulary, so it is often difficult for him to tell others what exactly he is feeling. Because of this, it was difficult to originally form a connection with him, and I really had to focus on his tone of voice, pace of speaking, eye contact, and facial expressions when interpreting what he is feeling. Mike has a great sense of empathy and often only tells people what they want to hear in response to people’s questions, for example, he will never say anything negative about anyone or anything even if he did have an unpleasant experience. After meeting him a few times and paying closer attention to his social cues, I was able to form a good relationship with him and have more meaningful conversations. Trying to put myself in his perspective and see how he may be feeling definitely helped me communicate and form a bond with him.
Patrick’s Blog: Is Empathy Always Good?
When thinking back on strong emotions that I’ve felt through empathy, one moment in particular from my childhood stands out. I was in eighth grade, and was cheering for my brother with my family as he raced in the finals of the 1600 meter track and field event. It was one of the most important races of the season for him, as the top 3 finishers would qualify for the California State Track meet. The race started off promisingly, and after the first two laps of the race, my brother was among the lead pack, comfortably slotted into second place. However, as he rounded the curve to start the third lap, I heard a shout of despair from my dad. As I looked back onto the track, I realized that my brother’s legs had gotten tangled with another runner, and he had tumbled to the ground in a heap. A few crucial seconds passed before he was able to recover, leap to his feet, and rejoin the race. Miraculously, he was able to catch up to the lead pack and regain his position. But he had lost too much time and exerted too much energy trying to recover, and I watched excruciatingly, as runners eventually began to pass him as he slowly faded out of contention for a top three finish.
After the race had ended, my family drove to Chick-Fil-A, a post-meet tradition of ours. But instead of the usual post-meet celebration I had grown accustomed to, I instead watched as my brother sobbed in disappointment from across the table, with my parents trying, but failing to console him. Unable to find any words to comfort him, I sat in silence, feeling his disappointment and sadness, before realizing that tears were also running down my face.
Empathy gives us the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Through empathy, we can feel both the positive and negative emotions of other beings. Crucially though, we care most about people who are similar to us, in attitude, language, appearance. While this ability to feel the emotions of others is useful in helping us to form and maintain connections with close friends and family, using empathy to guide decision-making can be problematic.
One way in which empathy can prove to be an issue is when looking at altruistic acts. Frans de Wall posits that humans have evolved to develop altruistic motivations through an empathic mechanism (De Wall, 2008). Yet, we can see inconsistencies in the results of exercising this empathic mechanism. As an experiment, C. Daniel Batson and his colleagues conducted an experiment where they told subjects about Sheri Summers, a ten-year-old girl who had a fatal disease and was waiting in line for treatment to relieve her pain (Batson, 1995). Participants were told that they could move her to the front of the line, at the cost of another child not getting treatment. When only given details of the situation, most participants said Sheri should wait her turn. However, when first asked to imagine Sheri’s pain, they tended to move Sheri up in line. Thus, this is a case where empathy overcame our sense of fairness, and increased the suffering for others. While this hypothetical situation may seem unrealistic, it’s not hard to imagine replacing Sheri with a sibling or a close friend, and seeing how feeling the pain of those close to us would influence us to make irrational decisions.
Paul Bloom additionally argues that empathy is particularly insensitive when applied on a statistical level, rather than an individual one (Bloom, 2018). He gives an example by highlighting the Make-a-Wish foundation, an organization that grants the wishes of critically ill children. Bloom states that it costs an average of $7000 to grant a wish. Yet, he counters by saying that using the same amount of money to purchase malaria nets could, on average, save the lives of 3 children. Upon hearing the emotionally affecting story of a Make-a-Wish recipient, we are more inclined to publicize and donate to the foundation, eschewing the opportunity to save the lives of a greater number of people.
While being labeled as an empathetic person is seen as a virtue, it is important to understand the biases that can come with solely relying on empathic impulses to make decisions. Only through empathy, am I able to cheer for my brother’s successes and support him and cry with him through his hardships. However, through that same emotional pathway, I am more prone to be emotionally influenced into making irrational choices. Realizing that relying on empathy can have both positive and negative outcomes is crucial in helping us to form stronger social connections, and become altruistic in a virtuous and unbiased way.
References
Batson, C. D., Klein, T. R., Highberger, L., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Immorality from empathy-induced altruism: When compassion and justice conflict. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(6), 1042–1054
Bloom, Paul (2018) Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Vintage.
Chow, C. M., Ruhl, H., & Buhrmester, D. (2013). The mediating role of interpersonal competence between adolescents’ empathy and friendship quality: A dyadic approach. Journal of Adolescence, 36(1), 191–200.
De Waal, F. B. (2008). Putting the altruism back into altruism: The evolution of empathy. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 279-300
“fyi i know we got lunch yesterday so i wanted to lyk [let you know] i tested positive today”
“Did y’all know [friend] tested positive too?”
“yoooo it finally happened i tested positive too :/”
In the last week, as COVID cases around Harvard rise, the texts I receive directly or in group chats with friends have looked like some variation of the above. Yet after an initial expression of concern, it seems that getting sick has become a bonding moment, a shared experience as my sick friends make their own group chats (with names such as “covid cuties”) and talk about what they’re up to in quarantine. In times of stress, it is fascinating how “suffering together” can actually inspire joy amongst friends—a phenomenon we have thanks to empathy.
When we think of empathy, the first thing that often comes to mind is an elementary-school definition of “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes”. As simple as this is, however, it provides a helpful heuristic on what it actually refers to: “the capacity to be (a) affected by the emotional state of another, (b) assess the reasons for the other’s state, and (c) identify with the other, adopting his or her perspective” (De Waal, 2008). While this may sound complicated, the underlying idea is the same—we empathize when we consider the situations those around us are facing and feel the same emotional impact that they do.
Thinking back to our lecture that broke down empathy into mentalization, imitation, and origin monitoring, it’s likely to no one’s surprise that empathy seems much easier to practice when it’s with our friends. After all, these are people we want to like anyway, and by that logic, that would entail we try our best to engage in these sorts of pro-social behavior. Mentalizing comes much easier when we have an idea of how our friends think, or what they think about, and imitation is more natural given that it is also more practiced with the friends we spend time with.
It is interesting to note, then, that when it comes to our friends, it may seem like we’re already “in”—but it is the times when we feel left out that our empathy-attuned behavior shines through. This pattern is remarkable in the context of friends: given that these are people you care about, you have a point of contrast for what being “in” the group shouldn’t feel like. Motivated by this, you’d have a higher desire for social connection, and this is exactly what is shown in the studies by Pickett et al. (2004): one key finding was that individual differences in the need to belong was positively correlated with accuracy in detecting vocal tone and facial emotion, both of which are critical for understanding other human beings and thus establishing a real bond.
Students at Harvard can unite over many shared experiences: the stress of blocking and nerves of Housing Day, the joy of winning at Harvard-Yale, the sadness when we were asked to leave campus in March 2020. It is with our friends in particular, however, that we want to put in the extra effort to figure out what they are feeling and then in turn, feel with them. It is part of our natural instinct to preserve these relationships and our sense of belonging within social groups. More personally, it is thanks to empathic friends that I always have someone to celebrate with, rant to, or cry on their shoulder. Empathy makes friendship a truly beautiful thing.
Georgia: Strangers
While it may seem natural that we have an abundance of empathy for our friends and even readily meet acquaintances with empathy, how do strangers fit in?
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine still raging, many of us have been feeling deep empathy for Ukrainians watching their homes burnt to the ground, family members go off to battle, and loved ones flee their nation. Seeing videos and reading articles about devastation thousands of miles away from us makes us feel deep sorrow, pain, or even anger on behalf of Ukrainians. But, while it certainly serves us to feel empathy for those close to us, with whom we feel a stronger need to belong and interact with regularly (Pickett, Gardner, & Knowles, 2004), why should we feel this way towards total strangers? Moreover, some research indicates that we may have developed a mechanism for schadenfreude, a feeling of pleasure in the misfortunes of others, particularly when they are a member of a rival-outgroup (Cikara, Botvinick, & Fiske, 2011).
De Waal (2008) argues that this form of empathy may be the evolutionary mechanism for altruism, a selfless concern for others and their well-being. Intuitively, this makes sense. For us to be able to work together in larger groups, we need to be able to cooperate with people who we might not know well, and empathy serves as a bridge allowing us to better understand others. Even today, empathizing with people you will never meet helps inspire donations to hurricane relief, humanitarian aid, and food pantry donations, collective efforts that help make our society better by uplifting people that could not be accomplished without empathy motivating individual actions. Moreover, we do not expect these acts of goodwill to ever directly benefit us.
But if it serves humankind to feel empathy for strangers then why don’t we feel empathetic all the time? For one, we have a finite amount of cognitive resources, and feeling empathetic for each starving child in the world all the time would absolutely overwhelm us to the extent that we would never be able to get anything done. Thus, we often protect ourselves from those overwhelmingly negative feelings by either refusing to engage with bad news behalling other people altogether (much like closing your eyes when someone’s about to be stabbed in a movie) or even by engaging in dehumanization. And as the number of people a tragedy affects gets larger, the amount of empathy we have for the people affected dwindles. It doesn’t make us horrible people to not be downtrodden about all the horrible things going on around the world all the time, it’s just our way of protecting ourselves from a kind of empathy burnout.
Politicians and journalists surely know this, which is why they bring our attention to individuals rather than statistics. Presented with the story of one Californian who lost everything in the wildfires last year we may be inspired to donate or feel compelled to lobby for better preventative measures. Presented with massive statistics, we’ll often change the channel.
Julia: Fictional characters
Can we feel empathy for fictional characters? I recall a time quite recently where I decided to watch the newest version of Little Women on a flight and upon reaching a certain scene in the film (I won’t give any spoilers) had to control the urge to sob, but nonetheless I was crying. After getting some concerned looks from the stranger next to me, I tried to remind myself that it was just a movie, however I could not help but feel the loss that all these fictional characters were feeling. This example and the countless other times I have felt embarrassed for a character in a TV show or felt happy for a character in a book have made me curious about whether these instances are examples of empathy.
Despite fictional characters essentially being made up strangers with no relation to us, we perceive these characters to be real human beings and likely can still experience their state as our own. Zaki (2014) breaks down the components of empathy into: experience sharing which can describe our tendency to take on the affective state of another, mentalizing which describes our ability to infer how another person would think or feel in a certain situation, and mind perception. If we can “turn up” or “turn down” these empathetic processes, we may be more inclined to mentalize while watching a film or reading a book because we want to understand the internal state of the characters (Zaki, 2014). We discuss our ability to empathize with others and whether or not this is something we have control over. De Waal (2008) suggests that humans have such little control over empathic activation, and that is why one would shut their eyes during a movie when you anticipate that something bad is about to happen. We do not want to feel the terror that character is feeling, despite knowing that it is a fictional depiction.
In this week’s lecturette, we learned that social group membership is a reason we may be motivated to feel more or less empathy for an individual. The intergroup empathy bias would suggest that we would empathize more with in-group members compared to out-group members (Cikara et al., 2o14). In a fictional world there still remain in-groups and out-groups. One may be more likely to empathize with a character that they share similarities with. Think of the most hated evil characters, like Joffrey from Game of Thrones or Voldemort from Harry Potter. Those are characters that we are likely to perceive as out-group and we typically experience pleasure from their pain. However, some villains become more complex when writers attempt to humanize these characters by giving backstory to explain where their actions and beliefs come from. It seems that writers have the power to decide who the audience will empathize with by the amount that you are able to mentalize a character and the amount of emotion sharing a character portrays, in addition to whether this character is considered in-group or out-group.
Empathy is an incredibly powerful tool to unite us with friends, strangers, and even fictional characters. It motivates us to contribute to the common good and inspires us to treat others with more kindness than we otherwise might. However, empathy is not ubiquitous, as wonderfully automatic as it may be our minds often protect us from fully empathizing with everyone else. It’s up to us to tread the line between too much empathy and not enough as we try to be the best versions of ourselves we can.
Cikara, M., Bruneau, E., Van Bavel, J. J., & Saxe, R. (2014). Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failures and counter-empathic responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 110–125.
This week, we read about psychologist Paul Bloom’s argument Against Empathy in moral reasoning because it’s biased towards people like us. Though he made many good points, we still believe there are many situations where empathy is essential. In the following blog post, we’ll explore how empathy enables us to effectively help friends struggling with depression (or just had a bad day) and to stand up to bullies and we’ll finish with a call for more empathy in everyday circumstances.
[Summer] Case 1: How to Save a Life?
“How to Save a Life” by The Frayer is the band’s biggest hit so far. First popularized by medical dramas like Gray’s Anatomy, it saw a resurgence on Tiktok in the ongoing pandemic.
Since its release in 2006, it has moved millions of people (myself included) to tears as we empathize with its poignant and emotional lyrics and literally feel the frustration, despair, guilt, sadness etc. along with the singer.
This song always reminds me of my experience trying to help a friend who struggled with depression. Often, I find it hard to get through to my friend, to slip past their defense and often ask myself: “Where did I go wrong?” “How to save a life?”
After reading this week’s reading, I’ve started to think that one possible answer to this question is the secret to this song’s popularity – Empathy.
Psychologists identified three central components of empathy: 1. Mind Perception: the ability to identify another person’s mind and to know it’s different from our own 2. Mentalizing: the ability to understand others’ emotions, beliefs and intentions; taking their perspective 3. Emotion Sharing: the ability to feel the emotions others feel
(Da Waal 2008; Zaki, 2014)
With this framework, I noticed for a song that evokes so much empathy, how unempathetic the singer’s response is. Though he acknowledges that “he” has a mind different from his own, he doesn’t seem to mentalize with “him”. Throughout the song, he speaks in a strikingly rational and detached manner: “Let him know that you know best”, “Lay down a list of what is wrong”, “grant him one last choice”. Furthermore, the strong emotions in “What did I do wrong?” and “How to save a life?” mostly come from the singer’s perspective and are not shared by “him”. The singer doesn’t explicitly acknowledge the sadness, confusion, anger etc. “he” must feel. His “polite” manner seems almost unintentionally dehumanizing to me.
In the 2016 paper, Castro and Zautra explained that people often learn patterns of relating to others through imitation of role models. Thus, if the singer addresses “him” in a “dehumanizing” manner, “he” is more likely to reflect this dehumanizing view and be distrustful. On the other hand, they found that if people learn to “humanize” others as people with goals and emotions, they will perceive more “choice” in their actions, be more intentional with their social interactions, become more able to maintain healthy and meaningful relationships and be more resilient when facing challenging negative emotions (Castro & Zautra, 2016).
Perhaps if instead of analyzing the problem and telling the boy what to do, the singer had provided an empathetic response and had connected with “him” on an emotional level, he would have more easily slipped past “his” defenses to help “him” find “his” own solution and motivation to make a change. And maybe this way, he could have saved a life.
Of course, in many situations, empathy alone is not enough to save a life, but I believe it’s always a good start.
[Lake] Case 2: How to Stand Up to a Bully?
Empathy not only enables us to provide emotional support but also prompts us to stand up for a friend in need.
Let’s travel back in time to elementary school when I first remember empathy being prominent in me. I was on my daily school bus ride home from school, however, this time our schools’ bully started acting out. He was a 5th grader and we were 3rd graders, the perfect case for him to pick on someone he felt power over. He first moved into the seat across from me where a schoolmate was sitting and started to harass him. Sitting there and listening to this, I began to put myself in his shoes and try to understand how I would be feeling if I was getting bullied – which I’ve experienced as the new kid. Following the verbal assault, he (the bully) slapped my classmate across the face. Instinctively, I stood up to help, to which the bully asked the infamous “what are you going to do about it?”. So, I punched him straight in the nose.
According to De Waal’s thesis, “empathy evolved in animals as the main proximate mechanism for directed altruism.” (De Waal, F.B., 2008). My act- punching the bully in the face, is a prime example of altruism: the desire to help another person without self-interest, even if it involves a cost to the helper. I punched the bully knowing that I would get in trouble (I did until my principal decided not to punish me after hearing the full story). At the time of the event, it was instinctive. The thought of getting in trouble did not cross my mind, since I was only thinking about helping my schoolmate.
It was this experience, feeling what it felt like to help my classmate in this horrible situation, that made me consciously try to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, placing oneself in another’s position. I credit this empathetic act to my parents; they are beyond supportive and made me feel secure. There is no doubt that strong relationship between a child and their parents gives the child greater empathy for their peers. My parents have the greatest sense of empathy toward me. The study from Hepach et al., (2012) found that the intrinsic motivation for young children’s (2 years old) helping behavior does not require that they perform the behavior themselves and thus “get credit” for it, but rather requires only that the other person is helped. Thus, young children are intrinsically motivated to see others helped. My parents are very empathetic and have always had a desire to help, constantly doing things to give back in any way. From Hepach et al., (2012), seeing my parents helping others when I was a young child without a doubt played a role in my empathetic values/nature.
[Michael] Case 3: How to Make Someone’s Day?
Summer wrote of helping a friend with depression, and Lake of standing up to a bully. These are important situations that greatly require us to act with empathy. Such important situations, in fact, that we’ll likely feel guilty about the situation after if we do not help. We know these situations call for our aid, and it’s the moral thing to do.
But what about more casual situations? Those everyday situations in which we walk past CVS and know we could make a friend’s day if we bought them a little card for $2, but we don’t. Or when we know we could see our parents light up with happiness if we just FaceTimed them for 10 minutes, but we don’t. Or we could give that homeless person $5 and allow them to have a hot drink in the winter, but we don’t. You get the picture.
Many of us don’t do these little acts of empathy, even though they ask very little of us, and we know they would really make someone’s day. My part of this blog is aimed at convincing you to do them more often.
We’ll start with empirical research. Whillans et al. (2016) found that spending money on others improves cardiovascular health. As in, buying someone a small gift not only makes their day but also improves your heart health. So, every day when you walk past CVS and don’t buy your friend those on-sale post-Valentine’s Day chocolates, you’re not only missing an opportunity to put a smile on their face, but you’re missing an opportunity to improve your own heart. Doesn’t that make you want to spend the $5 now?
More empirical research, you ask? I’ve got it for you. Dunn et al. (2008) found that spending money on others makes people happier than spending money on themselves. So now you know that completing that little empathetic act not only makes the other person happy, but it’s also going to make you happier than spending that same money on yourself.
While we all want to find ourselves in those rare situations where we act courageously, and save the day, like punching a bully in the face, those situations don’t happen every day. But we can still be empathetic in the situations that happen every day — and oftentimes it might be even harder in these situations to show empathy. Yet, research shows just how beneficial being empathetic in these little moments can improve both our physical and emotional health (and make someone’s day!). So, I hope reading this inspired you to be just a little better friend, or boy/girlfriend, or simply, person. Go buy that Valentine’s Day chocolate while it’s still on-sale.
References
Castro, & Zautra, A. J. (2016). Humanization of Social Relations: Nourishing
Health and Resilience Through Greater Humanity. Journal of Theoretical
and Philosophical Psychology, 36(2), 64–80.
Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B., & Norton, M. I. (2008). Spending money on others
The football team at Harvard comes from different parts of the country and all walks of life. When we arrived on campus freshman year, none of us really had anything in common outside of football. Due to the fact that football is a fall sport, we arrived on campus just a few weeks before the season was set to start, and nobody really knew each other. This posed a challenge for us because the sport requires a tremendous amount of teamwork to win games. One of the ways we were able to engineer connections with each other before the season started was mind perception. The paper “From Mind Perception to Mental Connection” (Wheatley et al., 2012) discusses how shared past experiences allow people to form a social bond almost instantaneously. In the case of our team this shared experience was playing football and lifting weights since we were all in middle school. During our down time we would all talk about our experiences playing football in various parts of the country and this really allowed all of us to become closer. These shared experiences really helped us to understand how others were feeling and what others were thinking. This allowed us to work our hardest every day even if we had to wake up at 4:30 for practice or practice in the extreme heat or cold because we all understood it was a grind for everyone and we were all in pursuit of a common goal, an Ivy League Championship. It also allowed us to have a better connection on the field, helping us to execute plays quicker and more effectively.
Wheatley goes on to discuss how synchrony can strengthen these bonds, and additional research done by Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) supports these claims. The results showed that participants who perform synchronous physical activity are more apt to perform cooperatively toward their common goal (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009, as cited in Wheatley et al., 2012). The idea of performing as a cohesive group is extremely important in football, especially across the offensive line. On the offensive line all five players perform the same exact action as each other on every play, trying to work together to block a path through the defense for the running back. If one person messes up and is not doing the same thing as everyone else then the play is completely ruined. At the beginning of the season nobody on the offensive line really had a great mental connection and a lot of plays got messed up. But as we continued to practice and work together, we were able to perform our jobs with less instruction and communication due to the fact that we knew what the others were thinking as the play developed.
Our team had an overwhelming positive experience with mind perception as we were able to come together and form virtually instantaneous bonds through these shared experiences and synchronous physical activity. The more we shared with each other and the more time we spent together, the more we were able to understand and predict how others on the team felt and how they would act. Our season started off very well, but we lost a few close games which eliminated us from contention in the Ivy League Championship. However, we still managed to blow out Yale at Fenway in front of our home crowd. As our time at Harvard progressed our team became significantly closer and our record since freshman year got progressively better.
[Do Yeon]
As mentioned above, mind perception can bring people together. However, there are also limits to mind perception, one of which is that it can perpetuate the distance people feel towards another. This “distance” can be particularly harmful when thinking about the treatment and experiences of groups that deviate from societal norms and expectations. For example, those who identify as sexual minorities face substantial discrimination and stigma from multiple levels, including through interpersonal interactions (e.g., family, co-workers, classmates) and on a structural level (e.g., social norms, laws and policies).
When Castro and Zautra (2016) discuss the idea of resilience in relation to mentalization, they establish that having strong social connections are a necessary key to resilience and that a way to forge these meaningful social connections is through mentalization. This was supported by researchers who conducted a diary study, finding that people who had an increased sense of social connectedness were able to recover from “negative emotional experiences” faster than those with comparatively less social connectedness (Ong & Allaire, 2005, as cited in Castro & Zautra, 2016). However, resilience, as defined here, operates under the assertion that it is not achievable without close social connections. This definition of resilience would render people who belong to stigmatized groups (e.g., a sexual minority group) and may not live in a tolerating community, thus lack a strong support system, unable to be “resilient.” In addition, this idea of resilience overemphasizes the point that with meaningful close relationships, one can overcome/avoid being adversely impacted by negative experiences. Within the context of stigmatized groups, arguing that resilience results from simply having and maintaining positive close relationships places the burden of coping with negative experiences onto those experiencing them, instead of to the people and/or institutions that are perpetuating the stigma they face.
Given this, I began to wonder about the ways that mentalization could be used/studied that could flip this burden over to the sources/perpetrators of stigma and discrimination instead. Thus, I found the ways that mentalizing could be used to work towards this to be particularly engaging.
Because mentalizing requires one to infer what others are thinking and feeling (Waytz & Epley, 2012) it becomes more difficult to do so as the other person becomes increasingly different from oneself. The more different someone is from oneself, the more difficult it can be to understand what they have been through, how their experiences have impacted them, and the perspective they approach problems with. Someone who does not identify as belonging to a sexual minority group could not think like or navigate the world as someone who belongs to a sexual minority population would, with one reason being that the concerns and experiences that individuals who are a sexual minority face can be different than those of people who are cis and heteronormative. It is also more difficult because stigmatized populations often have widespread stereotypes and assumptions made about them, which could cloud or influence the mentalization process.
When someone is not perceived as a part of one’s group, it becomes easier to dehumanize them (Waytz & Epley, 2012), which can lead to these groups more easily perpetrating “negative experiences” towards the groups they dehumanize. On the other hand, humanizing someone requires one to recognize that others also have emotions, goals, and struggles, just as they do themselves (Castro & Zautra, 2016). There is research that showed that across participants of differing racial groups, simply wondering about the other’s favorite vegetable was able to humanize them (Wheeler & Fiske, 2005, as cited in Castro & Zautra, 2016).
The use of mentalizing within this sort of research, is a branch of mind perception research that diverges from placing the burden of implementing a solution to “negative experiences” solely onto stigmatized groups. While doing these readings, and writing this post, it was clear to me how powerful mentalizing is, with the ability to help us forge close connections and great teamwork, but also the ability to enable the dehumanization of others. This makes it that much more important that we are aware of the ways this process can be beneficial and productive as well as biased and harmful as we continue to learn about and discuss social connections.
References
Castro, S. A., & Zautra, A. J. (2016). Humanization of social relations: Nourishing health and resilience through greater humanity. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 36(2), 64–80.
Waytz, A., & Epley, N. (2012). Social connection enables dehumanization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(1), 70–76.
Wheatley, T., Kang, O., Parkinson, C., & Looser, C. E. (2012). From mind perception to mental connection: Synchrony as a mechanism for social understanding. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(8), 589-606.
Understanding someone else’s mind sounds extremely positive and is a great way to foster connections. However, what happens when understanding someone else’s mind leads to negative outcomes such as caring less about others? Here we delve into both sides of the coin for mind perception – the good and the bad.
Components of mind perception that we will discuss below include mind detection, theory of mind, humanization, and dehumanization. Mind detection includes the identification of another entity with a mind, whereas theory of mind is the ability to infer the thoughts, feelings, desires of other people (Epley & Waytz, 2010). Humanization is attributing basic human qualities to others (Haslam, 2006) whereas dehumanization is the failure to attribute basic human qualities to others (Epley & Waytz, 2012) .
Kara: The Good
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
This is a line I repeat to my twin sister probably twice a day. Feeling so connected with someone else’s mind has never felt easier. Inferring thoughts and feelings of someone I grew up with, share the same DNA with, and understand so well is something I consider to be a great success of mind perception in my personal life.
In the Wheatley reading and in class, we learned how easy it is to recognize a face. As humans, we overstate the importance of the face as a stimulus; they ultimately serve as facades of other’s minds (Wheatley et al., 2012). There was a huge jumble of objects in a collage on a big screen. When asked about the location of money, it took over two minutes. When asked about the location of a face, it was almost instantaneous. Now imagine if that face looks exactly like yours. Even more instantaneous. That is a metaphor for mind perception with an identical twin sister and one that I recognize everyday.
Another perk of mind perception is the ease in facilitating social connection and interaction. My sister and I joke that we just constantly blabber to each other at lightning speed. There is zero response time; we just laugh and instantly continue the conversation, jumping from one conversation to the next. Researchers found that conversations with faster response times felt more connected, and a third party perceived the conversation as more enjoyable (Templeton et al., 2022). No wonder, I thought, when I first read the article and connected it to my sister.
Furthermore, Wheatley and his team found that the brain has the same electro-cortical response for dolls and humans, but there is a significantly larger response to human faces (Wheatley et al, 2011). The increased firing for human faces compared to inanimate objects fosters a greater sense of sociality and interaction between human to human. Another topic close to mind perception is humanization. Studies found that humanizing others nourishes healthier relationships and creates more sustainable bonds in the long run (Castro & Zautra, 2016). Combining the firing of the brain’s cortical responses with the humanization creating long-term healthy bonds, it sets humans up for the perfect recipe of social connection and belonging. Being empathetic is a quality I really admire. I think we can all agree it is a great character trait to demonstrate. Failing to consider another person’s perspective or mind is dehumanizing that person. Being empathetic is essentially humanizing and taking the perspective of another person, and of course, super advantageous in making new friends and connections. Mind perception is a fundamental tool in understanding others and forming these close social connections that we crave as humans.
Orion: The Bad
Social Connection Enables Dehumanization. This conclusion, outlined by Waytz and Epley in their 2012 paper of the same title, raises immediate concerns about the implications of meeting one’s own need for belongingness on others. As a self-identified relationship anarchist, or, a person who believes that love and connection are not a zero-sum game, the thought that “increasing social connection diminishes the motivation to connect with the minds of additional others and increases the social distance between the self and more distant others” directly questions my closely held beliefs about our ability to love (Waytz & Epley, 2012). My newfound sense of belonging with my roommates this year floated to the surface as I scanned the disturbing findings. Our friendship is built on a foundation of shared values and multiple overlapping identities, and they fill a need for belonging that I’m not sure was met even before the pandemic began. This is great, of course; my level of confidence, security, and general wellbeing has mostly skyrocketed since being part of this little friend group, where we work consistently to value, humanize, and understand each other. But I cannot help but wonder if our radical inclusivity when it comes to our unique insecurities, flaws, and struggles is not also inherently exclusionary. Have I, in cultivating such close bonds with them, begun seeing others less complexly?
This is not the first time I’ve felt such a compelling sense of belonging. In high school I was a proudly self-described theater kid, spending most of my hours backstage chatting, eating, and doing homework with other theater kids, even when not actively working on a production. I am sure that any team activity – sports, chess club, editorial teams – lends itself to the formation of this sort of shared identity. Working with other actors as part of a cast not only provides a teamwork-based foundation for closeness but actively encourages you to mentalize, mimic, and generally tune yourself to the thoughts and feelings of your castmates, because these are the things that contribute to great on-stage chemistry. Perspective-taking, or imagining oneself in the mental and emotional state of another, is literally baked into the craft. But there was something else.
It is my experience that the shared “theater kid” identity that compels us to sequester ourselves backstage involves a feeling of unbelonging everywhere else. We are often, but not always, a queer, neurodiverse, or otherwise “different” bunch, which can make traditional high school hallways a less than comfortable environment. The fact that we humanize each other so intensely provides a much-needed home base and safety net for navigating school, and I think this is good and necessary. With time, though, I see how this also worked to reinforce my belief that I would not be accepted and isolate myself from others. Occasionally, I have, in years since graduating, met and connected with a classmate outside of theater who remembers me – remembers what classes I took and which performances I was in, what I was studying, and where I worked for my senior project – while I did not remember very much about them at all. This troubles me, especially because the reason I do not remember is almost always that I assumed they, as people outside my in-group, would not accept me. So I just didn’t pay very close attention.
While this is of course a bit of a sad realization, Waytz and Epley outline far more serious consequences to our failure to humanize than missed high-school connections. It is, according to them, the mechanism of satiated need for belonging leading to indifference, not necessarily hatred, that laid the groundwork for the most atrocious crimes human beings have committed against one another in history. What do we do with this information? Obviously, I do not think it wise to starve ourselves of such a basic need for belongingness and connection. I do think we have a calling we cannot ignore to build communities that are affirming, supportive, and uplifting – but do so without defining a rigid, inflexible “them” and “us.” There is hope for this: one study found that having a strong moral identity, or sense of identification with the moral values of one’s communities, makes people “more likely to extend moral concern” to those outside their in-group (Smith et al., 2014). Yet more research is needed in identifying the protective factors that can help us continue to humanize others while meeting our own need for connection.
References
Epley, N., & Waytz, A. (2010). Mind perception.
Wheatley, T., Kang, O., Parkinson, C., & Looser, C. E. (2012). From mind perception to mental connection: Synchrony as a mechanism for social understanding. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(8), 589-606.
Wheatley, T., Weinberg, A., Looser, C., Moran, T., & Hajcak, G. (2011). Mind perception: Real but not artificial faces sustain neural activity beyond the N170/VPP. PloS one, 6(3), e17960.
Castro, S. A., & Zautra, A. J. (2016). Humanization of social relations: Nourishing health and resilience through greater humanity. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 36(2), 64–80.
Waytz, A., & Epley, N. (2012). Social connection enables dehumanization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(1), 70–76.
Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and social psychology review, 10(3), 252-264.
Melophilius (2016). Good Days and Bad [gif]. Imgur. https://imgur.com/gallery/SV5hgpE/comment/673589168
Smith, I. H., Aquino, K., Koleva, S., & Graham, J. (2014). The moral ties that bind . . . Even to out-groups: The interactive effect of moral identity and the binding moral foundations. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1554–1562.
Templeton, E. M., Chang, L. J., Reynolds, E. A., LeBeaumont, M. D. C., & Wheatley, T. (2022). Fast response times signal social connection in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(4).
We realized after reading the research papers on imitation that studying imitation transcends paper and is present in each of our lives. Every human has been impacted by imitation whether it be consciously or unconsciously. We wanted to shed light on how imitation has played a role in our lives as college students. From sharing how our home lives have affected us in seminar classes to looking at our friend circles and teammates, there is value in understanding the effectiveness of imitation in our daily lives and upbringing.
Nia: Imitation in The Family
After reading the Cheng article on self-monitoring without awareness, I realized that most children learn through nonconscious methods of imitation (Cheng & Chartrand, 2003). This may bring to light how we learnt to talk or walk, but I want to focus not on how imitation assimilates us into society, but on how it can differentiate each of us. The people we are around, our families, our culture, our hometowns, classmates, etc. shape each of us into who we are and continue to shape our future lives.
In my own family, I only have older brothers. Because of this, I would try to mimic everything they would do. From being a toddler and trying to use the bathroom like a boy to only wanting to play sports and do other traditionally masculine activities, I was completely ignorant to my non-conscious forms of mimicry. My father raised me the same way he did with his sons, so it never came as a surprise within my family that traditionally feminine activities, like “playing princess” or dressing up barbies, never appealed to me. It was easy for me to rationalize when my parents wanted me to be like “the boys”. I was consciously aware of this mimicry. However, it was not until I was older that I realized all of the subconscious ways mimicry had impacted me. I felt out of place interacting with large groups of girls when I had to do traditionally feminine activities. They were not doing anything wrong, but it was hard for me to “act” like they did without being consciously aware or “self-monitoring” my behaviors. I would sometimes question my own motives. Am I only doing this because everyone else is doing it? Do I really want to try on each other’s clothes and have a girls’ night? Why did I feel more comfortable playing sports with “the guys”? These feelings I had growing up manifested into me being a “high self-monitor” as I got older (Cheng & Chartrand, 2003).
While I’m no longer a complete tomboy playing in the yard with my brothers, I realized that being thrown into situations that felt “socially threatening” at a young age forced me to use mimicry when I felt uncomfortable. I am now a senior in college, and consciously or not, using affiliation cues to gauge when I should imitate others in a situation still holds true for me (Cheng & Chartrand, 2003). After this week’s readings, I urge each of you to look into how imitation has impacted your life from your upbringing. While we grow up to leave our homes, the standards and lifestyle of our homes set not only the expectations we have in social situations but also how we navigate them.
Jonathan: Imitation in Friend Groups
After making my way back to Harvard this year and reimmersing myself into the social community on campus, I could not help but notice how much I’ve begun to alter my behavior to match those around me. Whether it’s suddenly saying words from a TikTok that I have never seen or noticing friends adopting my hand gestures during enthusiastic conversation, mimicry seems to be a constant occurrence now, especially as we reintegrate into society after being isolated for the past few years during the pandemic. I’ve noticed this happen among my long-lasting friendships from childhood too, slowly adopting lingo, ways of speaking, or behaviors that only become evident after they fully become my own. This process often happens outside of the realm of conscious control and is hard to explain or track, but feels satisfying nonetheless.
According to psychological studies of mimicry and its effect on belonging and connection, this pattern of imitation has important implications on social relationships based on the specific contexts it is employed in. According to a study conducted by Leander et. al., context had a major impact on how mimicry affected individuals’ perceptions of those around them. The study demonstrated that mimicry improved perception of others among participants in a more intimate and friendly setting, whereas it elicited physical and emotional coldness in a more impersonal and distant setting (Leander et al., 2012). This emphasis on context makes sense in the discussion of friendships because these relationships are often incredibly intimate and among peers of equal status, so engaging in mimicry would have a positive effect on the relationship.
Mimicry is also shown to have a beneficial outcome on the strength of social interactions. Stel and Vonk found that the closeness and smoothness of interactions were heightened among two participants when one mimicked the other’s facial expressions and non-verbal actions (Stel & Vonk, 2010). I found in my own interactions that the realization of mimicry typically comes with lots of laughter and a greater sense of joy in having an impact on others in this way. Given that this happens in the instances where we can catch the mimicry and that a majority of it goes under the radar, the presence of mimicry in friendships makes a lot of sense, since it leads to a greater sense of connection to others and leads to a more stable relationship moving forward.
Though often our values and upbringings encourage us to think of ourselves as unique individuals, perhaps this focus of independence is a bit too narrow-minded. As we develop complex and intimate relationships with those around us, adopting elements of those who we think are important is a fundamental part of who we are and who we become, as demonstrated by these studies and more. I encourage you to take a look at your interactions with your friends and see if you can find any signs of mimicry; if you do, then you might just have a keeper.
Sierra: Imitation in Sport
Throughout the majority of my childhood, I was a competitive gymnast training eight hours a day and up to thirty two hours a week. My teammates were my closest friends, while also being my closest competitors. When you are spending so much time with the same people in such a competitive yet family-like environment, you start to pick up tendencies that specific individuals have. In particular, I had one teammate who would always style her hair in the locker room into a slick back, tight ballerina bun. I knew that no matter what, she would always do so. Whether I wanted to pick up on these tendencies or not, it was inevitable, and as time went on, I began to mimic some of them. I was the youngest of my teammates by two years, which naturally, had me look up to them and admire what they could do. All that I wanted to achieve was what the “older girls” could, and I would do anything in order to accomplish so.
Recent research has shown that mimicry facilitates the bonds that people form, as well as the emotions that people feel with each other (Stel & Vonk, 2010). In sport, the importance of team chemistry is always reiterated because of its impact. Going back to my earlier point on picking up my teammate’s tendencies of how she styled her hair, before I knew it, I began to style my hair in the exact same way that she did. I began to notice that when I did so, I naturally felt closer with her because we had something in common that we didn’t have before. This revealed to me that something as small as styling my hair the same could have such a large impact on my teammate’s and I relationship. My teammate and I began sharing more emotional stories with one another, and were generally more open with one another because we had a stronger and deeper emotional bond. This, all in all, showed me that mimicry positively impacted the bond I formed with my teammate on both a personal and emotional level, thus supporting the findings of Stel & Vonk (2010).
Another study conducted by Ashton-James et al., (2007) found that how close people are is affected by mimicking, and specifically found that it brings people closer to one another. As said before, being the youngest on my team put me in the position to naturally see my teammates as those who I want to look up to and do the same as they did. Sport is about repetition, it is about having a confident mindset and it is about knowing that your teammates have your back. To the repetition piece, I would physically imitate the certain skills or moves my teammates would do. They would do a round off, I would do a round off. They would do a full turn, I would do a full turn. By mimicking their actions, I connected with them on a deeper level to where we would bond and connect over the struggles or achievements we had over a particular skill. Going through this experience supports the findings that Ashton-James et al., (2007) found in the sense that we both understood the complexities that went into our performance, and by imitating what the older girls were doing, we were able to form a connection that was closer.
While gymnastics had a large impact on my life and how I view older individuals, I strongly think that everyone should have either a formal or informal mentor on whatever team they are a part of. Whether that is in the workplace, in school, in sport, or whatever else it is where you are working with others, find that person who you can look up to, who will push you to want to do what they do, and ultimately, mimic.
References
Ashton-James, C., van Baaren, R. B., Chartrand, T. L., Decety, J., & Karremans, J. (2007). Mimicry and me: The impact of mimicry on self-construal. Social Cognition, 25, 518–535.
Cheng, C. M., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). Self-monitoring without awareness: using mimicry as a nonconscious affiliation strategy. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85(6), 1170.
Leander, N. P., Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (2012). You Give Me the Chills: Embodied Reactions to Inappropriate Amounts of Behavioral Mimicry. Psychological Science, 23(7), 772–779.
Stel, M., & Vonk, R. (2010). Mimicry in social interaction: Benefits for mimickers, mimickees, and their interaction. British journal of psychology, 101(2), 311-323.
The Beatles, the Boston Red Sox, the Avengers. Everywhere we look people join together with others who share the same goals, passions, or superhero-like abilities which make them part of a distinct group. This semester, we’ve spent each class dissecting our need to belong, and our group associations constitute a huge component of fulfilling that need. Lara, Ari, and I each belong to sports teams here on campus which have provided unique group environments throughout our time here. We are excited to share the experiences we’ve had on the dance, soccer, and rugby teams as we examine some of the benefits and drawbacks of group membership.
Coming to college, I knew very little other than the fact that I was going to be completely out of my element and that I was going to go crazy if I didn’t find a way to continue dancing. As a lifelong ballerina but yearning to try out something new, I adventured to an Expressions hip-hop workshop during opening days (that performance was laughable, a ballerina doing hip-hop?) and was approached by two of my now teammates who encouraged me to come to Crimson Dance Team (CDT!!!) auditions the next day. Apparently, they were impressed by my ability to count to eight and sassy walk with the best of ‘em (or at least that’s what they told me after I made the team).
The first thing that struck me about CDT was how different everyone was, putting aside our identifications as dancers and Harvard students. We come from a variety of dance backgrounds (some competitive, some ballet and jazz, some hip-hop, etc.) and, in my years on the team, we’ve had members from more than ten states and four countries with countless other identities and life experiences. The ability to bring different people together can be very beneficial for groups by increasing the number of perspectives and amount of knowledge contributed to achieving a goal (Cheng, Sanchez-Burks, & Lee, 2008). On CDT, that can mean offering different approaches to cleaning a dance (working on each individual component of a move so everyone is in perfect unison) or suggesting team building strategies; the more people we have making unique contributions, the more competitive we can be as a group. Groups are also just a great way to meet people who come from all walks of life in order to expose yourself to these different perspectives.
Aside from bringing different people together, teams (and other groups) have many other benefits. We know that group membership increases our overall sense of belonging (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), but this is especially salient following rejection in other social environments. When people experience rejection, they gravitate towards and find more meaning in their pre-established groups in order to fix their dampened sense of belonging (Knowles & Gardner, 2008). Being a part of the dance team has definitely benefited me when it comes to finding my place at Harvard and having people to turn to when things are a bit rough. Team membership generally can have many positive attributes when it comes to social connection, however there are also some potential drawbacks which must be examined in order to get a complete picture of what it means to belong to this type of group.
[Lara]
“One last rep, go Gibby!!” In between the beating of my heart in my ears, I hear my teammates yelling my nickname as I turn for the last conditioning sprint of the workout. Fighting through the pain and lactic acid filling my thighs with concrete, it’s their loud encouragement that gets me through that last repetition. My team informs a large part of my identity, at Harvard and beyond; being a student-athlete fills me with pride, responsibility, and an inherent belonging to the entire athletic community. Group membership to the soccer team provides me with the opportunity to grow and meet goals together, creating an interdependency. I enjoy this unique dynamic, as we need and rely on every single player to be on board (not literally!) with the team goals in order to win games, championships, and improve both personally and collectively.
The knowledge that I’m ‘stuck with’ my 20+ teammates for at least four years somewhat forces acceptance and approval of everyone, however, this also spawns an imbalance between assimilating with the team’s dominant identities in contrast to maintaining individuality. The optimal distinctiveness model describes this dichotomy as opposing needs for assimilation and differentiation, in which we define ourselves using distinctive category memberships (Brewer, 1991). Social identities are strongest in those categorizations that are not too inclusive where they become constraining, while also narrow enough to create a sense of belonging. When groups maintain this balance, we are more likely to identify with them and adopt their principles (Brewer, 1991). Personally, I experienced this conflict in assimilating to the heteronormative environment on my team for my first two years and instinctively ignoring my sexual orientation and exploration. Naturally, I assumed that I was straight, both because of existing team norms and conformity out of fear of rejection or ostracism. The thought of coming out to my team became a very anxiety-inducing experience; I played out drastic events of losing my place in this group and having to quit, even though deep down I anticipated that they would accept me regardless.
Coming out, I did not expect positive reactions from my teammates, as I had concealed this stigmatized identity from them for two years of our interactions. Members of the LGBTQ+ community have been shown to be perceived more negatively when they were associated with people’s ingroups (Lupo & Zárate, 2019). Similarly, early disclosure of homosexuality to a heterosexual study partner, versus later coming out, was predictive of increased liking, closeness, and interest ratings in spending one-on-one time in another study (Dane et al., 2015). Contrary to my knowledge of how people can react, and the imminent threat of losing one of my social identities, I stepped out of my comfort zone and overcame my initial flight reaction to leave the closet. To my surprise, the outcome emulated those results showing that participants reacted more positively for established in-group members (Buliga & MacInnis, 2020). In fact, the pre-existing friendships on my team felt like a buffer to the potentially stigmatized perception they may have had of my ‘non-straight-ness’. Learning about an established friend’s membership to an out-group, in this case sexuality, can be overruled by preceding relationship satisfaction and investment into the friendship through long-term commitment (Rusbult et al., 2012).
So maybe my initial fear and stress reaction were part of an innate fear activation reaction involving the HPA axis, amygdala, and sympathetic nervous system? Maybe my stress of rejection was perspective-taking of my team’s perception that turned disadvantageous to my personal well-being? A theme we have found in this course is that the intense physiological aspect of empathy can be counterproductive in that it produced undue stress, anxiety, and fear in me. We may need to self-regulate this vicarious aspect of empathy to maintain our relationships, and our individuality. Tuning into empathy to connect with my teammates is advantageous to create belonging and powerful group identities, however, it can also lead us to hide, or even lose, a part of ourselves.
[Ari]
Moving to a new place gives people the opportunity to curate the different parts of themselves due to decreased interactions with some of the groups they may have previously strongly identified with. As I prepare for graduation and moving to a new place, one of my main concerns is finding a group of friends. Coming into college, I was *briefly* in a similar situation as I knew of one other person who was going to Harvard but Opening Days, roommates, the mere presence of Berg, and joining the rugby team facilitated meeting new people. What I didn’t expect was exactly how close I would get to some of my teammates. As we learned in class, people in our in-groups are more likely to become and stay friends and sports provided me that space.
According to Graupensperger et al. (2020), small groups, like college club sports, lead to increased group identification which in turn, often leads to group members behaving to fit in and greater team cohesion. As Lara described, this can have a wide range of implications, some stressful, some encouraging. In a study investigating group membership and running, a relatively solitary activity, Evans et al. (2019) found women often report a greater running identity compared to men when linked with a running group. The results suggest those who consider running a part of their identity generally run greater distances on average. This supports my own experiences at the collegiate level with one example being conditioning. Conditioning sessions on my own are not as appealing and I will often try to rope people into conditioning with me because it’s an easy reminder of my membership to a team greater than myself.
Group membership is also based on social identity. The connection between group membership and social identity is moderated by the amount of prosocial or antisocial behavior between members during a given day (Bruner & Benson, 2018). In my own personal experience, team vibes are indicative of whether we’ll have a “good” or “bad” practice; for that reason we make a concerted effort to change our behavior when it seems like we are getting down on ourselves or chippy with teammates. Realizing this relies heavily on the experienced players who know the team to steer the rest of the team in a more constructive direction. This is only possible when teammates know the verbal and physical signs of someone being off track. The more time teams spend together, the closer they tend to get and research suggests this increases an individual’s commitment to the team (Graupensperger et al., 2020). The beginning of the season is challenging as everyone adjusts to new roles, new teammates, and figuring out social connections. As a freshman, I was one of eight walk-ons (only two remained by senior year) and it took some time to settle in and figure who was actually going to become a part of the team. And after winning a national championship in the fall of 2019, I’d say we found our groove.
Rugby is and will continue to be a huge part of my life after college, but instead of being an active member of the team, I will be a part of the Harvard-Radcliffe Rugby alumni group. Sports have been a cornerstone of my life and despite leaving behind the organized, rigorous collegiate sports atmosphere, I’m already looking for teams in my soon-to-be home. After all, the common interest sports provide me makes it easier to meet new people while providing an easy conversation starter that could be the start of meaningful new friendships and group connections.
References
Abramson, L., Uzefovsky, F., Toccaceli, V., & Knafo-Noam, A. (2020). The genetic and environmental origins of emotional and cognitive empathy: Review and meta-analyses of twin studies. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 114, 113-133. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.03.023
Baumeister, Roy F, & Leary, Mark R. (1995). The Need to Belong. Psychological Bulletin,117(3), 497-529.
Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: On being the same and different at the same time. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 17(5), 475-482.
Bruner, Mark W, & Benson, Alex J. (2018). Evaluating the psychometric properties of the Social Identity Questionnaire for Sport (SIQS). Psychology of Sport and Exercise,35, 181-188.
Buliga, E., & MacInnis, C. (2020). “How do you like them now?” Expected reactions upon discovering that a friend is a political out-group member. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 37(10-11), 2779-2801.
Cheng, Chi-Ying, Sanchez-Burks, Jeffrey, & Lee, Fiona. (2008). Taking advantage of differences: Increasing team innovation through identity integration. In Diversity and Groups (Vol. 11, pp. 55-73). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Dane, S. K., Masser, B. M., MacDonald, G., & Duck, J. M. (2015). When “in your face” is not out of place: The effect of timing of disclosure of a same-sex dating partner under conditions of contact. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0135023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0135023.
Evans, M. Blair, McLaren, Colin, Budziszewski, Ross, & Gilchrist, Jenna. (2019). When a sense of “we” shapes the sense of “me”: Exploring how groups impact running identity and behavior. Self and Identity,18(3), 227-246.
Graupensperger, Scott, Panza, Michael, & Evans, M. Blair. (2020). Network Centrality, Group Density, and Strength of Social Identification in College Club Sport Teams. Group Dynamics,24(2), 59-73.
Knowles, Megan L, & Gardner, Wendi L. (2008). Benefits of Membership: The Activation and Amplification of Group Identities in Response to Social Rejection. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin,34(9), 1200-1213.
Lupo, A. K., & Zárate, M. A. (2019). When “they” become “us”: The effect of time and ingroup identity on perceptions of gay and lesbian group members. Journal of homosexuality, 66(6), 780-796.
Rusbult, C. E., Agnew, C. R., & Arriaga, X. B. (2012). The investment model of commitment processes. In Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 218–231). Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249222.n37.
My quarantine has been spent watching a lot of reality TV. Specifically, romantic shows such as Love is Blind, Married at First Sight, and the Bachelor. There are so many different iterations of shows asking you to watch two people fall in love and stick around to see if their relationship lasts. Clearly there is something intriguing about watching a romantic relationship develop and seeing the drama play out. While watching, we get to see the heartbreak but also the blossoming of new love. A staple of these shows is the interviews where each person shares their thoughts on the state of the relationship. Often, these thoughts involve trying to figure out whether their love interest likes them back and in general trying to understand the others’ perspective.
This makes sense because perspective-taking is a critical part of any relationship. Perspective-taking involves stepping into the mind of another person to understand what they are thinking and feeling. In romantic relationships, perspective-taking occurs all throughout the course of the relationship. From the beginning, both parties are trying to identify whether their interest in the other is reciprocated. Rejection hurts and can be extremely uncomfortable. Even though we might try hard to figure out what someone else is thinking, it is really difficult for us to accurately identify their thoughts and feelings especially in regards to romantic relationships. Bohns & DeVincent (2019) found that those who initiate romantic relationships underestimate how difficult it is for the other person to reject their advances. While I was watching the Bachelor, I could palpably feel this discomfort every time Matt James sent girls home. The girls were also very disappointed and upset and I imagine they would have trouble empathizing with Matt’s position.
Perspective-taking is important throughout the relationship as well. Understanding your partner’s perspective is crucial for the well-being of romantic relationships (Ramezani et al. 2020). The reality TV shows take advantage of this fact by inserting uncertainty into the plots of the show. For example, in Love is Blind, the couples are engaged throughout the show and must decide at the altar whether to say I do. This creates a tension between the couples as they try to figure out what their partner is going to say when they get to the wedding. Similarly, in Married at First Sight, the couples are married and must decide at the end of the show whether to stay married or get divorced. Oftentimes you can tell who will reject their partner and who will feel blindsided by the rejection. It can still be heartbreaking to watch as someone realizes that their view of the relationship was very different from their partner’s view of the relationship. Luckily perspective-taking and empathy can be improved through Theory of Mind training as evidenced in the Ramezani et al. (2020) paper. Theory of Mind training involves teaching couples how to identify mental states so that they can learn to understand the mental states of their partners (Ramezani et al. 2020). While this would be the healthiest for these relationships, I don’t think it would not be as entertaining for the audience.
[Yufeng]
As mentioned above, romantic relationships do require high demand for perspective-taking and empathy abilities, becoming even harder when it comes to the affective forecasting part. Namely, when we have a crush on someone, whether we can accurately predict if they have similar feelings to us; or whether we can wisely step out when the others show no interest in us through their implicit cues, is very important but troublesome to us.
We may sometimes wonder why we keep regretfully missing someone we care about in the crowds without forming a stronger bond with him/her. In the series Sex Education, which narrates a teenage boy Otis with a sex therapist mother teams up with his high school classmate Maeve to set up an underground sex therapy clinic at school, Maeve and Otis soon realize that they share far more in common than they had originally thought and secretly develop romantic feelings for one another. However, neither of them acts on their impulses out of fear that the other does not feel the same way, and they end up passing by each other while forming romantic relationships with others (watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DenrhhJkZM ).
Whenever you encounter this kind of situation, do not overly blame yourself and regard it as common. We do desire one day we can have some magic power to predict the significant others’ feelings, which we cannot possibly get. However, there are still some ways to improve our forecasting accuracy to some extent.
Part 1: Causes
To begin with, I want to mention some of the nature behind the affective forecasting process towards the one we like. When we experience the feelings of desperately desiring someone, admittedly it is partially attributed to their physical attractiveness, personality and probably similarity and complementarity. Nevertheless, have you ever thought about the uncertainty itself of whether they like us can increase romantic attraction, which can be exemplified by an experiment, of which the female participants in the uncertain condition were most attracted to the men – even more attracted than were participants who were told that the men liked them a lot(Erin R. Whitchurch, 2011). After that, the attraction along with our perceived rarity, acting as an incentive, will influence our affective forecasting and then our motivation.
Honestly, it interests me firstly regarding why people sometimes flinch, facing the attraction, even though performing actively can significantly increase the possibility of success. It is reminiscent of people’s fear of being rejected, rejection sensitivity, as we’ve talked about in the class. Interestingly, to dig it deeper, I found the subjective expected pleasure theory. Especially when the unobtained outcome is more desirable, the anticipated pleasure about the obtained outcome declines because people anticipate disappointment when they imagine getting the worse outcome or anticipate regret when they imagine having made the wrong choice. Moreover, as for the forecasting process, the displeasure of getting the worst of two outcomes is typically greater in magnitude than the pleasure of receiving the better outcome(Barbara A. Mellers 2001). In other words, people tend to imagine possible bad outcomes more negatively than they originally are. Along with this, the anticipated pleasure will determine our next steps of decision-making(Barbara A. Mellers 2001).
The next question comes to what causes the misperception. The signal detection theory (SDT) describes this as the sensitivity of distinguishing sexual intent cues from friendly cues (Figure 1). Specifically, the insensitive one can perceive more overlaps between the friendly cues and sexually interested cues. It should be highlighted that these sensitivity variances are not only due to inheritable or gender differences, but also due to stimulus such as clothing style, dating variables, alcohol, attractiveness(Farris et al., 2008) etc.. According to this theory, misperception may arise from people’s different signal detection sensitivity. For instance, the insensitive one (panel a) cannot distinguish the large parts of the overlap, when dating a sensitive one (panel b). Additionally, decision criteria can also affect the outcomes (Figure 2). For instance, the liberal one (point a) may mistake some friendly cues as sexual intent cues, while the conservative one (point b) may neglect some sexual intent cues as friendly cues. This can explain why males perceive both males and females as having more sexual interest than do females – their perception thresholds are different. Evolutionary theorists have suggested that men’s reproductive goals are better achieved by over-perceiving (lower threshold) rather than underperceiving women’s level of sexual interest(Parkhill, 2015). Overall, the bias will result in the misperception and I hypothesize that the misperception outcomes will in turn influence the sensitivity due to the close relationship between rejection and self-evaluation.
Figure 1. Normal probability distributions representing perception of friendliness and sexual interest. Panel a depicts the perceptual distributions of an individual who is relatively insensitive to the difference between friendliness and sexual interest. Panel b depicts the perceptual distributions of a more sensitive individual(Farris et al., 2008).
Figure 2. Normal probability distributions representing perception of friendliness and sexual interest. Decision criterion points are depicted to illustrate decisional bias. Point ‘A’ represents a liberal criterion; point ‘B’ represents a conservative criterion(Farris et al., 2008).
Part 2: Solutions
Even though it is pretty hard to maintain accurate affective forecasting, we still can figure out some possible solutions based on those findings. For instance, we should know clearly the uncertainty feelings can give us certain kinds of illusions, to avoid suffering from obsessive love disorder.
Plus, we should consider the possible effects of SDT if we always step into misperception. To be more specific, we should deliberately know more about others’ perspectives, especially the significant other you are dating with. According to the research, even though people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself or some predictions of the observers(Gilbert et al., 2009), they are still more prone to conjure an inaccurate vision based on the presence of event information(Knowing, 2009). Thus, the takeaway is that we should forecast based on the actual feelings of surrogates currently experiencing the event or neighbors/observers’ advice.
On top of that, despite of the subjective expected pleasure theory, we still can mentally subtract positive events to improve our affective state, according to the evidence that Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner(Koo et al., 2008).
Finally, never overlook the beneficial consequences for mood by actively engaging in positive self-representation, even to strangers, because The failure to recognize the affective benefits of putting one’s best face forward may underlie forecasting errors regarding the emotional consequences of the most common forms of social interactions(Dunn et al., 2007).
References
Barbara A. Mellers , A. P. M. (2001). Anticipated Emotions as Guides to Choice. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10(6).
Bohns, V. K., & DeVincent, L. A. (2019). Rejecting unwanted romantic advances is more difficult than suitors realize. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(8), 1102-1110.
Dunn, E. W., Biesanz, J. C., Human, L. J., & Finn, S. (2007, Jun). Misunderstanding the affective consequences of everyday social interactions: the hidden benefits of putting one’s best face forward. J Pers Soc Psychol, 92(6), 990-1005. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.990
Erin R. Whitchurch, T. D. W. a. D. T. G. (2011). ”He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not . . . ”: Uncertainty Can Increase Romantic Attraction. Psychological Science(22), 172.
Farris, C., Treat, T. A., Viken, R. J., & McFall, R. M. (2008, Jan). Sexual coercion and the misperception of sexual intent. Clin Psychol Rev, 28(1), 48-66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2007.03.002
Gilbert, D. T., Killingsworth, M. A., Eyre, R. N., & Wilson, T. D. (2009, Mar 20). The surprising power of neighborly advice. Science, 323(5921), 1617-1619. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1166632
Knowing, M. I. v. Y. F. C. P. A. F. B. I. B. (2009). My Imagination vs. Your Feelings: Can Personal Affective Forecasts Be Improved By Knowing. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 15(4), 351-360.
Koo, M., Algoe, S. B., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008, Nov). It’s a wonderful life: mentally subtracting positive events improves people’s affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts. J Pers Soc Psychol, 95(5), 1217-1224. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013316
Parkhill, A. J. J.-T. A. A. M. R. (2015). Why Do Some Men Misperceive Women’s Sexual Intentions More Frequently Than Others Do? An Application of the Confluence Model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Ramezani, A., Ghamari, M., Jafari, A., & Aghdam, G. F. (2020). The effectiveness of a Theory of Mind (ToM) training program in promoting empathy between married couples. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 19(1), 1-25.
