Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (36 page)

Why Are We Getting Less Social?

It shouldn’t be surprising to us that being social is essential to our well-being.
Everything we have learned about the social brain tells
us that we are wired to make and keep social connections, that we feel pain when these connections are threatened, and that our identity, our sense of self, is intimately tied up with the groups we are a part of.
As we’ve seen, our brains naturally gravitate to the social.
Yet as a society we have been gravitating away from all things social.
For thousands of years, we lived in small communities where we knew our neighbors and everyone around us because the communities were highly stable.
Something has changed dramatically in the last century, something that is making us less happy than we used to be—less happy than we could be.

Unfortunately, my own life is pretty illustrative in explaining what has happened to many of us.
I grew up in New Jersey, went to college there, and made a great group of friends.
Then I moved to Massachusetts for graduate school and largely lost contact with my college buddies.
Then I moved to California to become an assistant professor at UCLA.
I lived in West Hollywood, where I made some good friends, but I lived far from campus.
Once Naomi, my future wife, and I got serious, we moved much closer to campus, and I pretty much stopped seeing friends from West Hollywood.
You’ve heard about how bad the traffic is in LA?
Well, it makes you not want to drive eight miles on a Friday night.
Plus, I was a new professor, working my tail off to get ahead like anyone who is new to their profession.
Then Naomi and I got married and had a son, and I really wanted him to have a backyard to kick a ball around in or shoot hoops.
So we bought a house, which led me to take on consulting work on top of my day job.

No need to feel sorry for me—I’m extremely lucky.
I’m married to my best friend in the world and love my family, both immediate and extended.
But when I look back over the choices I have made, apart for the brilliant one where I asked Naomi to marry me, I have made a series of choices that have moved me geographically and emotionally away from friends and have taken time away that could have been spent with loved ones.
Without realizing it, I had moved from being a philosophy major, explicitly eschewing material
pursuits, to an adult pursuing the “American dream.”
Somewhere along the line, the pursuit of happiness got confused with the pursuit of income and career advancement.

As in my own life, materialism in our culture has been growing over time, and this aspiration toward financial success for many of us has come at the cost of our social connections.
We have limited time, and spending more time working means less time socializing.
In 1965, only 45 percent of college freshmen
listed being “very well-off financially” as a top life goal.
At that point, “helping others” and “raising a family” scored higher.
But by 1989, being well-off was at the top of the list, with 75 percent endorsing it.
And this is sobering news because the
more individuals endorse materialism
as a positive life value, the less happy they are with their lives.

Back to School

Increasing the social connections in our lives is probably the single easiest way to enhance our well-being.
But a growing addiction to materialistic values is taking us in the wrong direction, causing us to sacrifice time and energy from our social lives to the pursuit of financial success.
I think it’s safe to say that the government and corporate organizations that run our country have little interest in scaling back materialism—it grows the tax base and adds jobs, as more people are needed to make new things that people want to buy.
After 9/11, President Bush’s advice to the American public was to “go shopping.”
From the perspective of well-being, the government’s interest in increased consumerism is largely a Ponzi scheme—it promises increased happiness but doesn’t deliver.
Regardless of our take on materialism, society should be deeply concerned about how we turn around our march toward social isolation.
When we’re socially connected, we are happier, healthier, and better citizens.

In the 1950s, the U.S.
government took on numerous initiatives
to build the physical infrastructure of the nation.
Best known is the Federal-Aid Highway Act signed into law by President Eisenhower, which devoted over $400 billion (in current dollars) to the creation of more than 40,000 miles of interstate highways.
This investment has been repaid many times over in the form of new economic activity.
When the Great Recession hit in 2008, lawmakers quickly drew up plans to rebuild the nation’s now crumbling infrastructure.
Roads and bridges are in dangerous disrepair.
Our railroad system is far behind the rail lines of many other modern nations.
Rebuilding the infrastructure would create jobs and ultimately spur new economic activity.

I would argue that what we need is a new stimulus to rebuild the social structure of our society, as well.
To be fair, the government does make major investments in social programs.
But these are safety nets, rather than programs to increase social connection.
Programs like Social Security and Medicaid provide some measure of financial and physical security to those who are less able to fend for themselves.
But these are not investments in enhancing the social lives of all citizens.
Yet such investments would likely be repaid through higher productivity, better health, and lower crime.
Unfortunately, because social connections are less concrete than a new highway, it may be hard for people to rally behind them.
Still, we know now that our brains are wired for social integration and that this wiring permeates virtually every aspect of our lives.
Imagine if the president created a Council of Social Advisors to parallel his Council of Economic Advisors.
Bill Gates has been convincing the world’s billionaires to donate much of their wealth to supporting worthy causes such as ending polio.
What if they invested a little bit in social well-being?

Many of us can remember back to when we lived in a dormitory, freshman year of college.
Think about the extraordinary feat of social connection that happens on dorm floors each year.
Incoming students arrive at college in a socially vulnerable state, often with no pre-existing friends at the school.
Dorm floors are ground zero
for early social connecting in college.
Many of the people on each floor will make close friends with one another, and some of these friendships will last a lifetime.
Apart from the military, I can’t think of many other institutions in our lives that are as conducive to the creation of social bonds.

Approximately a third of all Americans live in apartments
, which in most cases are physically similar to college dorms.
Yet living in an apartment feels nothing like living in a dorm.
So what is it that colleges get right in how they set up their on-campus communities?
It certainly isn’t the food or the luxurious size of the dorm rooms.
First, I think, they get the physical space right from a social perspective.
When I was an undergrad at Rutgers, each dorm floor devoted about 20 percent of its space to areas for social gathering.
Dorms have couches with cable TV, and these days, some have videogame systems as well.
I have lived in several apartment buildings in my life, and I have never seen one with any meaningful common space devoted to floor-specific socializing.
Some have a sizable lobby, but they are not set up for informal socializing.
Open spaces on each floor work in part because people can hear what’s going on on the floor or in the building, and they can casually walk by and check it out.
Of course, the space would need certain amenities to attract people to it.
People might claim they head there for the large-screen TV or free Wi-Fi, but they would probably stay for the socializing.

The reason colleges get this right and apartment buildings don’t is that they have different motives.
Colleges are concerned with having a vibrant community; apartment builders are concerned primarily with profit and the costs per square foot.
But as a society, shouldn’t we too be concerned with having vibrant communities?
Given that 100 million people live in apartments in the United States, structural solutions to improving their social lives would seem like a good investment for all of us.
Couldn’t we, for example, offer tax breaks to those who agree to build one less apartment
per floor and leave the space open for socializing?
In other words, doesn’t it make sense to take what we know about the value of social connection and use this to guide how a portion of our taxes is used?

Colleges have other tricks up their sleeves to encourage socializing.
For many schools, students fill out profiles about their likes and dislikes, which are then used to pair up roommates.
While this doesn’t apply to apartments directly, this technique could be used to match incoming tenants with someone else in the building who has some similar preferences or is at a similar lifestage (that is, raising a newborn, just retired, and so on).
Last, but not least, each college dorm floor usually has an older student living rent free in return for overseeing the floor and creating a series of social activities.
These begin with “get to know each other” events at the beginning of each year and then move on to things like movie night, poker games, and board games night.
Students wanted to socialize, but didn’t always know how to get the ball rolling, and that’s where the dorm advisors come in.

Throughout our childhoods and young adulthoods, our social lives are curated by others.
Couldn’t we find a way to replicate that in our adult communities as well?
Why don’t we have someone on each apartment floor designated to create social activities?
In a sizable apartment building, it wouldn’t be hard to raise $1,000 per floor per month, taking a sliver of the rent from each apartment.
This money could be split between funds to support the activities and funds that would be used as payment to the social organizer on the floor.

In the neighborhood where I live, we have an organization of property owners that typically serves two functions.
The first is political, fighting for various things like more police cars on our streets.
But the second is informational.
There is an Internet listserv that allows residents to ask questions like “Does anyone want to buy my tickets to the Lakers game next week?”
or “Anyone know a good plumber?”
Why not extend that concept further?
For example,
close off streets one evening each weekend so that communities can use the streets themselves to set up a variety of social events.

Snacks and Surrogates

Knowing what we know about the brain’s wiring for social connection and how social connection relates to well-being, shouldn’t we look to change our schedules to work less and socialize more?
Research suggests that when people think about money, they become motivated to work more and socialize less.
But
when people are prompted to think about time
, the reverse happens; people become motivated to work less and socialize more.

People also find ways to extract some of the benefits of socializing even when there is no one around to be social with.
Social psychologists Wendi Gardner and Cindy Pickett suggest that people can extract some of the
benefits of socializing through
social snacking
.
Just thinking about or writing about a loved one can provide some of the benefits of face-to-face social relationships.
Looking at a picture of a loved one can offer some of the benefits of traditional social connections.

Social support and social connection can buffer us against the stress of difficult moments in our lives.
In one study that Naomi Eisenberger and I ran, when we delivered a painful stimulus to women,
they reported the pain to be less painful
when they were holding their boyfriend’s hand.
Surprisingly, when the girlfriend was merely shown a picture of her boyfriend, the pain was still reduced.
In fact, the picture was twice as effective in reducing the women’s pain as actual handholding.

In other words, a picture of a loved one is a strong enough social reward to help overcome some kinds of distress.
Inspired by our work, Nikon recently partnered with the Red Cross in Germany to bring
digital picture frames to people in hospitals
so that they
would be able to see pictures of their loved ones during their hospital stay.

Television is the number one leisure activity in the United States and Europe, consuming more than half of our free time.
We generally think of television as a way to relax, tune out, and escape from our troubles for a bit each day.
While this is true, there is increasing evidence that
we are more motivated to tune in to our favorite shows
and characters when we are feeling lonely or have a greater need for social connection.
Television watching does satisfy these social needs to some extent, at least in the short run.
Unfortunately,
it is also likely to “crowd out”
other activities that produce more sustainable social contributions to our social well-being.
The more television we watch, the less likely we are to volunteer our time or to spend time with people in our social networks.
In other words, the more time we make for
Friends
, the less time we have for friends in real life.

Over the last two decades, the Internet has increasingly been challenging television for our leisure time.
As with television, people have turned to the Internet to fulfill their social needs.
Unlike television, which is a passive activity, the Internet offers endless opportunities to actively connect with other people.
Although people avail themselves of this online social mecca, there have been major questions about its utility.
Does more time spent online lead to better well-being the way offline social connection does?
And how does time spent online affect our social connections in the “real world”?