Oddly enough, I have a surprising amount of experience with this. I used to play piano for a church of ~500 where my dad is one of the pastors in my hometown, and played a lot of music around town as well. All of those factors together meant that a lot of people knew way more about me than I knew about them.
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.
Alright, same thing here, but a bit smaller, cause my Dad was just the troop leader of a large contingent of scouts. Hundreds of parents and kids knew me, but I mostly just “pretended” to know them like you did.
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.
Without trying to gas you up or make you feel one way or another about it via the associations of these words/ definitions/ lables, this sounds like a textbook example of a parasocial relationship, or a microcosm of what celebrities must experience.
I have a similar experience in my neighbourhood. I live on the corner and have no privacy across my backyard. I spend a lot of time playing with my young kids. Needless to say all the boomers ‘round here know everything about me.
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.
> People who knew my name and would strike up conversations in the grocery store like I knew them at all outside of these conversations.
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.
It is common for people to take offence if they recognise you, but you don’t recognise them. It is not pleasant to unintentionally cause offence when you don’t recognise someone.
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.
I struggle very heavily with remembering faces and especially names. Because of the peculiarities of my situation, if someone walks up to me familiarly I can't tell if they only know me second-hand, or if we actually have had some sort of interaction in the past, and how significant those experiences are to the other person
It can be stressful to not know or remember if I actually know this person some how and navigating through that.
I'm not sure that it's an unreasonable thing for humans (or more generally: communal conscious agents) to work this way. Indeed we should probably just accept it for now and make use of the phenomena as the article suggests by connecting people with more details about others in-authority around them.
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.
Unfortunately such concepts are widely exploited for rather dubious purposes. I'd generally hope that people could learn to separate the informational content of communication from the emotional content of communication. The advertising technique of 'the trusted third-party spokesperson' (independent doctors recommending pharmaceuticals, etc.) relies entirely on this sense of trust and tribal identitarianism.
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.
Exactly this. If you learn that someone is from your same tribe, shares the same experiences, or shares the same values this transmits real information.
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
This is one of the reasons why I have pulled back from social media. In feeds I see a random sample of the most anxious people I grew up with and find myself knowing more about their lives than I do about people I care about. I'd prefer to spend my finite attention on relationships that are actually important to me.
This obviously could allow for a widening misalignment on a deeper level than we can easily observe.
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.
If your hypothesis is that parasocial relationships are not a healthy substitute for social relationships, I think most people would intuitively agree.
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
So to combat falling into parasocial not-really-relationships, we should see their content as not really them, not really indicative of who they are, anything we have to tell ourselves to not feel as if we're connected when we're not. False connection is worse than no connection at all, like believing lies is worse than "I just don't know".
As someone who struggled with and had to ‘first principles’ social skills, I feel this even in many mundane interactions.
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.
> In one set of studies, participants answered three multiple-choice questions about their lives; half then saw their partner’s responses to the same questions and half did not. All participants were then told that their partner was trying to guess their own answers. Participants who saw their partner’s responses believed that this stranger understood them better than those who did not.
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.
Had a friend vent about their parents cutting a phone call off cause the parents were 'having breakfast with friends' and they were about to be on again. on tv. friends == fox & friends.
"without increasing the number of potentially fraught officer–citizen interactions"
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.
> The officers themselves also dropped off cards to local residents containing similar information…The team found that residents of the developments that had received the intervention believed it more likely that local officers would find out about illegal activity than residents of the control areas (though there was no significant effect on residents’ perceptions of how well police officers knew them).
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.
I guess that's why democratic elections work. We believe the elected politician knows us because we know some things about them, even though they have no clue about nearly all of their constituents.
Yeah, that could be it. Alternatively, it could be that their representatives make trustworthy promises to pursue certain political goals and the oppose others. Certainly it is a little of each. In an ideal world, it would be entirely the latter.
When we learn more about a stranger, we feel like they know us better because they do know the most important thing (to them) about us: that we are capable and willing to learn more about them.
I'm not a fan of the "duh, your monkey brain gets everything wrong all the time" vibes that articles like this one tend to give off. The very first sentence already labels this cognitive pattern as a "mistake". It's not a mistake, it's a heuristic. Psychologists would do well to learn the difference between the two. You haven't found a flaw in the brain, you've found a mechanism the brain uses to navigate the world in the absence of unlimited knowledge and cognitive resources.
When you learn about a celebrity and then you assume they know you too, you are clearly making a mistake. And the heuristic probably doesn't work well in the digital age.
But the underlying thought pattern isn't a mistake or flaw. It's a perfectly reasonable baseline assumption that's hardwired into our brains for good reason. When you travel to the Sahara and you assume that it's not going to rain, you will sometimes be mistaken. But that doesn't mean the assumption is a mistake.
But if you see it is raining and you are getting wet (you see the celebrity through the tv and know they can't hear you back), it is likely a mistake to think it isn't raining because you are traveling in the Sahara.
I would say that is still applicable and valid. like any huristic, there is opportunity for abuse, but this isn't new.
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"
Reasonable. But amusingly, I have the additional heuristic that sample size complaints mean that commenters don't understand statistics.
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.
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.