When we learn more about a stranger, we feel like they know us better too
digest.bps.org.uk
digest.bps.org.uk
In my experience, many of these folks thought they have much more of a relationship than I did. People who knew my name and would strike up conversations in the grocery store like I knew them at all outside of these conversations. The worst part is that I got used to pretending like I knew people and navigating very fake conversations, in a way that I was not a fan of. It's a form of masking that I got very good at.
I'm moving back to my hometown soon because I've gotten a remote job and my family needs the support system right now. This is an aspect I'm not very excited to get back to.
I really had to try and not use that word, but it very much was.
My advice is to accept it, don’t “over mask” but don’t forget that there are a handful of benefits to the situation. Lean into the benefits.
No idea if it would work, but IME most adults are understanding about the challenges of adolescence.
And I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet you're more likely to get some real friends by being open.
(I'm not saying it's easy. Just throwing the idea out there for your consideration.)
I’ve met up with these people, didn’t know a single one of them. You just plainly say, “sorry, it’s been quite a few years how do we know each other?”
If they push harder, just say, “sorry, my Dad knew a lot of people, it’s all a flash of faces when you’re a kid.”
Trust me, people will get it and not give ya a hard time. When one person did, the others told him to bugger off and stop being so self important.
From there on, you can start anew. Just ask them their names and move on.
What's wrong with people being more friendly with you? Is it that they waste too much of your time?
I suspect feeling offended has something to do with reacting to perceived social hierarchy signals.
Although I had someone take offence the other day because they had got fatter, and I didn’t recognise them, and they were over-sensitive about their body figure.
It can be stressful to not know or remember if I actually know this person some how and navigating through that.
Teachers probably feel this way. Students might go say hi to an old teacher from 2-3 years ago, and most likely the teacher wouldn't remember this particular student much if at all.
Once a person knows more (relevant, accurate & truthful) information about another person then they will have a better mental-model of them, and I think that this will often make them feel like the other person could know them in better detail in-response as a person (even though there has only been one direction of information-flow so far).
The error could be huge if the base-assumption is wrong, but if it's not wrong then we could already know some specific details of the other person's mind quite well indeed (meme-complex-detected!).
In certain cases, especially around the description of qualities such as approachability and humility, hearing of these things from a speaker and in particular if they are common with the listener, could reasonably suggest that the speaker might also recognize these same qualities in the listener, and this could imply a possible connection without any bi-directional information transfer needed.
The information can mean that the other does in fact understand you better, even if they don't know you personally.
I would argue that it's a valid heuristic and not out of place in the modern world.
You see it all the time in social interactions where individuals want to be relatable. Of course I can be manipulated, but that doesn't mean it isn't of value
During the run-up to the 2008-2009 subprime crisis, there were housing brokers who relied heavily on identitarianism and trust to market adjustable-rate mortgages to various groups. Matching up sellers to buyers by race/religion/gender etc. was a pretty effective technique for getting signatures on loan agreements. The result was many trusting people ended up with loans that blew up on them a few years later, resulting in many loan defaults and resulting economic collapses.
On the other hand, using such tactics is helpful in getting accurate information to people. If you ran a public health campaign aimed at reducing infectious disease transmission, a positive goal by almost any measure, then matching the message to the group would likely improve adoption of various effective measures (handwashing & general sanitation, for example).
In general, though, people are better off if they can extract the information from a sales pitch and make their decisions on the basis of rational analysis, not on emotional resonance.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/100-is-it-weird-for-ad...
I'm curious how this misalignment may manifest for the person's mental and physical health - as well as greater societal health in the long-term. If a person isn't bonding in reciprocal way with others ideally and in-person, and to use or have those people as a "soundboard" or counterweight to themselves.
If they are mostly with their own beliefs or current understandings of things without them being challenged by enough social interaction - then beliefs won't be kept in as much check as otherwise would be, where there's more chance that you'll be around peers that will question or challenge your beliefs on a deeper level; not thinking even anything super nefarious but we learn and organize our own brain/thoughts by talking with others, and how critical thinking is developed.
If using a parasocial relationship as a crutch without realizing it, nor being guided towards not needing it as a crutch, then there's going to be a growing imbalance for the individual and society's function.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with online streaming of games or OnlyFans NSFW content - it becomes a problem when it's more than just entertainment and more of an addiction.
I think the bigger question is the degree to which Parasocial relationships replace or compete with social relationships. I am more skeptical on this point.
I thought this paper was an interesting introduction and exploration of the topic:
The one-and-a-half sided parasocial relationship: The curious case of live streaming
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882...
People wear masks all the time because sometimes their true self is not conducive to what they are doing at that time.
For a celebrity entertainer who needs to appeal to a crowd of tens of thousands, their Dunbar’s number, even optimistically, will be orders of magnitude smaller.
Therefore, the gap of inner circle-audience will be made up by an act relying on their ability/looks/charm which is necessarily contrived and not reflective of their true self.
This seems perfectly rational to me. The participants thought their partners had a symmetrical role to them by the design of the experiment. So they assumed if they received information about their partners then their partners must also have received information about them. They are making a reasonable inference based on a false premise that they were deliberately misled into accepting.
Perhaps if I read more I would see the experimental design has been glossed over and it isn't as simple as this, but this is what stuck out to me.
My dude, this /is/ a potentially fraught officer-citizen interaction. The police have done something unusual, therefore a chilling effect is going to kick in.
This seems like a leap—couldn’t these folks instead be thinking “oh the police stopped by my building, they are paying attention”? The real study is behind a paywall so I’m curious if this was controlled for.
[0]: https://twitter.com/michaellafores/status/149978283377425204...
I think what the huristic gets at is the idea of like mindedness and similarity.
It would be interesting to explore the opposite effect, whee the information shared is hostile or unrelatable. Would people still feel more understood or less?
What would the reaction be if the information shared was "I am from a hostile tribe and hate people like you"
They do at least link to the original paper, but unfortunately it's not yet in sci hub and the abstract contains none of those details.
Not making fun of you. Just sharing what I thought was an interesting reaction I had to your comment: after all, it's a reasonable comment where this heuristic fails.