Interaction
Why do people turn to smartphones during social interactions?
Ryan Dwyer, Aaron Zhuo & Elizabeth Dunn
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2023
Abstract:
Smartphones can undermine the well-being people derive from social interactions, and yet nearly 90% of smartphone owners report having used their phones in their most recent social interaction. Why do people so readily turn to their devices, if doing so makes them less happy? To investigate this question, we asked participants to spend 20 min with 2-3 unacquainted peers in a makeshift recreation room. We randomly assigned groups to either have their phones accessible or to leave them stored away, and we assessed enjoyment for each 5-min phase of the 20-min period. We predicted that phones would provide some initial benefits; but, over time they would increasingly undermine the enjoyment people would derive otherwise by connecting with others. Contrary to our hypothesis, phones failed to confer any detectable benefits. Instead, participants who had access to their phones reported worse overall subjective experience and socialized significantly less (on both self-report and objective measures) compared to those who did not have access to their phones. The findings from this registered report cast doubt on the possibility that people are making sensible -- albeit myopic -- choices to use their phones, suggesting that people may be acting against their own best interest when they use phones in social situations.
Clarity from Violence? Intragroup Aggression and the Structure of Status Hierarchies
James Chu
American Sociological Review, June 2023, Pages 454-492
Abstract:
Status hierarchies are fundamental forms of social order that structure peer interactions like intragroup aggression. The reciprocal relationship, however, remains unclear. Does intragroup aggression strengthen, or weaken, status hierarchies? Under what conditions? To answer these questions, I analyze an original dataset containing victimization and directed friendship networks of 8,229 adolescents across 256 classes and three semesters. Measuring the strength of status hierarchies by how likely friendship nominations are characterized by hierarchical triads, I show that peer aggression weakens status hierarchies, and temporal sequences indicate the results are unlikely to be explained by reverse causality. I theorize that clear status hierarchies emerge through coordinated reallocations of esteem, and peer aggression engenders hierarchy primarily by giving onlookers shared opportunities to coordinate. Peer aggression, however, is frequently ambiguous, and onlookers arrive at inconsistent interpretations, fragmenting how they assign esteem and reducing the clarity of status distinctions. Additional analyses confirm that whether peer aggression strengthens or weakens status hierarchies depends on the consistent perceptions of onlookers. Taken together, this research demonstrates the significance of third-party onlookers and their ability to consistently interpret interactions, while offering new explanations for when peer aggression is self-limiting or persistent.
You changed my mind: Immediate and enduring impacts of social emotion regulation
Razia Sahi et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
As social creatures, our relationships with other people have tremendous downstream impacts on health and well-being. However, we still know surprisingly little about how our social interactions regulate how we think and feel through life's challenges. Getting help from other people to change how one thinks about emotional events -- known as "social reappraisal" -- can be more effective in downregulating negative affect than reappraising on one's own, but it is unknown whether this regulatory boost from social support persists when people face the same events alone in the future. In a preregistered study of 120 young adults (N = 60 same-gender dyads, gender-split sample) involving in-lab emotion regulation tasks and a follow-up task online approximately 1 day later, we found that participants responded less negatively to aversive images that were socially regulated (i.e., reappraised with the help of a friend) both immediately and over time, as compared to images that had been solo regulated (i.e., reappraised on one's own) or not regulated (i.e., passively viewed). Interestingly, the regulatory boost from social support observed both in the lab and at follow-up was driven by women dyads. This work highlights one important mechanism explaining how support from others can facilitate emotional well-being: By changing peoples' lasting impressions of distressing events, interactions with others can help prepare them to cope with future exposure to those events on their own, underscoring how valuable others' perspectives can be when navigating ongoing emotional stressors.
Seeing other people yawn selectively enhances vigilance: A conceptual replication
Andrew Gallup & Sabina Wozny
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Yawning serves as a cue that an individual is experiencing a reduction of arousal and vigilance. As a result, the group vigilance hypothesis predicts that the detection of yawning in others should trigger distinct neurological changes to enhance the vigilance of the observer as a means of compensating for the reduced alertness of the yawner. In support of this hypothesis, a previous study found that watching videos of other people yawning significantly enhanced the detection of a recurrent survival threat (i.e., snakes) but had no impact on the detection of neutral stimuli (i.e., frogs). To assess the generalizability of this effect, we performed a conceptual replication to test whether seeing others yawn improves the detection of another predation threat to humans: lions. In a repeated-measures design, 25 participants completed visual search tasks with lions and impalas separately after viewing yawning and control videos. As predicted, lions were detected significantly faster than impalas across trials (p < .01). Moreover, consistent with the group vigilance hypothesis, there was a significant interaction between the target stimulus and video presentation (p < .05), whereby lion detection was selectively enhanced following exposure to yawns. These findings provide further support that merely witnessing others yawn elicits cognitive changes that improve threat detection during periods of enhanced vulnerability.
Partner similarity and social cognitive traits predict social interaction success among strangers
Sarah Dziura et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, September 2023
Abstract:
Social interactions are a ubiquitous part of engaging in the world around us, and determining what makes an interaction successful is necessary for social well-being. This study examined the separate contributions of individual social cognitive ability and partner similarity to social interaction success among strangers, measured by a cooperative communication task and self-reported interaction quality. Sixty participants engaged in a 1-h virtual social interaction with an unfamiliar partner (a laboratory confederate) including a 30-min cooperative 'mind-reading' game and then completed several individual tasks and surveys. They then underwent a separate functional MRI session in which they passively viewed video clips that varied in content. The neural responses to these videos were correlated with those of their confederate interaction partners to yield a measure of pairwise neural similarity. We found that trait empathy (assessed by the interpersonal reactivity index) and neural similarity to partner both predicted communication success in the mind-reading game. In contrast, perceived similarity to partner and (to a much lesser extent) trait mind-reading motivation predicted self-reported interaction quality. These results highlight the importance of sharing perspectives in successful communication as well as differences between neurobiological similarity and perceived similarity in supporting different types of interaction success.