The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (26 page)

Still, just as people who live alone use their televisions as “company,” media multitasking is often what people do when they’re frustrated, alone, or at loose ends. As
New York Times
critic and self-described gaming addict Sam Anderson wrote about video games, “They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day.”
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Online networks are the same. As they clue you in to a burnished version of other people’s social lives, they can also amplify feelings of loneliness. In 2011, when I spent a solitary summer writing in a cabin in the Laurentian Mountains, my lack of human contact prompted me to check email and Facebook more than usual—and more than I should have. With each hopeful click I learned about everything I was missing—the dinners, jazz festival dates, casual jaunts for coffee with friends and family—all of which made me feel even more isolated.

I chose to hunker down in the woods to get work done. But social isolation among preteens is usually not their choice. Can’t go on a school trip because there’s not enough money or your parents won’t let you? Here are a dozen photos of your classmates having fun. If you didn’t feel left out before you checked your phone, you will now. How about that lopsided cake bedecked with burning candles, pictured on a pedestal plate and tagged as the twelve-year-old’s birthday offering from her sixteen-year-old boyfriend? It’s inexpertly iced but the message, dispatched on a news feed to 350 “friends,” is that someone in the group has a boyfriend who cared enough to bake her a cake. How about that?
And these are the anodyne posts. The more sinister ones eviscerate a person’s self-respect.
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Whether they’re lobbed in our direction or at others, most of us are keenly aware of social affronts in our own “villages.” But online networks instantaneously expand humiliation’s reach. As our species’ survival has hinged on group cohesion, we’ve evolved antennae exquisitely attuned to pick up on hints of exclusion; when such hints are detected, it hurts, as much or more than physical pain. In fact, expressions such as “hurt feelings,” “heartbreak,” and “rubbing salt into the wound” are not just metaphors. As we saw in
Chapter 4
, brain imaging studies by Naomi Eisenberger and her team at UCLA have shown that overlapping neural networks are involved in physical
and
social injuries. Shared neural anatomy is why social pain feels visceral.

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and parts of the right prefrontal cortex, which together constitute the brain’s alarm system, become activated when people experience physical pain, according to Eisenberger. Amazingly, the same areas become activated when people feel socially excluded, showing that, biologically speaking, feeling socially isolated is as much a threat to survival as bodily injury is.
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This is especially true in adolescents, whose brains are uniquely wired to detect signs of social exclusion.
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Eisenberger has shown that teenagers’ individual differences in sensitivity to rejection are distinctly visible on brain scans. Online networks exploit this sensitivity by blitzing users with a steady stream of status updates, which by some unwritten rule, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative in other people’s social lives—making your own social life look so much worse in comparison.

HONEST SIGNALS

Aside from the flaws we purposely omit, what’s also missing from our digital personae are the subtle signs that allow us to read each other’s minds. When we’re in close physical proximity, our
emotions leak out, or so I discovered while driving a friend to the airport a few years ago. Straight ahead were road signs indicating which lanes to take for departures, arrivals, short-term parking, long-term parking, very distant parking, valet parking, and curb drop-offs. I’d driven to this airport dozens of times. Yet my feelings about the fact that I would not be seeing this friend again for months, perhaps years, became cognitive overload. I slowed to a halt under the forest of signs. “Am I distracting you?” my friend asked, pausing in mid sentence. I said no, but the answer was yes. My body was sending out honest signals: signs of my awareness that she would soon be three thousand miles away. Suddenly, remarkably, I had no idea where to go.

Honest signals are primarily nonverbal. Much of what is transmitted in face-to-face interactions—whom to trust, who is “hot,” who is the most feared or persuasive member of the group—is communicated through nonverbal cues. As primates whose survival hinged on our social bonds, most of us get these messages even if they fly under our radar; we evolved the capacity to transmit them before we evolved the capacity to speak.
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Even though humans can express sophisticated ideas with symbolic language, the nonverbal leftovers are still with us, adding a layer of communication that mainly happens face-to-face.

Lest you think these signs too primitive to be relevant in a digital age, as I mentioned earlier, two MIT computer scientists, Sandy Pentland and Ben Waber, have devised wearable computers that look like iPhones—“sociometric badges”—to capture these honest signals and make them analyzable. In a phone interview, Waber told me that the masses of data the sociometers capture are not parsed for content but aggregated to detect overarching patterns. “You can’t reconstruct what people are saying,” he assured me. Equipped with infrared sensors, Bluetooth location applications, and accelerometers to measure body movements, as well as recorders that capture the pitch of people’s voices, these
sociometers measure tone of voice, posture, and excited or languid gestures—whether a person is unwittingly communicating “
Put your head on my shoulder
” or “
Don’t stand so close to me
.”

Using the sociometers in large corporations and on university campuses, the team has discovered that honest signals can predict a group’s cohesion, not to mention its productivity levels, and who will assume a leadership role.
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But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is that analyzing social signaling provides a “God’s eye” view, says Pentland, revealing information that can predict things people desperately want to know.

A sociometric badge
. (Image and Figure Credits
6.2
)

The question, though, is how rich does the medium have to be for us to “get” these honest signals? For example, can we show emotional support through an instant message or a text? Leslie Seltzer, Seth Pollack, and their colleagues at the University of Wisconsin explored these questions with stressed-out kids. The psychologists already knew that a mother’s voice, like her touch, prompts the release of oxytocin in her children (the hormone is a physiological sign of being soothed by social interaction).
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What they wanted to know was whether the meaning of the words or the sound of a mother’s voice mattered more.

To find out, they induced stress in seven- to twelve-year-old girls by asking them to solve math and word problems in front of an audience. The researchers randomly assigned the girls to one of four groups. The first group met up with their mothers right after the test. The second group received a comforting phone call from her instead. The third group received a supportive text, and the fourth—the control group—had no contact with their mothers at all. The upshot? Being near her mom or getting a call from her
prompted similar levels of oxytocin release, which was detected in higher amounts in the girls’ urine. The contact also induced a drop in cortisol (a byproduct of stress), in the girls’ saliva. Talking to their mothers after a stressful event clearly had a calming effect. In contrast, an instant message from Mom had no effect on oxytocin release. In fact, the girls who received IMs from their mothers had cortisol levels just as high as the girls who’d had no contact with their mothers at all.
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Really? An emotionally supportive text has no impact? Seltzer’s research subverts what most of us assume: that the content of our messages matters more than the medium. Instead, the sound of a loved one’s voice is like her touch—an honest signal that gets lost in translation on a screen.

THE FEMALE EFFECT

To be clear, though, what Mom says actually does matter. When researchers observed the social interactions of fifty-five British families for over a decade, they found that children whose mothers explicitly discussed other people’s feelings and intentions grew up to be more empathic than their peers. The researchers tested and controlled for the mother’s baseline level of empathy, so it wasn’t just a question of sensitive parents passing on their genetic traits to their children. The mother’s interactions made a difference. “You can predict, even from when the children are three or four, what their social understanding will be like when they’re eight or nine,” Dr. Yuill said of the fourteen years she spent being a fly on the wall in British living rooms.
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When it comes to communicating face-to-face, research by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reinforces the idea that emotions are contagious within a family. No surprise there. But what is remarkable is that the most powerful route of transmission is from daughters to their parents. And gender matters: mothers convey their feelings, especially their anxieties and triumphs about work,
to their children in ways that fathers do not, according to the 500 Family Study, a large, long-term study of American working families.
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A similar pattern of maternal influence emerged in another naturalistic study, of American dual-income families. From 2002 to 2005, Belinda Campos and a team of researchers from UCLA voyeuristically filmed the interactions of thirty middle-class, two-income American families with two or three children. The team focused on two important features of family life: reunions (the moment when a working parent comes home) and physical proximity (when family members are together in the same room). Their observations confirmed the primacy of working mothers in their children’s lives. Mothers were more likely to be enthusiastically greeted when they came home from work than fathers, who often came home an hour or so later, only to find their children already distracted. Mothers were also much more likely to be in the same room with the children than fathers, and fathers were the family members most likely to spend their time at home alone.

The most shocking revelation, though, was the solitary nature of American family life. The members of almost a third of these families were never in the same room at the same time. For this group, there was “not a single instance in which all family members came together,” write the researchers. On average, family members were together about 14 percent of the time they were at home. And while mothers did manage to spend time with their children, the most common configuration of all was family members, and especially fathers, “alone together”—each in his or her own space.
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In a short evolutionary time, we have changed from group-living primates skilled at reading each other’s every gesture and intention to a solitary species, each one of us preoccupied with our own screen. But what if that screen is also a camera, party line, gossip column, television, encyclopedia, megaphone, cheat-sheet, video arcade, and, of course, telephone, all rolled into one hard, shiny package that rides along with you everywhere, stashed away in your
pocket? During the clannish teen years, being constantly connected to your pals shouldn’t be a problem. As Fran Lebowitz has remarked, “as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.” Let’s now turn to adolescents to see if that’s still true.

W
hen Allison Miller was an eighth-grade student attending Woodside High School in northern California, she sent and received twenty-seven thousand texts a month. Thumbing through about nine hundred digital conversations a day, often keeping as many as seven conversations going at once, the pert blond teenager was nearly always connected to her circle of friends—during the breaks between classes, while being driven to and from school, before and after sports practices, and while studying for tests. “I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then twenty minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework—,’ ” she told reporter Matt Richtel of the
New York Times
.
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The human dramas landing on her cellphone’s screen often eclipsed other activities, she admitted. If she got wind via text of a ripple of conflict between friends, she would try to intervene. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else,” she said, blaming a lackluster report card on her technology multitasking.