Sad, lonely people more likely to be ‘natural’ social psychologists (2018)
news.yale.edu
news.yale.edu
Much like the difference between reading and writing, it’s very much possible to be skilled at understanding a social situation while at the same time having no clue how to respond appropriately.
For me, “reading the room” is easy. “Writing the room,” so to speak, on the other hand will probably remain a lifelong awkward learning experience, and I don’t think I’ll ever be “fluent” in it.
As is probably common, I did wonder if there’s something clinically wrong with me, but most screening tests I can find emphasize lack of understanding of social situations/facial expressions etc. which I’m just fine with.
E.g. a toddler may find it easier to kick around a ball on a lawn vs. a kid kicking it around on a soccer field with boundaries, goal posts, and rules. To extend the analogy, everyone thinks the toddler is cute and doing a great job, but only the kid's parents think she's playing well.
I mean it's projection too; I'm very judgmental about people, thinking they look stupid, so I tend to avoid doing anything weird in case people think I look stupid.
And because you don't try (or try less often), you don't have as much experience with it.
Again, anecdotal, the few that somewhat understand it are the ones that have been driven by emotion for long periods of time and have seen how out of control they are (not saying they are off doing crazy things).
I’ll give a small example from work. There’s a business analyst who fucked up our product, but is very good friends with most of the team. Emotionally, the team take offense when he/she is called out. In fact, we have difficulty unraveling or changing the direction of some his/her decisions because they are protected.
What do you do here? The group is wrong, but right, but wrong.
I’m just bringing up simple work friends here. I haven’t even ventured into love, hate, childhood friends, family, parents, partners, religion, culture, children, identity, politics, money, dignity, pride, indignation, vengeance, retribution, redemption, all things Shakespearean.
You cannot fight so many of these things, and literally need to wait it out until everyone in the room realizes and are ready to compromise.
In short, some of these things are forgone conclusions, and it is depressing. That it often takes lifetime until everyone in the room gets it, and the only solace is at the end, where we take the little victory that at least everyone now understands. But, nothing got done as we all waited for everyone to go through the (e)motions.
Being able to read the social situation is a prerequisite so if you’re truly good at that then it’s possible to improve.
I think it’s a mixture of taking a genuine interest in other people, being good at story telling, and being able to gauge the interest of others in what you’re talking about. There’s also a lot to good delivery (part of good story telling) - watching good stand up comedy you can see this in action.
It also helps to be doing or learning things that make for good story telling too.
I keep evaluating lot of scenarios in my head when I'm in the room and try to find how the outcome of doing/saying that specific thing might be rather than doing/saying that thing and around half the time, the time of saying/doing that thing has passed before I could make the decision.
https://yalesurvey.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1XOUyQ4Ux6deFBH
I took it and got a 36/40. I have taken one intro to social psych course after taking gen psych.
"Fantastic! Your score was better than approximately 99.5% of other people's scores. You have the ability to accurately infer how most people feel, think, and behave in social context without a background or little background in social psychology. In a way, you seem to be very good at capturing human's 'social nature'. This skill, which we call social psychological skill, has been linked to intelligence, a willingness to engage in complex thinking, melancholy, and introversion."
I think some of the questions I remember learning about in psych 101, like the bystander effect, but the ones I was surprised that I had intuition for were the questions that asked about how other people deal with strong negative emotions and what works for coping.
I think it's interesting that the article frame this skill as something that people in positions of power need but at the same time being introverted to begin with means people are less likely to try to attain those kinds of positions. I wonder if it'll continue to be a weakness of current governance long term because people prefer extroverts in those positions.
I also think it's worth mentioning the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie as a way to become better at some of the things people in the comment section are bringing up as an area that needs improvement for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
After finishing I couldn’t believe it. I thought maybe it was part of a larger experiment telling you what you want to hear. So I took the test again answering randomly and got a horrible score and 20th percentile. (ie it’s a real score)
So much of this seems so incredibly obvious to me! I mean I guess it make sense when you think about it. If it was obvious to most people, then most people would make better (less selfish, less bias) decisions which we see they don’t do.
Some that particularly struck me were the ones about group think. Like passing someone in the gutter, in-group validation, group enhancement of extremism etc. I always have an almost knee jerk reaction to go against the group in lots of situations (if there’s a large group of people walking in a certain direction; I’ll assume they’re all lost and make my own way for instance)
Explains a lot! Thanks for the link.
And here’s a fun experiment. If I call out how much of downvoting and upvoting on sites like here on HN are about group think, other biases, rather than based on the individual comment, I bet it’ll get downvoted (because of those same reasons)!
By my count, of the commenters who posted a score so far, 5/13 (~40%) scored better than 99.5% of people and all of them scored better than 80% of people.
HN readers is obviously not an unbiased sample, nor is the subset that choose to reveal their scores. Still, I wouldn't put too much stock in this internet survey. They can be notoriously unreliable.
(As an aside, a number of questions are obvious because they're phrased as "True or false: X can never happen" (answer is false). The true ones don't use an absolute qualifier like "never". The use qualifiers like "usually" or "mostly".)
Most of these sundry facts I suspect I learned by osmosis after spending too much time on the internet — but I would never have called myself a natural psychologist, so I don't know how much predictive power this study really has =)
32/40.
I'm not sure what this says about me or the survey.
Of course I understand their point that social psychology is cynical, but I hope it isn't all cynical. I think there might be a publication bias here--studies which find that people act predictably and rationally don't become famous. No one would have heard of the Milgram experiment if everyone refused to shock the man.
Many of the questions are directly out of famous experiments where if you have read/heard about it, you know the correct answer. I do question if perhaps bored introverts just spend a lot of time reading books and articles instead of possessing some sort of innate insight into humanity.
Most research has large gaping holes and make big assumptions in the interpretation of the gathered data. This hole is then “resolved” in the discussion part of the paper by acknowledging that the experiment could have been done in a better way.
I'm also sad and lonely, I wonder why... :-D
Before reading the article, I'll speculate that the reason people are sad and lonely is because they understand how terrible humans generally are, but haven't found any way to benefit from this knowledge.
> Bob experiences numerous positive things when surrounded by a grapefruit. He wins a little money at the lottery, listens to his favorite music, and eats his favorite meal. Is it possible that Bob infers that he likes this particular grapefruit more than other grapefruits, because he has experienced all these positive feelings around this grapefruit?
I can kind of understand what it's asking, but this is worse on my brain than "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". It feels like I've stepped into a surrealist novella.
I took that question to be asking about tbe effects of positive mood and positive luck on the enjoyment of the grapefruit. If he had instead had bad luck, had a flat tire, and got an annoying ad jingle stuck in his head, would he feel he disliked that particular grapefruit more than other grapefruit? I personally said yes.
I agree though, some questions were very awkward in wording and I wonder what the optional questions about the symmetric vs asymmetric shape groupings was about.
I feel like I spent an entire decade mostly in contemplative reflection and observation as I searched for intrinsic meaning and purpose.
I imagine many others who score well have some similar period they've been through where it almost feels like they spent more time observing themselves and others living than actually living.
> If you wanted to create a company that is fair in terms of hiring practices, what percent of each of the following groups of people would you hire? [...] Please make sure the amounts you enter add about to approximately 100%. (The groups are Hispanic, White, Asian, and Black.)
What are they trying to learn from this, and how are you supposed to answer it?
1. You can't intentionally hire percentages of employees by race because that's illegal.
2. How do I make the amounts add up to approximately 100%? They left out some of the larger demographics (indigenous, and arab/Middle-Eastern are both larger populations than Black or Hispanic in my country).
On another note I passed a particularly bizarre question about x and y random groups and wanted to go back. Can’t do this, so I ended up taking the quiz over again and screen shot a few of my (least) favorite questions. And I noticed complete willingness to answer differently on some questions and confidently the same on others.
I wonder if I’m more concerned about this grapefruit that’s missing from my fruit bowl.
I would be more interested to hear from commenters who got a poor score on the test.
Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field” comes to mind.
Resiliently optimistic is better. Reminds of me of the Stockdale Paradox:
"You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale#The_Stockdale_...
I'm naturally interested in psychology and pay attention to any media that discusses it stuff including popular books.
I am now convinced everyone gets this score, and the actual experiment is to test something else like extrinsic motivation to conform to an ideal, or suggestibility or something..
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Just asking.
Additionally, the correct answers maybe compromised, since social psychology is one of the worst offenders in the replication crisis.
Now that sounds fun.
I smell infinite regress there.
Somebody should feed it.
https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/1864-9335/a000...
And self-reported feelings of sadness and lonelyness could also be interpreted as symptoms of a more or less mild depression.
Which makes this study prone to the same problems of the hypothesis of depressive realism.
Reminds me of the film There Will Be Blood, where Daniel Plainview says something like "I can only see the bad in others" (not exact quote). It makes it hard for him to form long lasting relations with anyone, or a successor he can trust.
But as a somewhat neurotic introvert I can often understand that sentiment. It's like I'm preprogrammed to see the bad in people before the good.
https://news.yale.edu/2019/09/09/those-autism-make-good-soci...
The original article is pretty interesting but I don't understand how the author was able to make the jump from a short 40 question survey to positing about ASD. The optional questions at the end of the survey were about how you feel about shapes. I am surprised that this passes as meaningful evidence of anything.
I am not a social psychologist (whatever authority that title may grant one), but I wonder about how one goes from a few conclusion that may hold true under certain conditions to "truth about human nature".
For instance, "Do people work harder in groups or as individuals? "
I could see peer pressure being a motivating factor to work harder as a group. Among highly accomplished and productive peers a new group member might strive to prove themselves by over contributing to the group. I would also expect cultural factors and (im)proper management to play a role.
“Do people work harder in groups or as individuals?” For example can be answered in one way or the other depending on social values, cultural traditions, and those even change thru time.
Ask your parents, ask younger generations, ask other ethnics groups or even ask yourself the same question in twenty years.
(not that they’d conduct a study, so it’s good to have scientific evidence)
On hacker news I expect the consequence of moving away from physical relationships to digital relationships, otaku, and parasocial relationships are pretty fascinating topics that fall under the research of social psychology.
It's different from sociology because it's focused on the individual. Sociology would instead be focused on the development of groups as a whole.
I am assuming by asocial you're referring to otaku as a concept and not someone's trauma response.
> Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as being a result of the relationship between mental state and social situation, studying the conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur and how these variables influence social interactions.
> He stressed that individuals who scored high on tests about human nature do not possess the same knowledge and skills as trained social psychologists. However, he also noted that while “natural” social psychologists will not replace actual psychologists, they could be important players in the real world.
They have found a new class of humans?
I'm curious if there exists people getting scores of 20 or less, most answers are pretty obvious.