You think you can read a room. A new study says you might catch the happy people but miss those who are suffering.
Strangers beat chance at reading a person's life satisfaction and positive emotions after a 60-second video. The cues influencing accurate guesses are voice volume and physical attractiveness.
Do We Know How Happy Strangers Are? Accuracy in Well-Being Judgments at Zero AcquaintanceThe setup is simple: Adults filled out measures of life satisfaction, frequency of positive emotions, and frequency of negative emotions. Each of them was then videotaped for roughly 60 seconds while introducing themselves and talking freely, the way you would if you were seated next to a stranger at the start of a long night and someone asked, What's the worst hostel story you've got?
Four research assistants who never met these people watched the videos and rated each person's well-being using the same measures—excellent use of informant reports and observation methods, by the way. The question:Strangers were significantly better than chance at reading life satisfaction and significantly better than chance at reading positive emotions. But they were terrible at reading negative emotions. That third finding is why this study deserves a big audience, before everyone runs off to babble with Uber drivers.
When the authors looked at which cues were driving the accurate judgments, two mechanisms popped out.. Kind of a wacky one-two combo. The volume at which a stranger speaks is being treated as a proxy for how satisfied they are with their entire life. So is whether you find them attractive.
These are two cues that have nothing directly to do with the inner experience of the person being judged. You are not an FBI agent assessing the danger of a guy in an airport with shaky hands, eyes darting left to right. You are locked onto decibel levels and a jawline.
It reminds me of the lousy proxies people lean on when they choose romantic partners, such as whether they return the shopping cart or not.as a psychologist means enjoying people's pet theories about what makes a good person and a suitable partner, and far more interesting, the tests they use to sort who falls into which category. The reason negative emotions were unreadable starts to make sense once you see how silly and intuitive this approach todoes not influence your hip-to-waist ratio or your bone structure.
The slow, exhausting forms of unhappiness that occupy whole years of a person's life sit behind the eyes and do not broadcast through the behavioral cues that A psychiatrist with a 15-minute intake is running a slightly longer version of the one-minute thin-slice judgment, and the patient who walks in mumbling and average-looking is sending questionable signals at best, which means the doctor has little to write down except a prescription. A jury sees a defendant who is boisterous and clean-shaven and decides he looks like a man worthy of a fine future.
The dentist asks how you're doing while her hands are in your mouth, registers that you sound fine, and goes home unaware that her last patient of the day was three weeks out from contemplating. We have built large parts of our social infrastructure around the kind of brief, in-person encounter where the cues that get through carry the least predictive value for what we are actually trying to learn about somebody.
The clinical interview, the bail hearing, the teeth cleaning, offer weaker windows than assumed. People decline social invitations because they predict the experience will be too painful for them and for everyone else. When they do show up, they assume the friend across the table is doing about as well as they appear, which means a private struggle reads as fine.
That is what produces the tragic false negatives.for socializing, all of it rests on the assumption that you already know what's going on with the humans you'd skip strolls with. The science discussed here is a demonstration that you suck at this more than you think.. Run the experiment and you find, almost every time, that conversations turn out longer, warmer, and more meaningful than people expected.
This study sharpens the edge, because it tells you that half of the well-being picture stays invisible after a thin-slice observation, even when you're convinced you're socially astute. Talking is how you gather the data that thin slices systematically hide. A few weeks ago I went to a $5 Friday comedy show by myself, sat down with an old-fashioned, and noticed the venue was playing"The Becoming" on the loudspeaker before the lights went down.
This is not a popular track but it's one of my favorites, so I was entranced. Ecstatic. Open to whatever the universe might bring, ready to hand over my last Italian rainbow cookie as an offering. A guy a couple of seats over was alone too, waiting on his partner to come back with drinks, and he had the kind of slumped, glassy expression I would have read as miserable if I'd been running the Choi-Diener-Oishi mental arithmetic.
I said something, sort of in his direction but not quite to him, about how many memories this song was dragging up. It was a comment a person could ignore. Instead he started telling me about the first time he heard the album, what he was doing, who he was with. We talked through the whole pre-show, and when his partner came back she joked that we should sit on each other's laps for the rest of the night.
If I'd diagnosed him from across the room and trusted my brain, I'd have walked out thinking I spent the evening near human slop, when what I did was sit one Nine Inch Nails song away from somebody about to become my friend. Choi, H., Diener, E., & Oishi, S. . Do We Know How Happy Strangers Are? Accuracy in Well-Being Judgments at Zero Acquaintance.
The Best Ways to Begin AgainSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back?
Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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