It’s not quite that easy. Prior social standing and resulting biases may cause changes in brain wiring that take some effort to override. Harvard psychologist Leah Somerville asked subjects to complete a standard measure of rejection sensitivity involving a set of hypothetical social situations in which a number of individuals report that they strongly anticipate they will be hurt or abandoned by others. She then asked her subjects, who were either high or low in rejection sensitivity, to look at pictures of a new set of people and guess whether they would be liked or disliked by each of the individuals anticipating being hurt or abandoned. While they waited to hear the outcome, each participant’s brain activity was measured using an fMRI scanner to reveal neural responses to social evaluation. Somerville’s results are especially interesting because they revealed not how people’s brains activated when they found out whether they were rejected or accepted; rather, the study focused simply on how brains responded when anticipating rejection or acceptance. People low in rejection sensitivity had fairly mild neural responses in a region of the brain that led Somerville to conclude that they didn’t particularly care whether the strangers liked them or not. It did not seem relevant to their view of themselves.
But for the subjects with high rejection sensitivity, neural activity in this same region was quite strong when anticipating acceptance or rejection, suggesting that they placed high value on this type of social judgment. In other words, highly rejection-sensitive individuals feel that social feedback is very important, and it is strongly associated with how they feel about themselves.
A second common interpretation bias may also seem familiar: the tendency to assume that others are being hostile in an emotionally equivocal situation. Remember your tardy friend at the coffee shop? A person with a hostile attribution bias might feel intentionally stood up because their friend was being cruel. This type of bias is common among those who were unpopular adolescents. Psychologists uncover hostile attribution biases in children by asking them to interpret ambiguous stories. For instance, “You lend another child your favorite toy, and when she returns it, it is broken.” Or, “You are sitting at lunch when someone walks behind you holding his drink. The next thing you realize is that there’s milk all over your back.” For each story, children are asked to report what they think happened and why.
After hearing these narratives, most kids report that the events were accidental. But some children, especially those who have been rejected by peers, consistently believe the slights involved were intentional acts of mean children. Experiences with unpopularity actually strengthen this bias over time. Being rejected at the start of the school term predicts who will exhibit hostile attribution bias by the end of the year, even after controlling for who may initially have had this type of bias. This probably occurs because for some children, a hostile attribution bias offers an adaptive way to interpret life experiences. For those who were treated poorly by their peers, it is reasonable to grow up protecting oneself from social unpleasantness. Unfortunately, some children never outgrow this bias, even years after the cruelty of adolescence fades away.
When they mature, children with hostile attribution bias turn into our paranoid neighbors and cynical coworkers, people who are at greater risk for problems at home and work. Mothers with this bias are more likely to assume that people are antagonistic toward their children and to assume that their own children are being purposefully hostile; their children are even more likely to become aggressive themselves. Parents with hostile attribution bias also are more likely to display aggressive behavior toward their romantic partners.
According to research from occupational psychologists, people with hostile attribution bias are more likely to engage in workplace aggression. They arrive late, skip meetings, waste supplies, antagonize coworkers, and bad-mouth the office to others who work elsewhere. When they are interrupted, their advice is ignored, or their contributions go unacknowledged, they are also much more likely than others to become angry or anxious, or even quit.
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Our adolescent experiences don’t only influence our cue encoding or our cue interpretations. They also influence how we act in the millisecond moments of social information processing. These “response biases” also have a lot to do with popularity. A bias toward wanting to fit in by seeming savvy and sophisticated may lead us to unnecessarily lie to a health studio employee just to save face, for instance.
In one recent study, a team of developmental psychologists showed a series of videos to over four hundred youth and asked each to imagine that they were a person depicted as the victim of bullying. In some videos, they watched peers spill water on a victim; in others, peers either called them names or damaged their toys or got them dirty. After each video, children were asked to discuss how they would respond to such treatment. The subjects discussed the video with the researchers, who were thus able to ensure that the children had encoded and interpreted the scene in the same way. But the results showed that those who were popular chose to behave in ways that would allow them to mend relationships and even build friendships with the bully. In contrast, those who were unpopular were more interested in revenge, in appearing dominant, or in avoiding the situation entirely. In other words, unpopular children’s impulses were to be aggressive, rude, or passive. This, too, is a bias, but not in cue encoding or cue interpretations. It is a bias in how we choose to act in the span of a millisecond.
Related research indicates the same biases affect adults based on whether they used to be popular or not, and these biases are particularly evident when they are feeling very emotional or are intoxicated.
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We have thousands of social interactions every day. For each event, we encode information from the world around us and interpret it. Finally, if the situation calls for a response, we act. While psychologists understand this reaction as a series of social information processing steps, we experience it in less than a millisecond, without contemplation or deliberation. Those milliseconds combine to fill our days, influence our relationships, define our identities, and ultimately determine our lives—who we are. These automatic reactions can make us seem as if we have terrific instincts or can get us into trouble. And the basis for what we see, how we act, and what we do all day every day is in large part a function of our high school popularity. Those old foundational memories are referenced again and again as our brain helps us get through the day.
If you were popular in high school, and your adult brain initially archived memories of inclusion, acceptance, and admiration, this may all seem like great news. You’ve been endowed with a set of favorable biases that research suggests will contribute to your optimism, self-confidence, and trusting nature today. But be warned: they may also lead you to an unrealistic sense of the world around you and can result in overconfidence and naiveté.
If you were not popular, those old desires to fit in, or those old wounds of rejection, may feel as if they will never heal. Because the power of popularity is strongest when left unchecked and unchallenged, it’s worth the effort to attempt to reduce how much our past affects how we experience the present. While it may seem depressing or fatalistic to discover that our high school experiences are working behind the scenes to make us repeat our adolescence over and over again, it is very important to remember that we don’t have to become victims of our past. We now know that within each of the milliseconds of our social lives, we are presented with opportunities to make new choices. By understanding how our high school popularity affects us now, we are not doomed to be dominated by our past. We are freed to overwrite it! Eventually, we can fill our social databases with new memories to replace the damaging ones.
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It’s been a while since I browsed the pages of my high school yearbook, but in that time, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about that period of my life. I recently had a dream that I was at a faculty meeting, but the other professors were all kids from my gradu
ating class, and they weren’t paying attention to what I had to say. I remember that during the dream I felt confused. Why are they here? I don’t work with any of these people. I’m a grown-up. They’re not even part of my life anymore!
But maybe they are, in ways I never imagined.
CHAPTER 7
Clicks and Cliques
What’s Not to “Like”?
It was not long ago—the year 2000 to be exact—that two Silicon Valley engineers, James Hong and Jim Young, had a difference in opinion about the appearance of a woman walking by. Their disagreement may have started as a calm discussion, but it arguably launched a worldwide phenomenon that changed our entire society, perhaps as substantially and pervasively as any other innovation in the twentieth century, including the automobile, the telephone, or the microchip.
It was this conversation that Hong and Young say led to the development of a website they called Hot or Not. You may remember having heard about this site back in the day. You may have even visited it or sent in your photo. It probably didn’t seem paradigmatic at the time, but then you may not remember what the world was like when this site first launched.
In 2000, the web was not too crowded. It was only four years earlier that Google had been conceived in a research lab a few miles away. Hot or Not wasn’t the first website of its kind. But it was that site that hit a nerve and became one of the most popular internet destinations of its time by far. Within just one week, it reached over two million hits per day. A few weeks later, it was ranked by the Nielsen Company as one of the top twenty-five sites worldwide for internet advertising. But perhaps the most significant effect of this site actually had more to do with how it inspired others—and one man in particular. Hot or Not was reportedly an inspiration for Mark Zuckerberg’s own Harvard-based Facemash. And we all know what happened after that.
At its simplest conceptualization, Hot or Not offered a public service for anyone who was insecure about his or her looks. Just minutes after posting their photos, users would receive objective feedback from thousands of people around the world enabling them to learn just how they were perceived by others.
But the site also offered something much more important that changed our relationship with popularity forever. Recall that this was the same year in which reality competition shows first appeared on prime-time TV in countries all over the world. In the United States, Survivor and Big Brother appeared, soon followed by American Idol. It wasn’t long before versions of each would launch in over forty different countries. This was the era in which we were first introduced to the idea that anyone could achieve national fame, visibility, and positive regard from others, and in which the public could decide who was popular and who was not without ever leaving their living room couches.
That was likewise possible on Hot or Not. Its developers didn’t merely make attractiveness ratings of each picture confidentially available to the visitor who had submitted his or her photo. It posted those ratings publicly. Moreover, average ratings were rank-ordered and viewable on the site as a list of who received the most favorable votes. Suddenly we could reach an unfathomable number of people with the simple click of a button, and they could approve of us, or at least of our appearance, just as easily.
This opportunity for instant worldwide popularity is fundamental to all social media platforms today. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, the common goals are to get “likes,” or even to go “viral”—in other words, to become highly popular. What makes this so appealing?
Throughout this book, I have discussed factors that motivate us to care about what others think of us, both the forces that we’re conscious of and those well outside our awareness. Recall that one of these factors involves the unique way that our brains are organized, with the more primitive regions, in our limbic system, being especially sensitive to social rewards. In those moments in which we feel we are getting attention and approval from peers, fMRI studies reveal activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, which reflects the presence of neurotransmitters that make us feel good, giving us some of the same pleasure that we obtain from recreational drugs. And remember that the activation of these brain regions is important not only because it is pleasurable but also because it powerfully affects nearby brain regions that influence our feelings, motivate us to change our behavior, and even make us crave whatever we indirectly linked to the source of that pleasure.
In 2016, researchers at UCLA decided to investigate the extent to which social media may have the same effects on us. They did so by developing a clever approach to determine what happens in our brains at the very moments that we are viewing and “liking” what we see. They decided to conduct this study with adolescents aged thirteen to eighteen, which is the period during which the anterior cingulate cortex has just developed the advanced brain circuitry of adulthood.
The participants were asked to enter an fMRI scanner and interact with a platform that was designed to be similar to Instagram, the popular photo-sharing social media site. They had earlier asked each participant to submit his or her own Instagram photos, which they claimed would be viewed by fifty other teens who also were part of the study. This wasn’t true, but it enabled the experimenters to manipulate how many times each of the participant’s own photos had been “liked,” ostensibly by peers. Half of the subjects’ photos were randomly chosen to be popular among the peers, with a high number of “likes” recorded under each one. The other half were made to look as if they had gotten few “likes.”
Not surprisingly, they found that social media can provide a big boost of social rewards, which was reflected by dramatic effects in the brain. When participants viewed their own pictures and saw that they had been “liked” by many others, it was accompanied by significant activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that the subjects experienced pleasure in a way that could be hard to resist—and even become addicting. The effects were surprisingly comparable to the rewards we receive when engaging in off-line interaction.
This may explain some of the reasons why social media has become so popular. In 2015, the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank, reported that 76 percent of adolescents and 65 percent of adults in the United States use social media, the vast majority of whom report that they are online not just once, but several times a day. In fact, most Americans are on multiple social media sites, with 71 percent of all teens on Facebook, 52 percent on Instagram, 41 percent on Snapchat, 33 percent on Twitter, 33 percent on Google+, and 14 percent on Tumblr. Among adults, some of the most visited platforms may be different (less Snapchat, more Pinterest and LinkedIn), but the proportion of those active on these sites is fairly similar. Interestingly, there are only minimal to modest differences by gender, ethnicity, or economic status in social media use. Today, most youth and many adults report that they have more social interaction each day through social media platforms than they do face-to-face or voice-to-voice.
Much has been written about social media in the past two decades—some critics warn that it marks the end of society as we know it, with adverse effects on children’s development, adults’ productivity, and, through its natural cliquish segmentation of the world into those we follow and those we don’t, the degeneration of our unified global community. Others have extolled the virtues of social media and its unprecedented opportunity to provide social connections and viral information exchange at a magnitude that never before could have even been conceived.
Scientists have debated these points as well, with studies appearing more slowly than many would like, probably because the online world changes far too quickly for science to keep up. Initially data suggested that those who use social media extensively may be at risk for psychopathology, a concept that had begun to be known in the psychological literature as “Facebook depression.” Excessive use of the internet was even considered as a possible psychiatric diagnosis in the newest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
But research has come a long way since then, and we are now beginning to understand a bit more about how social media is changing our relationships. The effects of social media have less to do with whether we use it than when we use it, how we use it, and who we were before we ever logged in.
My own lab has conducted a few studies to determine exactly what may go wrong, or right, when we use social media. For instance, following the lead of my graduate student Jackie Nesi, we have been able to demonstrate that excessive use of online communication during key life periods may have implications for the social proficiencies that are supposed to be developed in adolescence. Our results revealed that for young adolescent boys in particular, those who communicated with their romantic partners over the computer more than they did in person grew up to be a bit worse than others at basic romantic relationship skills, such as how to resolve arguments or express relationship needs.
In other work, we have learned that social media use also may be detrimental if we use it for the “wrong” reasons. In another study with about eight hundred teenagers, Jackie and I found that while many used social media to connect with old friends and make new ones, some lurkers were more interested in going online just to observe others. When they did, they were especially likely to compare themselves to their peers to determine whether they were as attractive, popular, and active as them. This may sound like something that characterizes teenagers, like the girls Ira Glass featured in his story on NPR’s This American Life who reported pressure to immediately offer exaggerated compliments on their friends’ posts for fear of relationship sanctions. But looking at others’ post-worthy pictures and reading friends’ glowing remarks is part of how adults use social media as well. Our findings revealed that this use of online platforms to engage in “social comparison” and “feedback-seeking” was linked with later depression, especially for those who were unpopular and made “upward comparisons” while viewing the profiles of their peers.
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