Like Minds
There is chemistry in social chemistry
Inbal Ravreby, Kobi Snitz & Noam Sobel
Science Advances, June 2022
Abstract:
Nonhuman terrestrial mammals sniff themselves and each other to decide who is friend or foe. Humans also sniff themselves and each other, but the function of this is unknown. Because humans seek friends who are similar to themselves, we hypothesized that humans may smell themselves and others to subconsciously estimate body odor similarity, which, in turn, may promote friendship. To test this, we recruited nonromantic same-sex friend dyads and harvested their body odor. We found that objective ratings obtained with an electronic nose, and subjective ratings obtained from independent human smellers converged to suggest that friends smell more similar to each other than random dyads. Last, we recruited complete strangers, smelled them with an electronic nose, and engaged them in nonverbal same-sex dyadic interactions. We observed that dyads who smelled more similar had more positive dyadic interactions. In other words, we could predict social bonding with an electronic nose. We conclude that there is indeed chemistry in social chemistry.
A Twenty-First Century of Solitude? Time Alone and Together in the United States
Enghin Atalay
Federal Reserve Working Paper, April 2022
Abstract:
This paper explores trends in time alone and with others in the United States. Since 2003, Americans have increasingly spent their free time alone, on leisure at home, and have decreasingly spent their free time with individuals from other households. These trends are more pronounced for non-White individuals, for males, for the less educated, and for individuals from lower-income households. Survey respondents spending a large fraction of their free time alone report lower subjective well-being. As a result, differential trends in time alone suggest that between-group inequality may be increasing more quickly than previous research has reported.
Talking to strangers: A week-long intervention reduces psychological barriers to social connection
Gillian Sandstrom, Erica Boothby & Gus Cooney
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although people derive substantial benefit from social connection, they often refrain from talking to strangers because they have pessimistic expectations about how such conversations will go (e.g., they believe they will be rejected or not know what to say). Previous research has attempted but failed to get people to realize that their concerns about talking to strangers are overblown. To reduce people's fears, we developed an intervention in which participants played a week-long scavenger hunt game that involved repeatedly finding, approaching, and talking to strangers. Compared to controls, this minimal, easily replicable treatment made people less pessimistic about the possibility of rejection and more optimistic about their conversational ability-and these benefits persisted for at least a week after the study ended. Daily reports revealed that people's expectations grew more positive and accurate by the day, emphasizing the importance of repeated experience in improving people's attitudes towards talking with strangers.
Gratitude expressions improve teammates' cardiovascular stress responses
Yumeng Gu et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gratitude expressions play a key role in strengthening relationships, suggesting gratitude might promote adaptive responses during teamwork. However, little research has examined gratitude's impact on loose tie relationships (like coworkers), and similarly little research has examined how gratitude impacts physiological stress responding or biological responses more generally. The present research uses an ecologically valid, dyadic teamwork paradigm to test how gratitude expressions impact in vivo physiological challenge and threat stress responding, assessed via a challenge-threat index composed of cardiac output and total peripheral resistance. Compared with a control condition, teammates (n = 190) who were randomly assigned to a gratitude expression manipulation showed improved biological challenge-threat responses while jointly completing an acutely stressful collaborative work task (developing a product pitch), and later while completing an individual performance task (pitching the product). During the collaborative task, gratitude expressions buffered against threat responses; during the individual task, gratitude expressions amplified challenge responses. Analyses of cardiac output (CO) and total peripheral resistance (TPR) aided in determining how cardiac outflow versus vascular constriction/dilation contributed to these effects. The finding that gratitude expressions promote adaptive biological responding at the dyadic level contributes to a growing literature on the social functions of positive emotions and gratitude, specifically. The present results also have wider implications for physiological stress in performance tasks and suggest that workplace gratitude interventions can promote adaptive stress responding in teams.
Faster responders are perceived as more extraverted
Deming Wang & Ignazio Ziano
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Personality inferences are fundamental to human social interactions and have far-reaching effects on various social decisions. Fourteen experiments (13 preregistered; total N = 5,160; using audio, video, and text stimuli) involving British, U.S. American, Singaporean, and Australian participants show that people responding to a question immediately (vs. after a slight pause) are seen as more extraverted. This is because response delays are believed to signal nervousness and passivity, and hence introversion. This effect was consistently observed across a range of scenarios from everyday small talk to mock job interviews and for various types of response formats, including face-to-face, phone, and online conversations. We found that the effect was not influenced by apparent relationship closeness between the responder and questioner but that it was influenced by whether observers believed that the responder was mentally occupied during the interaction. Importantly, our results also suggest that the effect of response timing on extraversion perceptions influences hiring decisions-job applicants are more likely to be hired by mock employers for job types congruent with their level of extraversion as exuded from their response timing. Finally, we found that observers typically expect that introverted individuals would pause for longer before responding to questions, as compared to extraverted individuals. Theoretical implications for the understanding of personality impression formation and response timing and practical implications for hiring and other interpersonal situations are discussed.