Category Archives: modern love studies

modern studies of love, cultures across the world

Interpersonal Attraction over Minimal Similarities

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It is widely known in psychology that similarities attract individuals in interpersonal relationships and love. We feel attracted to others with whom we share similar personality traits, interests, values, and other personal attributes. even minimal similarities, if they are essential, can lead to interpersonal attraction.

People Tend to Be Prone to Overgeneralization

However, this interpersonal attraction due to similarities may stem not from real similarities but rather from our overgeneralized beliefs that such observed personal similarities indicate our deeper and more fundamental similarities with another person.

Charles Chu, an assistant professor at Boston University, recently conducted a study showing how our perceptions of similarities prompt our false beliefs about having deeper similarities with the person.

As the author said,

“Our attraction to people who share our attributes is aided by the belief that those shared attributes are driven by something deep within us: one’s essence.”

More concretely, Charles Chu continues:

“To put it concretely, we like someone who agrees with us on a political issue, shares our music preferences, or simply laughs at the same thing as us not purely because of those similarities, but because those similarities suggest something more—this person is, in essence, like me, and as such, they share my views of the world at large.”

What Is “Psychological Essentialism”?

According to the author, “psychological essentialism,” specifically applied to people’s ideas about the self and individual identity, is what motivates this way of thinking. People have a tendency to “essentialize” many things in their perceptions of others. This seems to be a psychological phenomenon present across all human cultures.

Charles Chu defines “psychological essentialism” this way:

“To essentialize something is to define it by a set of deeply rooted and unchanging properties, or an essence.”

“For example, the category of ‘wolf’ is defined by a wolf essence, residing in all wolves, from which stems attributes such as their pointy noses, sharp teeth and fluffy tails as well as their pack nature and aggressiveness. It is unchanging in that a wolf raised by sheep is still a wolf and will eventually develop wolf-like attributes.”

Charles Chu explains that researchers have recently started to concentrate on the category of the self in terms of “psychological essentialism.” They found that we tend to essentialize the self in the same way that we essentialize other categories in our perception.

“To essentialize me is to define who I am by a set of entrenched and unchanging properties, and we all, especially in Western societies, do this to some extent. A self-essentialist then would believe that what others can see about us and the way we behave are caused by such an unchanging essence,”

Charles Chu said.

New Experiments on Self-Essentialism and Interpersonal Attraction

Researchers conduct studies to better understand how self-essentialism drives interpersonal attraction. Let us review a series of four experiments recently reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

First Experiment

In the first experiment, researchers asked participants their opinions on one of five randomly selected social issues: gun ownership, the death penalty, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, or animal testing. The other half of the participants read about someone who disagreed with their position, while the other half read about someone who shared their position. Then all participants answered questions about their general beliefs about self-essentialism. They also rated their level of interpersonal attraction to the fictitious person and how much they thought they shared a general worldview with that person.

The participants who were high in self-essentialism more frequently reported that they had a similar general perception of reality as the fictitious person who agreed with them. The participants also express attraction to them.

Second Experiment

In the second experiment, similar to the first one, researchers found the same results, further supporting their theory of self-essentialism. This time, researchers asked about another shared attribute: the participants’ propensity to overestimate or underestimate the number of colored dots on a series of computer slides.

In this case, the belief in an “essential self” made participants think that a single aspect of similarity implied that both the participant and another person see the world similarly. This, in turn, led to a higher attraction to that person.

Third Experiment

In a third experiment, researchers showed participants eight pairs of paintings and asked them to select their favorite from each pair. Some participants were fans of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, while others were fans of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Then researchers informed half of each fan group that their artistic preference was intrinsic to their identity. Researchers informed the other half of participants that there was no correlation between their artistic preference and their identity.

Researchers then exposed the participants to two fictitious individuals. One of them shared their artistic preference, and the other did not.

Researchers found in this experiment that those whom they told that artistic preference was related to their essence were significantly more likely to express attraction to a hypothetical person with the same artistic preferences.

Fourth Experiment

In the fourth experiment, researchers classified participants as fans of one of the two artists. Then they gave them information about whether or not using one’s own essence was useful in perceiving other people.

In this experiment, researchers told one-third of the participants that essentialist thinking may result in inaccurate perceptions of others. Researchers told another third of the participants that essentialist thinking may result in accurate perceptions of others. They didn’t provide any information to the remaining third of participants.

Here are the striking results of the study: Participants, who were informed that essentialist thinking could result in accurate assessments of other people, believed that they shared a similar taste in art with them. They also felt attracted to these fictitious people.

What the Study Concluded about Interpersonal Attraction

The most surprising finding of the study was that something as simple as a shared appreciation of an artist could make people believe that other people would have similar worldviews. However, the author advised that self-essentialist thinking might not always be beneficial. Regarding this finding, Charles Chu noted that,

“I think any time when we’re making quick judgments or first impressions with very little information, we are likely to be affected by self-essentialist reasoning.”

“People are so much more complex than we often give them credit for, and we should be wary of the unwarranted assumptions we make based on this type of thinking.”

Thus, one can see that Self-Essentialist Reasoning Underlies the Similarity-Attraction Effect in interpersonal perception and attraction.

Take Notice of Your Partner’s Being Grateful to You

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Gratitude is the best attitude. Love and happiness are closely associated with being grateful. On the other hand, it is so great when your partner notices your being grateful.

Please recall the last time you were thankful for someone. This was most likely because someone did something good for you. You were grateful, and you thanked your partner for doing this for you. Right?

Feeling and expressing gratitude to others are great experiences associated with positive relationship outcomes, including one’s feeling of being happy.

But what happens when your partner in a relationship perceives your gratitude towards them? Do they really see it? Do you see when someone is grateful to you for what you did for them?

How Can I Know that my Partner Sees Me Being Grateful for Him or Her?

First, it is necessary to understand how people perceive each other’s gratitude. And only then can we answer the question and understand whether perceiving a partner’s gratitude also benefits you and the relationship. These perceptions can be accurate or not. Actually, partners may not really notice that their partner is grateful to them. What a bummer, isn’t it?

What might that entail when your partner is grateful? Consider the following relationships: Monica and Chandler, Rachel and Ross, and Phoebe and Joey. If someone asked Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe to rate their partner’s gratitude, what would they say?

They might rate their partner’s gratitude as 7, 8, or 9 on a 10-point scale, respectively.

Then, we need to compare their perceptions of their partner’s gratitude with their partner’s actual gratitude. Right? Only then can we determine whether they are accurate or not and whether they are under- or over-perceiving their partner’s gratitude.

When asked, Chandler, Ross, and Joey might say they are grateful to their partners, rating their gratitude on a scale of 6, 7, and 8, respectively.

Do these women notice their partners’ being grateful? How can we know this?

If each woman underestimated their partner’s gratitude by one point, they were all inaccurate and somewhat biased. The fact that Rachel rated her partner higher than Monica or Phoebe and that this matches the pattern of their partners’ levels of gratitude shows that they were also largely accurate. However, Ross’s actual rating of gratitude was higher than Chandler’s and Joey’s ratings.

The key point here is that partners may underestimate or exaggerate their partner’s gratitude. However, they are still accurate about the relative levels of gratitude of their partners. They are relatively accurate in their perception of their partner’s being grateful.

How Accurate and Biased Are Partners’ Gratitude Perceptions of Each Other?

Hasagani Tissera, the graduate research student at McGill University, collaborated with other researchers working at McGill, York University, and the University of Toronto to explore this question. In two studies, which they administered among 514 couples, they asked each partner in the couple to report on how grateful they are and how grateful they believe their partner is. We also asked how partners are satisfied with their relationships. Researchers administered their survey by asking partners independently of each other.

Then, researchers compared partners’ perceptions of their partners’ gratitude with their partners’ actual gratitude. Surprisingly, they discovered that partners tended to underestimate their partners’ gratitude. Nevertheless, they remained reasonably accurate about it.

Why so?

Why Do Partners Fail to Recognize Others’ Being Grateful?

Obviously, it makes sense. It would be good and important to know how grateful your partner is. This makes them feel satisfied.

What might be less apparent is why people often don’t see how grateful their partner is. Why do partners tend to be biased in a certain way? What does it entail in a relationship?

Thinking that the other person isn’t as grateful as they really are might keep partners from getting too comfortable and push them to keep working on making the relationship better. This is different from thinking their partners are more thankful than they really are. The latter could cause them to put in less effort in the future and put the relationship at risk.

How Biased Gratitude Perceptions Affect Relationship Satisfaction

In fact, a relationship depends on how much a person underestimates their partner’s appreciation. If they are drastically off, it is associated with a less happy relationship. However, a small mistake in the perception of gratitude can make a relationship happier.

If partners do not believe their partners are grateful, despite the fact that they are extremely grateful, this could lead to serious problems in a relationship. The large gaps in partners’ underestimation of gratitude are detrimental to relationship satisfaction. However, a small gap appears to be beneficial.

Power Poses Can Make You Feel Confident

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The senses of touch, body positions, and movements play a significant role in both romantic relationships and sexual encounters. Our physical attraction is evident in body postures, sitting close to one another, cuddling, and kissing.

How good is it to show that you are assertive in your body language?

Your “power poses” and confident behavior can be beneficial in relationships. Traditional cultures tend to praise the assertive behavior of men but not of women. Feminists may think differently.

What if you do not have an assertive personality? Can you become more assertive?

The studies have shown various ways to become more assertive in your attitudes, behaviors, and relationships. One of these is a seemingly simple technique: you just need to regularly train so-called “power poses” (Carney et al., 2010; Körner et al., 2020; 2022).

What Are the “Power Poses”?

The “power poses” are the wide-body poses, the superman-like poses. Researchers examined the effects of two types of body positions:

  • expansive body positions that reflect dominance, for example, standing or sitting in an expansive way and taking up as much space as possible;
  • upright postures, for example, standing or sitting straight (versus slouched); that body position is the nonverbal display of prestige.
ROBERT KÖRNER AND ASTRID SCHÜTZ, A Stronger Self Through Wide Body Positions, March 10, 2023

What the Studies of the Effects of the “Power Poses” Showed

Some researchers found that power posing increases people’s self-esteem and confidence, while others did not find these effects (Körner et al.).

Early studies, for example, showed that adopting wide-body positions for one or two minutes

“can make you feel powerful, risk-oriented, and increases the male sex hormone testosterone and decreases the stress hormone cortisol.”

Robert Körner and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 128 studies conducted between 1982 and 2022 with more than 10,000 participants on the effects of power poses. The cultural samples of participants were largely from the U.S. and European countries.

How Power Pose Affects Motivation and Behavior of People

The results of a meta-analysis of 128 studies conducted with more than 10,000 participants on the effects of power poses have indicated that

“Expansive body positions make people feel more self-confident, powerful, and in a better mood. People who engaged in dominant poses felt somewhat more confident, powerful, and positive than people who stood or sat in a slumped or contracted way. “

Most researchers investigated the differences in effects between high- and low-power poses. They usually did not include a neutral body position in their studies.

The effects of expansive and upright body positions were the same; both of these body positions affected people’s self-perceptions.

These body positions of people also impacted their real behavior, affecting how they became action-oriented and risk-prone through the poses. However, the effect of body positions on behavior was not robust.

The power poses, on the other hand, had almost no effect on blood pressure, heart rate, or hormones.

Body Positions Have Different Effects for People in Western and Eastern Societies

According to multiple studies, gender and age make no differences in the effects of body positions. However, studies found the effects of body positions on motivation and behavior in Western countries, such as Germany and the U.S. However, these effects were somewhat smaller in Eastern countries such as Malaysia and Japan.

Do “Power Body Positions” Really Help?

Robert Körner and his colleagues concluded that

“the adoption of expansive body positions for just one or two minutes can make people feel better.”

ROBERT KÖRNER AND ASTRID SCHÜTZ, A Stronger Self Through Wide Body Positions, March 10, 2023

So, the power body positions and upright postures can help people as a simple technique to increase their subjective experience of confidence, yet they do not necessarily change their behavior or relationships.

The Religious Bias of Love and Prejudice

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Many religious teachings emphasize love, kindness, and generosity as the primary cultural values. Whether or not you are religious, you have probably heard of the “Golden Rule.” It states that you should treat others as you would like to be treated. A version of this rule exists in all major world religions. Why does religious prejudice still exist?

Does religion increase moral behavior? Or, why do religious cultures explicitly or implicitly teach prejudice?

Religions encourage prosocial behavior and teach us to love each other. Religious teachings suggest people treat others with kindness, generosity, and positivity. Based on the review of many studies on religion and prosocial behavior, researchers have concluded that religious people’s faith tends to increase their prosocial behavior.

Why then don’t we always practice what we preach?

The Paradox of Religious Love

The question arises: why does religion also influence actions and viewpoints that seem to conflict with these religious principles?

Throughout history, religions have been a force behind atrocities like wars and massacres committed against people of other faiths. We know about the stories of religious crusades. We remember the French Wars of Religion in 1572 and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.

Why Religious People Can Be Prejudiced

While religion teaches prosocial behavior, research shows that when people identify themselves closely with one’s religion, this can lead to their racism and homophobia. The social psychological effect of intergroup bias can explain how religion can produce prejudiced attitudes and behaviors.

How Intergroup Bias Decreases Prosocial Behavior and Love

The intergroup bias is the human propensity to think favorably about the groups we are a part of — an “ingroup”.” Yet we think more negatively about the groups you are not a part of—”an outgroup.” While we think that outgroups violate our ingroup values, we perceive them as dangerous to our ingroup.

In light of this social psychological effect, we can understand why religious beliefs can produce both prosocial behavior and prejudice. On the one hand, people direct their prosocial behavior primarily at members of their own ingroup. On the other hand, people focus their prejudice on members of other groups, particularly those they view as threatening.

However, it is unclear whether religion boosts prejudice or if there is another factor at play. Annetta Snell and her colleagues thoroughly reviewed the findings of psychological research, which used priming techniques to explore whether religion might increase prejudice.

What the Priming Studies Are

Priming is the method of subtly encouraging someone to think about a thought or concept in such a way that they are barely conscious of this subtle influence. Researchers employ the strategy of priming to influence people’s opinions when they don’t want to be too explicit in their influence. The purpose of such priming is to increase a concept’s awareness in the brain of a person in order to detect differences in subsequent behaviors and attitudes.

In one type of priming technique, for example, people unscrambled short sentences with religious words. That was implicit religious priming. Then these participants responded to the questions that assessed their prejudice toward various religious groups.

Researchers compared the responses of these participants with those of other people, whom they primed with unreligious (neutral) words. The higher level of prejudice in the group primed with religious words than in the group primed with neutral words should provide evidence that religion causes prejudice.

What the Priming Studies of Religious Beliefs Show

Annetta Snell and her colleagues have reviewed 44 studies estimating how much this kind of priming increases prejudice. They concluded that the priming of religious thoughts increases prejudice across all target groups, such as Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. However, researchers found that this effect of religious priming is relatively small.

However, researchers found that priming religion increases prejudice toward members of sexual and gender minorities as well as towards atheists. These findings indicate that religious people tend to perceive members of sexual and gender minorities, as well as atheists, as especially threatening to their religious views. It is likely they perceive those as violating their religious values.

Thus, priming religious thoughts increases prejudice due to intergroup bias and perceptions of threat. However, it would be inadequate to excessively generalize these findings. When primed with religious thoughts, not all people show prejudice towards other groups. And religious leaders and community members can mitigate the negative social effects of religious prejudice if they explicitly oppose prejudice towards other cultural groups.

The Biological Evolution of Human Bonding and Love

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The basic human need for positive social connections that have evolutionary and social roots is the foundation of love relationships. These origins can be traced all the way back to the beginning of recorded history. (Karandashev, 2022, chapter 3).

The evolutionary need for bonding and love derived from the early evolutionary distinction between “ingroup” and “outgroup.” The “ingroup” is us, and the “outgroup” is them.

The need to belong to an “ingroup” became the core of human motivation. Belonging to an “ingroup” provided security, subsistence, and psychological attachment to others whom they needed for survival.

The Evolutionary Need to Belong

People clearly benefit from living in cooperative and supportive groups that work together and help each other. People who live with others are safer and have a greater sense of physical, social, and psychological survival security. They had more consistent access to food and a greater capacity to defend themselves from raiders due to cooperation. Therefore, those ancestors of humans who lived in tribal communities had a greater chance of surviving.

People are “social animals” that have survived because they worked together, helped, and supported each other, their family, and their tribe. While hunting, they discovered that more hands are always better than two. As food gatherers, they gained protection from threats by traveling in groups. Those with a stronger sense of community were more likely to live longer. They had more and better offspring, which made them the dominant genetic group.

“Love as a means of community bonding” is the main thing that brings people together and makes their relationships stronger. As social beings, they have a better chance of staying alive when they live together because they can help each other. This is why the need to belong is intrinsic to human nature. Subsequently, men and women have an innate need to belong.

Social Bonding That Enables Human Physical Survival

When people belong to a social group, they have a greater chance of surviving because the group can provide better access to resources for maintaining sustenance and security. Those who live in tribal communities have a greater sense of security in their social connections than those who live alone. When members of a community work together to share resources, it makes it easier for them all to obtain food, water, and shelter. In addition to this, they are better able to defend themselves against predators as well as aggressive outsiders attacking them.

Social Bonding That Empowers Psychological Survival

In a later stage of evolution, human motivation also included the need for psychological security in addition to physical security. In tribal subsistence-based and traditional collectivistic societies, extended family, kin, and the tribal community provided sufficient conditions for secure social bonding. The ties of tribal community and kinship were the social relations that kept people together in many small-scale, low-technology societies of the past.

Over the course of evolution, the need to belong to a group and feel safe psychologically and emotionally became the driving force behind all human behavior. Strengthening one’s physical and psychological strength, as well as developing supportive relationships, became vital to surviving in life.

Thus, bonding, the need to belong, and the need for love all have their roots in our evolutionary past, which I discussed at length elsewhere (Karandashev, 2022, chapter 3).

How People Were Domesticated

Natural selection almost certainly played a role in the development of social abilities, social bonding, and prosocial behavior during the course of human evolutionary history. “Domestication syndrome” was at work with humans in the same way as with animals.

Brian Hare, a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, proposed the theory that explains the “Survival of the Friendliest” (Hare, 2017). According to this theory, humans domesticated themselves in the latter stages of evolution. In the course of evolution, human social skills emerged and evolved when natural selection began to favor in-group pro-sociality over aggression.

Social characteristics in humans evolved as a result of a “domestication syndrome” similar to that seen in other domesticated animals. The meta-analysis of many studies from the fields of paleoanthropology, neurobiology, and developmental biology was in accord with this evolutionary theory of domestication (Hare, 2017).

Why Do We Need Laughter and Smiles?

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Smiling and laughing are the natural expressions of human emotions in relationships with others. The cultural norms regarding their expressions, however, vary across cultures. People in some Western cultures, such as the European-American one, commonly use them. People in other cultures, such as Eastern Asians, are more reserved in their expressions of laughter and smile much less frequently (Karandashev, 2021).

The question of research interest is “Why do we need laughter and smiles?”

Researchers most often conduct scientific studies of laughter and smiles in Western cultures, such as England and the USA.

Here is one example of a study that British anthropologist Robin Dunbar and Austrian psychologist Marc Mehu conducted in 2008 (Dunbar & Mehu, 2008). They found that strangers who were talking to each other smiled and laughed more than once every two minutes.

When Do We Laugh and Smile? 

We smile when we’re happy, excited, shy, confused, recognizing someone we don’t know, winning, or losing. We laugh when we are amused, nervous, angry, greeting a puppy, teasing, or just don’t know what to say.

Men and women usually smile and laugh when they are with other people. They intuitively anticipate that others can see their smiles and laughter. And they expect, either implicitly or explicitly, that their smile and laughter will influence other people who see and hear these emotional expressions.

Why Do We Laugh and Smile? An Evolutionary Perspective

Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, Adrienne Wood, and her colleagues are investigating how smiling and laughing can be viewed as evolutionarily ancient behaviors conveying a wide range of messages (Wood et al., 2018; 2022). They propose that smiles and laughs can serve three functions:

(1) reward,

(2) convey affiliative intentions,

(3) assert dominance.

The Rewarding Function of Laughter and Smiling

These are the smiles and laughs that make you feel good. They show how happy the smiling and laughing person is. They also thank the other person for making this person happy. It’s nice when people smile and laugh with us, especially when we know it’s because of something we did.

This is why marketing companies put happy faces on ads for everything from car insurance to toilet paper: they want people to think well of their products.

Laughter also makes people feel good, which is why laugh tracks are used in comedies.

The Evolutionary Origins of Smiling and Laughing

These gratifying smiles and laughs could evolve from mammalian “play signals.” The animals’ play signals make it clear that they mean no harm. One can see that in some ways, smiles and laughter serve the same purpose. And these signals are rewarding—they make the recipient feel good. So, they help extend the playful interaction.

The Affiliative Function of Laughter and Smiling

Yet, most smiles and laughter are not rewarding expressions of happiness. This could be our quick, closed-lip expression when greeting a passing stranger or expressing sympathy to a friend. Or, we could use the polite laugh to ease awkward tension in a group meeting.

These expressions are the shadows of those big, happy smiles and laughs. They borrow the message of friendly, harmless intentions from reward signals. Therefore, we may call these smiles and laughs “affiliation signals.” Smiles and laughter, elicited by nervousness, embarrassment, sexual attraction, friendliness, and politeness, all have the common goal of increasing affiliation.

Do All Smiles and Laughter Make People Feel Good?

Some smiles and laughter, however, are far from making the recipients feel good. They can make them feel rather bad.

We all know how it feels when people laugh at us instead of with us. People sometimes tease, mock, make fun of, or criticize someone while smiling and laughing. One may call these smiles and laughter “dominance,” because they show that someone is better than someone else.

At first glance, it seems strange to think that a play signal that means nothing bad could be changed into something not so good. But when people smile and laugh like this, they are saying,

“I think you are completely harmless and not serious.”

There may not be a better way to show that you are in charge than to act like you don’t care about someone.

Many men and women believe that smiling and laughing improve their interpersonal relationships. Others believe they should be more reserved in their emotional expressions and not smile as much. In this regard, people from different cultures may have different explanations and cultural stereotypes.

Altruistic Love Brings Happiness

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This article presents the study demonstrating how altruistic love and doing small acts of kindness can bring good not only to others but can also improve your health and happiness. Let us look at the recent research findings showing the power of love and benevolence.

The New Study of Kindness

Meena Andiappan, professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, recently explored the ways people can increase their sense of well-being while decreasing their feelings of anxiety and depression in their social relationships. Let us take a look at how she explains these results for the scientific blog “The Conversation.”

Researchers investigated very simple acts of kindness. They compared those people who chose to treat themselves by spending money, time, or other resources on their own happiness to those who chose to treat others. On a daily basis, people in both cases performed simple, low- to no-cost acts.

The study has shown that the regular doing of “good things” leads to positive consequences for those who do them.

The Positive Power of Doing Good to Others

Researchers found surprising results in their study. The lives of participants in the first group who did not do anything beyond their normal activities did not change much. However, the mental health of those who provided acts of kindness to others improved markedly. Participants in the second group also had lower levels of anxiety and depression. These results supported the earlier findings of this kind.

How can psychology explain these findings? Researchers explain that devoting our time and energy to others makes our own problems appear less pressing.

The Positive Power of Social Connections

Here’s another way to look at these results: It is likely that strengthening social connections can also be beneficial. Treating others frequently entails spending time with them and developing and reinforcing relationships. Strong social relationships, according to social scientists, are one of the keys to well-being and happiness. In addition, when we are with other people, we tend to smile much more often. Therefore, we experience positive emotions more frequently.

The Positive Power of Meaningful Life

Furthermore, this research indicates that living a meaningful life is a significant predictor of happiness. Spending your limited resources and energies on others is likely to enhance this sense of meaning, making life more meaningful and worthwhile. Spending on yourself, whether time, money, or effort, does not appear to have the same benefits.

The Positive Power of Daily Kindness

Here is another important thing to note regarding the results of this study. Researchers have found that any occasional or regular acts of kindness are beneficial for your well-being and health. However, three factors can make certain actions especially beneficial to happiness.

  • First, doing something beyond common routine can make you happier than doing something normal and routine. So, extraordinary kindness is especially important.
  • Second, performing various acts of kindness is important. So, the variety of kindness and love is also important.
  • Third, receiving positive feedback about the kind act you performed boosts happiness. It is good to know we helped someone. Receiving gratitude and appreciation for our actions from others boosts our positive emotions.

Thus, the old adage “in helping others, you really can help yourself” is true. Still, we should remember that performing acts of kindness is not a universal cure for all emotional problems.

What Do Altruistic People Get in Return?

We must admit, however, that acts of altruism and kindness are not entirely selfless. Altruistic people gain psychological rewards for their altruistic actions through the hedonistic motivation of internal and intrinsic emotions.

For example, American psychologists Robert Cialdini and Douglas Kenrick (1976) conducted a study that demonstrated the truth of the hedonistic motivation of altruism. Doing good for others is emotionally rewarding and self-gratifying for some people. Their experiences of socialization likely influence their altruistic psychological characteristics, emotions, motivation, and behavior.

The studies have shown that altruism and altruistic love are nearly cross-culturally universal.

Can Sharing Bad News Improve Close Relationships?

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Men and women in close relationships hope to experience joyful and optimistic times together. They are happy to share everything good that happens in their lives. The people close to them are happy to hear the good news. It is widely held that sharing in a relationship—telling another about one’s emotional experiences—makes people feel better.

What about bad news? Does it make sense to share with others in their close relationships something bad that happened to us? Some may want to avoid spoiling their good moods.

Does it help people themselves when they share with others their bad news? People often feel worse after discussing negative events that have occurred to them. They perhaps replay the negative experience in their minds.

Something even worse may occur. Social sharing tends to lower the mood of the person listening to the disclosure. But why is social sharing so popular if it has emotional costs for both sharers and listeners? In their recent article at Character & Context Blog, German scholars Antje Rauers and Michaela Riediger from the University of Jena discuss this controversy.

People Tend to Share their Bad News with those Close to Them

For decades, scientists have tried to answer this question. Studies of intimate relationships provide a possible clue. Research shows that sharing stories about feelings can bring people closer together. As a result, perhaps the positive effects of sharing are not related to mood but rather to the quality of the relationships between people. Perhaps in times of crisis, the act of telling one another bad news strengthens our bonds with one another.

People usually share meaningful experiences with close friends or family members. To explore how and why they do this, Antje Rauers and Michaela Riediger designed a study with the goal of capturing social sharing as it happens in real life. Researchers asked 100 romantic couples over cell phones about their experiences as they went about their daily lives. During a period of three weeks, both partners recorded their current mood and how close they felt to their partner six times per day. Every time, partners also documented if they had any problems and whether they had shared with their partner their experience. Researchers were particularly interested in situations in which people had indeed just experienced a hassle. Then, they compared how people felt if they told their partner about these incidents with how they felt if they kept that bad experience to themselves.

What Did Researchers Find in Their Study?

Unsurprisingly, people felt worse following adversity than they did in the absence of such events.

Yet, researchers wanted to know if social sharing helped people emotionally recover from the hassles. Perhaps not necessarily. Some did not feel better after sharing, while some did. Some men and women also felt worse after hearing their partner’s story, whereas others did not. In other words, social sharing resulted in both emotional gains and losses for the couples.

Their sharing, however, significantly increased their relationship’s closeness. Both men and women experienced these benefits. And both the sharers and the receivers experienced these benefits. Researchers also examined how people in close relationships felt prior to sharing.

The main conclusion was that sharing did make people feel closer, no matter how close they had felt before. 

Social Sharing Affects Future Closeness in Relationships

Here is another question of interest. Are they fleeting experiences, or do they accumulate over time to increase closeness? How long do these increases in relationship closeness last?

According to the theory, social sharing generates virtuous cycles of mutual trust and even more sharing, which increase relationship closeness over time. Researchers asked the couples about their relationships 2.5 years later.

Results showed that those who had frequently shared their problems with their partners reported greater relationship closeness 2.5 years later. People who rarely shared with their partners, on the other hand, lost some of their closeness over time. Thus, the author’s findings suggest that social sharing can help to strengthen relationships both in the present and in the future. This psychological discovery explains why, despite the emotional costs, social sharing is so popular. Sharing bad news may not necessarily help to improve our mood, but it can aid in the formation of our close bonds.

These Experiments Show Why Equality Is Bad or Looks Bad

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Many modern societies have made great strides toward implementing social policies and practices that promote social equality. However, cultural values of equality spread more rapidly in some nations than in others.

Significant progress toward social equality, for example, has occurred relatively quickly in Western and Northern European countries. However, the social movement toward equality in the United States of America remains slow. The legislative initiatives face resistance from many voters and policymakers. They are often reluctant to support such equality policies. The intriguing question remains why so many people, both conservatives and often liberals, oppose such apparently fair proposals that can benefit all. Nevertheless, they mistakenly perceive the contexts of possible outcomes and resist social equality.

What the Preceding Studies Showed

In my previous post, I described some of the experiments conducted by N. Derek Brown and his colleagues (Brown et al., 2022), which discovered the hidden role that people’s “zero-sum” mindsets play in affecting their oppositional opinions, attitudes, and actions. Because of this, they believe that equality can lead them to lose their advantageous status. They agree with the idea of equality and perceive this as a positive change when equality increases within their own privileged social group. However, they oppose this idea of equality and perceive this as an undesirable shift when equality may increase between their own and other social groups.

Here Are the Other Experiments with Equality, Even More Convincing

The results of the following experiments were especially striking. Researchers made up a special “privileged” social group. They administered a personality test (a bogus test). Then, the researchers told participants that, based on their “test results”, they placed them in either the Eagles or the Rattlers group. In fact, the researchers assigned all of them to the Rattlers’ group. This group held a position of advantage over the Eagles, a fictitious social group. Then, the researchers proposed the Rattlers to reduce the disparity between them and the Eagles. They could take one of two actions:

  1. Either making both groups better off while helping the Eagles more (the win-win, equality-enhancing option)
  2. Or making everyone worse off while harming the Eagles more (the lose-lose, inequality-enhancing option).

Surprisingly and counterintuitively, the Rattlers perceived the win-win scenario to be marginally more detrimental to their interests than the lose-lose proposal. Therefore, they favored “the win-win” option less than “the lose-lose” option as a desired policy.

What Is Especially Striking About These Findings?

One can see that these findings are very convincing. Derek Brown and his colleagues (Brown et al., 2022) characterize these as “grim.” They commented that

“The misperception that equality is harmful is stubbornly persistent, resisting both reason and incentivization”

As Paul Piff, Professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, remarked,

People in general, and particularly elites, “tend to perceive inequality as something abstract and fairly distant. Inequality-mitigating policies are often framed in terms of policies to help the poor, which isn’t necessarily all that motivating for (some) folks. In a sense, then, combatting inequality rarely appeals to self-interest, which is a massive motivation for those advantaged in society to preserve the status quo insofar as it benefits them.”

The Important Conclusion of These Experiments

People tend to resist such equality policies, even when researchers address scarcity concerns and assure people that a more equitable policy will not affect their opportunities. Thus, this study demonstrates why equality is bad or looks bad to many privileged people. Inequality and disparities continue to occur because people fundamentally misunderstand their social consequences.

Why Is Inequality in American Society So Persistent?

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In the United States of America, equality is frequently declared to be a high cultural value. And there is undeniable evidence of the progress that American society has made in the social practice of equality during the 20th century.

In many respects, however, equality in the United States is still not consistent and is far from ideal. Despite their declared aspiration for social equality, Americans are diverse in their opinions and attitudes toward equality.

Psychological Discrepancies in Declared Values and Actions

The division between liberals and conservatives is quite apparent in this regard. While many progressive men and women see social equality as a highly desirable cultural value in American society, many conservative men and women may disagree with this view of social life.

Even though many people say they believe in the value of equality, both liberals and conservatives from socially advantaged groups may act in ways that protect their advantage.

Members of socially privileged groups often support the idea of equality, but they use their privilege to make policies that keep inequality in place. This trend keeps going even though inequality threatens the prosperity of both poor and rich groups. Many believe that this “cognitive mistake” is more common for conservatives than for liberals. However, it is not always correct. Both conservatives and liberals are prone to such “cognitive mistakes” and advantage-protecting behavior. Whether conservative or liberal, we tend to cling to our advantages at all costs.

Why Are Privileged Americans So Resistant to the Idea of Equality?

A recent study (Brown et al., 2022) looked at how conservatism, believing in the status quo, liking social hierarchies, and having a “zero-sum” view of the world affect behavior that tries to gain an advantage.

People with a zero-sum way of thinking perceive many situations as zero-sum games. This is the zero-sum attitude, which considers one person’s gain as another person’s loss. The study has especially looked at the psychological role of the zero-sum attitude. This attitude makes people from privileged social groups misperceive policies that promote equality as being detrimental to their own interests.

This zero-sum attitude makes negotiators think that their interests will always be at odds with those of their counterparts. They hold this belief even in situations when there are ways to make one or both parties better off without hurting either.

According to this view, people think that even everyday things like buying food or a car result in a position of winner and loser. Because of these beliefs, policymakers and voters may think that new policies will hurt them more than help others, even though the opposite is true.

The Studies Revealed What Causes American Inequality to Be So Persistent

A series of studies with a total sample size of 4,197 participants demonstrated that members of privileged groups incorrectly perceive equality to be detrimental to their access to resources and inequality to be advantageous. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, as opposed to between groups, do members of advantaged groups perceive it as harmless. Misperceptions persist even when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society. Misperceptions also persist when resources and resource access are unlimited.

In particular, a longitudinal survey of U.S. voters in 2020 revealed that voters’ perceptions of harm are a stronger predictor of voting against actual equality-enhancing policies than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs.

And the two final experiments showed that advantaged people are more likely to vote for policies that increase inequality that hurt their finances than for policies that increase equality that help their finances. Even after a change was made to help people make better decisions, people still have the wrong ideas. Surprisingly, this mistaken belief that equality has to be a zero-sum game could be why inequality still exists, even though it has costs for society that hurt everyone.