People not always needed to alleviate loneliness

New research at the University of Chicago finds evidence for a clever
way that people manage to alleviate the pain of loneliness: They
create people in their surroundings to keep them company.

“Biological reproduction is not a very efficient way to alleviate
one’s loneliness, but you can make up people when you’re motivated to
do so,” said Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. “When
people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more
likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like.”

Social scientists call this tendency “anthropomorphism.” As a research
topic, the phenomenon carries important therapeutic and societal
implications, Epley said. He and his co-authors will publish their
findings on anthropomorphism in the February issue of the journal
Psychological Science. Also contributing to the research were Scott
Akalis of Harvard University and the University of Chicago’s Adam
Waytz and John Cacioppo.

The behaviors they describe in the paper are not limited to the
lonely. Nevertheless, they are well-known to casual observers, from
the stereotype of the woman who lives alone surrounded by her
menagerie of cats, to the movie portrayal of a tropical island
castaway.

“In the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks was isolated on an island and found
the social desolation to be one of the most daunting challenges with
which he had to deal,” said Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake
Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of
Chicago.

“He did so, in part, by anthropomorphizing a volleyball, Wilson, who
became his friend and confidant while he was on the island.” Although
fictional, “Castaway depicts a deep truth about the irrepressibly
social nature of Homo sapiens,” Cacioppo said.

The researchers designed three experiments to test their expectations
that lonely people are more likely to make up for their lack of social
connection by creating humanlike connections with gadgets or pets, or
to increase their belief in the supernatural.

In one experiment, the team found a correlation between how lonely
people felt and their tendency to describe a gadget in terms of
humanlike mental states.

In another experiment, the team made people feel lonely in the
laboratory by asking them to write about a time when they felt lonely
or isolated. Under those circumstances, they were more likely to
believe in the supernatural, whether it be God, angels or miracles,
than when they were not feeling lonely.

“If we made them feel lonely, they were also more likely to describe a
pet, even if it wasn’t their own pet, as having humanlike mental
states that were related to social connection, like being more
thoughtful, considerate and compassionate,” Epley said.

The research further revealed that not just any negative emotional
state produces this effect. “It’s something special about loneliness,”Epley said. Fear, for example, doesn’t increase reported belief in
God, or how people describe their pets.

Loneliness is both painful to experience and potentially deadly. “It’s
actually a greater risk for morbidity or mortality than cigarette
smoking is. Being lonely is a bad thing for you,” he said.

But anthropomorphizing pets or God may actually confer many of the
same psychological and physical benefits that come from connections
with other people. The same benefits may not apply to gadgets, which
were a component of Epley’s studies.

“Non-human connections can be very powerful,” Epley said. “A brain’snot so sensitive to whether it’s a person or not. If it’s something
that has a lot of traits associated with what it means to be a human,
then all the better for us, it seems.”

The study also provides insight into the flip side of
anthropomorphism: dehumanization. People who enjoy a strong sense of
social connection are less likely to perceive humanlike mental states
in people who seem different from them. Classic examples occur during
times of war, during which a strong sense of nationalism or group
identity tend to emerge.

“It may be that strong in-group identity is one of the things that
facilitates dehumanizing the opposing side,” Epley said.

Source: University of Chicago
http://www.physorg.com/news119882379.html