Humans have a fundamental need to experience a shared reality with others. We present a new conceptualization of shared reality based on four conditions. We posit (a) that shared reality involves a (subjectively perceived) commonality of individuals' inner states (not just observable behaviors); (b) that shared reality is about some target referent; (c) that for a shared reality to occur, the commonality of inner states must be appropriately motivated; and (d) that shared reality involves the experience of a successful connection to other people's inner states. In reviewing relevant evidence, we emphasize research on the saying-is-believing effect, which illustrates the creation of shared reality in interpersonal communication. We discuss why shared reality provides a better explanation of the findings from saying-is-believing studies than do other formulations. Finally, we examine relations between our conceptualization of shared reality and related constructs (including empathy, perspective taking, theory of mind, common ground, embodied synchrony, and socially distributed knowledge) and indicate how our approach may promote a comprehensive and differentiated understanding of social-sharing phenomena.
The empathy paradox
There’s an image of empathy we all know that is beautiful: the fullness of completely understanding someone else, the symbolic walk in shoes that are not one’s own. The knowledge that someone else can share a pain so acute that would otherwise seem unbearably solitary. It’s an image inherent to empathy’s definition, an image many believe in wholeheartedly. Several studies conducted by Stanford researchers alone suggest people are motivated to feel empathy, that empathy is highly associated with social desirability, that it is as beneficial as it is admired.
Mechanisms of social cognition
Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct.
Undersociality: miscalibrated social cognition can inhibit social connection
A person’s well-being depends heavily on forming and maintaining positive relationships, but people can be reluctant to connect in ways that would create or strengthen relationships. Emerging research suggests that miscalibrated social cognition may create psychological barriers to connecting with others more often. Specifically, people may underestimate how positively others will respond to their own sociality across a variety of social actions, including engaging in conversation, expressing appreciation, and performing acts of kindness.
Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level
Significance Human memory is highly malleable. Because of this malleability, jointly remembering the past along with another individual often results in increased similarity between the conversational partners’ memories. We propose an approach that examines the conversation between a pair of participants as part of a larger network of social interactions that has the potential to reveal how human communities form collective memories. Empirical evidence indicating that dyadic-level conversational alignment processes give rise to community-wide shared memories is presented. We find that individual-level memory updating phenomena and social network structure are two fundamental factors that contribute to the emergence of collective memories. , The development of shared memories, beliefs, and norms is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur owing to a dynamic system of information sharing and memory updating, which fundamentally depends on communication. Here we report results on the formation of collective memories in laboratory-created communities. We manipulated conversational network structure in a series of real-time, computer-mediated interactions in fourteen 10-member communities. The results show that mnemonic convergence, measured as the degree of overlap among community members’ memories, is influenced by both individual-level information-processing phenomena and by the conversational social network structure created during conversational recall. By studying laboratory-created social networks, we show how large-scale social phenomena (i.e., collective memory) can emerge out of microlevel local dynamics (i.e., mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein points to optimal strategies for spreading information in social networks and provides a framework for measuring and forging collective memories in communities of individuals.
The Empathy Paradox
Understanding The Empathy Paradox can transform relationships by enabling you to appreciate differing perspectives and foster collaboration.
Ambient Co-presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
Ambient Co-presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
Cognition in a Social Context: A Social-Interactionist Approach to Emergent Phenomena
The formation of collective memories, emotions, and beliefs is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to be the result of a dynamical system of communicative interactions among individuals. But despite recent psychological research on collective phenomena, no programmatic framework to explore the processes involved in their formation exists. Here, we propose a social-interactionist approach that bridges cognitive and social psychology to illuminate how microlevel cognitive phenomena give rise to large-scale social outcomes. It involves first establishing the boundary conditions of cognitive phenomena, then investigating how cognition is influenced by the social context in which it is manifested, and finally studying how dyadic-level influences propagate in social networks. This approach has the potential to (a) illuminate the large-scale consequences of well-established cognitive phenomena, (b) lead to interdisciplinary dialogues between psychology and the other social sciences, and (c) be more relevant for public policy than existing approaches.
Social Verification Theory: A New Way to Conceptualize Validation, Dissonance, and Belonging
Academic Abstract In the present review, we propose a theory that seeks to recontextualize various existing theories as functions of people’s perceptions of their consistency with those around them. This theory posits that people seek social consistency for both epistemic and relational needs and that social inconsistency is both negative and aversive, similar to the experience of cognitive dissonance. We further posit that the aversive nature of perceiving social inconsistency leads people to engage in various behaviors to mitigate or avoid these inconsistencies. When these behaviors fail, however, people experience chronic social inconsistency, which, much like chronic rejection, is associated with physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. Finally, we describe how mitigation and avoidance of social inconsistency underlie many seemingly unrelated theories, and we provide directions for how future research may expand on this theory. Public Abstract In the present review, we propose that people find inconsistency with those around them to be an unpleasant experience, as it threatens people’s core need to belong. Because the threat of reduced belongingness evokes negative feelings, people are motivated to avoid inconsistency with others and to mitigate the negative feelings that are produced when it inevitably does arise. We outline several types of behaviors that can be implemented to avoid or mitigate these inconsistencies (e.g., validation, affirmation, distancing, etc.). When these behaviors cannot be implemented successfully, people experience chronic invalidation, which is associated with reduced physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. We discuss how invalidation may disproportionately affect individuals with minoritized identities. Furthermore, we discuss how belongingness could play a key role in radicalization into extremist groups.
How you attach to people may explain a lot about your inner life
Attachment theory suggests that early interactions with caregivers can dramatically affect your beliefs about yourself, your expectations of others, and how you cope with stress and regulate your emotions as an adult
Epistemic Infrastructure: Building Shared Truth in an Era of Disaggregation
The Construct of Collective Perception
The Emergence of Social Norms and Conventions
The utility of our actions frequently depends upon the beliefs and behavior of other agents. Thankfully, through experience, we learn norms and conventions that provide stable expectations for navigating our social world. Here, we review several distinct influences on their content and distribution. At the level of individuals locally interacting in dyads, success depends on rapidly adapting pre-existing norms to the local context. Hence, norms are shaped by complex cognitive processes involved in learning and social reasoning.
Sycophantic AI makes human interaction feel more effortful and less satisfying over time
Millions of people now turn to artificial intelligence (AI) systems for personal advice, guidance, and support. Such systems can be sycophantic, frequently affirming users' views and beliefs. Across five preregistered studies (N = 3,075 participants, 12,766 human-AI conversations), including a three-week study with a census-representative U.S. sample, we provide longitudinal experimental evidence that sycophantic AI shifts how users approach their closest relationships. We show that sycophantic AI immediately delivers the emotional and esteem support users typically associate with close friends and family. Over three weeks of such interactions, users became nearly as likely to seek personal advice from sycophantic AI as from close friends and family, and reported lower satisfaction with their real-world social interactions. When given a choice among AI response styles, a majority preferred sycophantic AI -- not for the quality of its advice, but because it made them feel most understood. Together, these findings offer a relational account of AI sycophancy and its impacts.
Functional Synchronization: The Emergence of Coordinated Activity in Human Systems
The topical landscape of psychology is highly compartmentalized, with distinct phenomena explained and investigated with recourse to theories and methods that have little in common. Our aim in this article is to identify a basic set of principles ...
How Social Isolation Is Killing Us (Published 2016)
Research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being.
A bias for social information in human cultural transmission
Evolutionary theories concerning the origins of human intelligence suggest that cultural transmission might be biased toward social over non‐social information. This was tested by passing social and non‐social information along multiple chains of participants. Experiment 1 found that gossip, defined as information about intense third‐party social relationships, was transmitted with siginificantly greater accuracy and in significantly greater quantity than equivalent non‐social information concerning individual behaviour or the physical environment. Experiment 2 replicated this finding controlling for narrative coherence, and additionally found that information concerning everyday non‐gossip social interactions was transmitted just as well as the intense gossip interactions. It was therefore concluded that human cultural transmission is biased toward information concerning social interactions over equivalent non‐social information.
