Pluralistic Ignorance: Blaming The Messenger

Some new research on the wonderfully named ‘pluralistic ignorance’ shows that people underestimate other’s negative emotions. In a perverse aspect of the ‘grass is always greener’ phenomenon, we seem to think that others are happier than we are.

However, the author of a Slate article that starts with this research takes a few giant steps, following on the thesis of Sherry Turkle’s new Alone Together, that social networks are causing us to be unhappy.

Libby Copeland, The Anti-Social Network

“Misery Has More Company Than People Think,” a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends’ reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others’ attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. “They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life,” he told me.

The human habit of overestimating other people’s happiness is nothing new, of course. Jordan points to a quote by Montesquieu: “If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” But social networking may be making this tendency worse. Jordan’s research doesn’t look at Facebook explicitly, but if his conclusions are correct, it follows that the site would have a special power to make us sadder and lonelier. By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people’s lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles’ heel of human nature. And women—an especially unhappy bunch of late—may be especially vulnerable to keeping up with what they imagine is the happiness of the Joneses.

In one of the Stanford studies, Jordan and his fellow researchers asked 80 freshmen to report whether they or their peers had recently experienced various negative and positive emotional events. Time and again, the subjects underestimated how many negative experiences (“had a distressing fight,” “felt sad because they missed people”) their peers were having. They also overestimated how much fun (“going out with friends,” “attending parties”) these same peers were having. In another study, the researchers found a sample of 140 Stanford students unable to accurately gauge others’ happiness even when they were evaluating the moods of people they were close to—friends, roommates and people they were dating. And in a third study, the researchers found that the more students underestimated others’ negative emotions, the more they tended to report feeling lonely and brooding over their own miseries. This is correlation, not causation, mind you; it could be that those subjects who started out feeling worse imagined that everyone else was getting along just fine, not the other way around. But the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense.

As does the idea that Facebook might aggravate this tendency. Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one’s assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies. We are playing with a new puppy. We are smiling in pictures (or, if we are moody, we are artfully moody.) Blandness will not do, and with some exceptions, sad stuff doesn’t make the cut, either. The site’s very design—the presence of a “Like” button, without a corresponding “Hate” button—reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring. (No one will “Like” your update that the new puppy died, but they may “Like” your report that the little guy was brave up until the end.)

Any parent who has posted photos and videos of her child on Facebook is keenly aware of the resulting disconnect from reality, the way chronicling parenthood this way creates a story line of delightfully misspoken words, adorably worn hats, dancing, blown kisses. Tearful falls and tantrums are rarely recorded, nor are the stretches of pure, mind-blowing tedium. We protect ourselves, and our kids, this way; happiness is impersonal in a way that pain is not. But in the process, we wind up contributing to the illusion that kids are all joy, no effort.

Facebook is “like being in a play. You make a character,” one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together. Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this “presentation anxiety,” and suggests that the site’s element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves. (The book’s broader theory is that technology, despite its promises of social connectivity, actually makes us lonelier by preventing true intimacy.)

Ok, so the researchers may have been sparked to do their study based on thinking about Facebook, but remember: the study did not involve Facebook at all. It was research that shows people underestimate the degree to which others have negative emotions (hence the wonderful ‘pluralistic ignorance’ that is one of the psychological keywords for the research).

It seems that we are socially blind in this way, to varying extents. And who would be surprised to learn that people naturally talk about the sunshine and flowers in life, and leave out the mud puddles and mosquitoes? In general, isn’t seeing through that social fog a part of maturity? A sort of cultural wisdom?

Nonetheless, Copeland goes on to connect this work with Sherry Turkle’s new anti-social bandwagon. Turkle is one of the newest social web naysayers, making the case that the social relationships we are involved with online are illegitimate and false, and they keep us from ‘real’ relationships, by which she means unmediated offline interactions. (Note: I have yet to read her book, but, without being overly dismissive, let me suggest that I have heard these arguments before.)

I submit that the real message to take away from the research that hypothetically forms the basis for this article is not that Facebook and other social tools make us unhappy, but that we make ourselves unhappy when we believe that others are happier than us. Blaming Facebook is like throwing the telephone out the window when it brings us bad news. Or, as Shakespeare has Cassius say in Julius Caesar:

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’