Why people believe others' social lives are richer than their own | Hacker News Reader

Why people believe others' social lives are richer than their own

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

117 pointslainon37 comments

A lot of it is just so fake. Pretty much everyone I know does the fake smile for the selfie, and then they immediately stop smiling.

Many people I know, when traveling, have a check list of the selfies they want to make to show everyone else how great their life is, when I know it isn't. And they miss the actual fun of experiencing traveling - to them it's just a series of selfies.

This was 99% of my Facebook, and that's why I quit. There was only one guy who was regularly posting interesting articles (tech, space, futurism). I ended up deciding a diamond in a pile of sh#t wasn't worth it, and HN/Reddit are better.

As for the social aspect, most people's lives are boring, and most people are boring, they only look at what's happening today, worry about what other people think of them, and other boring drivel.

/Rant over

Let me add to your rant. Regarding my children, and school functions such as plays and recitals - the number of parents watching their kids through their smart phones recording video [1] instead of just watching it naturally and taking the moment in.

[1] video that is horribly underexposed, un-viewable, that they'll never likely watch again.

I went to my first Christmas recital this year (2 yr old) and remember thinking what a favor the school would have done everyone to film the performance themselves and sell the video.

Instead everyone was rushing for better filming positions whenever a new group got on stage. Miserable.

It seems like most schools in Los Angeles do this for plays and recitals. What is strange is that people still film stuff. I think it gives them something to do.

Uggh, reminds me of people who take videos of fireworks and even worse post that garbage online.

I guess (tape) camcorders back in the day at least had sort of good HDR? :)

Saying this because obviously (also my) parents recorded plays 10 or 15 years ago.

Yours maybe, but most didn't. Now it's like its mandatory for 200 parents to simultaneously record their kids.

This seems to be the case with pretty much every event I go to lately. Concerts, firework shows, etc. All being experienced through a phone display just so people can "show off" the fact that they were there and earn internet points. It's incredibly sad what social media has done to society, and incredibly obnoxious trying to see past hundreds of smart phone displays just to see the stage at a show.

Have you asked them why? Maybe they're taking the video so they can share it with family members that couldn't be there: dad had to work tonight, grandparents love the grandkids but live on the other side of the world, etc.

I tend to overexaggerate my smiles in some group pictures to make it looks scary/disgusting. People tell me to stop fake smiling but I respond “at least I am honestly faking it” unlike others who are deceptively trying to make it look natural.

I talked to a Facebook employee about how he handles all of the crap on FB as a user, and he said most people there make heavy use of the filtering tools, so they're only seeing the stuff that they care about. That always sounded like a good strategy to me, but maybe not for your case since it's literally one guy.

“Well it may seem like others are going to more parties and having more sex than I am, but actually I read a study on hacker news that said I’m just imagining it!”

On average, people actually do have fewer friends than their friends have (also works for sexual partners).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

Non-mobile link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

On an anecdotal level, I've felt that a lot of this can manifest as mild envy, if not otherwise that pervasive fear of missing out. As an example, you're at home reading your favourite book and all your friends are out partying, yet even though you were happy with the decision to read, and to not join them if you had the offer, you still feel a bit envious of all of the others going out partying (and hearing about it too).

I'm curious why it's so easy to see your own life as boring as compared to others, and while it's absolutely true that you only see their highlights (good and bad), you've got yourself 24/7, along with every single unfiltered thought and feeling that comes along with it.

One activity of mine is to basically reflect on the recent past (say, the last 6 or 12 months, maybe even longer if I need to hammer the point home) and make a list of everything I did that was interesting, brave, adventurous, exciting, dangerous, difficult... no matter how insignificant some of it might seem.

Once you have what is essentially an itemised list of your achievements in the last year or two, it's easy to put your own experiences into perspective, and you are no longer dismissing them because you're not lumping in all of those quiet moments where you needed downtime or binged something on Netflix, or whatever. And in a lot of cases it's far more interesting than what you'd be doing if all your weekends were parties and hangovers, and such like.

And no one else needs to see that list you make, it's just bringing the attention back to yourself. It's incredibly powerful and a great reminder in those low moments.

Because: 1) people post positive news, but not negative ones; 2) you follow many people.

Imagine you have 365 friends. Let’s say each friend has about 5 amazing days per year, but the rest 360 days are pretty dismal. If we assume that each friend will only post about amazing days, that means that your social media feed, on average, every single day of the year, will look like a non-stop barrage of 5 posts describing 1 amazing thing that happened to a friend.

It's because when you read about other people you just read about the "highlights" of their life, and if you also read about many other people, it "feels" like amazing thing happen at the frequency you read about them (i.e. once every 1-5 minutes) rather than at the frequency they actually happen.

This. I don't believe my brain divides by the number of contacts. So I subconsciously compare my personal highlights with the highlights of all my friends combined. No wonder my life feels boring.

Values that help make us happier are internal values, things that we have immediate control over (honesty, creativity, respect for ourself and others, etc.). External values, often comparing ourselves to others, don’t really make us happy.

by definition, people with more active social lives are more visible than people without very active social lives

This is what I've thought about too. Could the article's observations attributed to the friendship paradox?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

People with impostor syndrome might find a lot of help in understanding the logic behind it, since it applies not just to friendship, but to any activity where visibility is positively correlated to ability.

Most popular GitHub projects are by top coders. Most musicians are in a tiny fraction of the skill distribution. The people that one might respect and measures oneself by almost certainly are better than the average, so if one feels inferior to them, that is a statistical quirk and not a strong signal that one is below average.

Which is what the article says in the abstract: "We argue that this pessimistic bias stems from the fact that trendsetters and socialites come most easily to mind as a standard of comparison and show that reducing the availability of extremely social people eliminates this bias."

There's also the well-known effect of social media where you see everybody's highlights and best moments, but unless you're close you won't hear about the boring or unhappy parts of their lives. I don't think the article tackles that though.

Because nobody can have less than zero social life?

I guess that depends on how you think of it. If all your social contacts are users, not actual friends, I think you can have a net negative social life where zero friends would be a step up.

If a social life is not present, this is true.

Purchase pdf

Anyone able to read the study?

If you don't want to use a source of questionable legality like Sci-Hub [1] then you can try sending a request to the authors to make use of their right to share a copy through the Open Access Button [2] or Unpaywall [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

[2] https://openaccessbutton.org/request/zsLh3M7ozGvLwD67v

[3] http://unpaywall.org/

It has never on been the consumer to know who has a license to someone else’s copyrighted work

So, no I dont have any qualms about sci-hub

I have qualms about convenience, I rarely download torrents because Netflix has provided the convenience Ive enjoyed since 2002

Do what you need to do to help the monetization model of academics, not my problem

> We show that this bias holds across multiple populations (college students, MTurk respondents, shoppers at a local mall, and participants from a large, income-stratified online panel)

MTurk workers are incentivized to answer quickly, not truthfully.

Internet polls are bullshit.

I get really tired of this knee-jerk "X is bullshit" response without even bothering to see whether researchers are aware of potential issues. A simple search on Google Scholar would have shown that they are, and want to figure out what the methodological implications are. https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=mechanical+turk

It's just as easy to argue - when you're not citing any evidence - that online respondents are more likely to be truthful because they're anonymous, and therefore their answer doesn't have an impact on their social reputation.

Knee-jerk dismissals are more bullshit.

It’s not a fucking Facebook poll, it’s a peer-reviewed multi-population study.

>MTurk workers are incentivized to answer quickly, not truthfully.

Which doesn't prevent truthfulness if it doesn't take more time.

Besides, they didn't say that they're super popular and cool -- so why'd they lie about not having a rich social life?

>Internet polls are bullshit.

Not really.

Have to pay to read :(

Money = More richer intellectual life => More richer HN-Life

Not even close.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

[2] https://openaccessbutton.org/request/zsLh3M7ozGvLwD67v

[3] http://unpaywall.org/

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