When watching a film with a friend, have you ever wondered why you feel agitated when they suddenly start doing something on their phone? Watching a film together is not an interdependent collaborative activity – watching the film alone is just as easy. Nevertheless, it feels like in that moment a social connection has been severed. Although we usually do not think about this much, in the bigger picture of the evolution of social bonding in human and non-human animals, this phenomenon is part of a remarkable pattern: Humans seem to be the only animals who create social activities centered around sharing experiences solely for the purpose of bonding with others. So how does the way in which we share experiences with others facilitate the unique ways in which we connect with others?
Before my PhD, I started exploring this question in adults. We showed that even minimally shared experiences in which participants merely jointly attended to something together caused them to feel closer to their partner sitting next to them relative to a partner who was consistently attending elsewhere (Wolf et al., 2015). But to truly understand how fundamental this psychology was to our species, I was convinced it was necessary to study this social bonding mechanism in young children as well as our most closely related evolutionary cousins, the great apes.
In my early dissertation projects, we found that even 2.5 year old children were already more motivated to approach and interact with a novel adult after that adult had watched a video with them as opposed to the adult sitting next to them reading their own book. They did so in natural interactions in which the experimenter was allowed to acknowledge the child’s joint attention bid, as well as during interactions in which the child was merely observing the experimenter going through a similar experience (Wolf & Tomasello, 2020a).
Surprisingly, subsequent research in great apes showed that chimpanzees and bonobos also approach a novel experimenter faster when this experimenter had watched a video with them, while they also spend more time in the same part of the room with a conspecific when they had watched a video together as opposed to individually (Wolf & Tomasello, 2019). Although this revealed a remarkable and previously unknown aspect of great ape psychology, it also meant that we were still not sure why humans, but not other animals are so motivated to create social bonding activities centered around shared experiences.
A comparative follow-up study, however, revealed a subtle, but potentially crucial difference between how humans and chimpanzees share experiences: When we instructed experimenters to engage in communicative eye contact at the start of the video to create common ground about their experience being shared (i.e., both the experimenter and the participant now knew that both of them knew that they were watching the video together), children, but not apes were more motivated to approach and interact with the experimenter than when the experimenters did not attempt to create common ground about the video being shared, but made eye contact unrelated to the shared experience later in the procedure (Wolf & Tomasello, 2020b). This suggests that humans engage in their shared experiences differently than other great apes, thereby transforming the way in which we connect and bond with others, even at an early age.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we then also became interested in how well this social bonding mechanism operates in the context of video mediated social environments (Wolf & Dotson, under review). Our results suggest that digital environments, such as digital classrooms and workspaces, might actually interfere with our capacity to socially bond with others through shared experiences. Finally, we also explored the darker side of sharing mental states in the formation of social bonds by examining the development of the Liking Gap: the tendency to like others more than we think others like us back after interacting with them. We found that the Liking Gap emerges around age 5 and becomes more intense between 5-11 years (Wolf et al., 2021).
As an assistant professor at the Social Connection Lab at Utrecht University, my students and I are currently continuing our work in these areas. For example, we are running experiments to examine whether children’s capacity to connect with others through joint attention also impacts their propensity to engage in prosocial behavior. In addition, we are also collecting data for a cross cultural study on the Liking Gap in Chinese and Dutch children. Ultimately, our goal is to improve our understanding of how humans’ capacity to understand each other and share experiences in unique ways has shaped our social lives throughout our evolutionary history and still impacts children’s social relationships, and thus mental and physical wellbeing, on a daily basis.
Being awarded the APA Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology for my dissertation “Connecting Through Shared Cognition: Social Consequences and Psychological Underpinnings of Sharing Experiences with Others” is not only a great honor but has also strengthened my conviction that these questions are important and warrant further pursuit. Finally, on a personal note, I would also like to dedicate this award to my father, an unrelenting supporter of my research (sending me newspaper articles about ape research wherever he could find them), who was diagnosed with severe illness the week before I handed in my dissertation and sadly passed away a little over a year later. Although losing him left an emptiness that can never be filled, I feel very fortunate that I was still able to share and celebrate this award with him. Because in the face of losing those closest to us, we most fully realize the importance of sharing and celebrating experiences such as these with the people we care about most.
References
Wolf, W. & Dotson, K. (under review). Social bonding through visual joint attention is not effective in online video mediated interactions.
Wolf, W., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). Joint attention, shared goals, and social bonding. British Journal of Psychology, 107(2), 322–337.
Wolf, W., Nafe, A., & Tomasello, M. (2021). The Development of the Liking Gap: Children Older Than 5 Years Think That Partners Evaluate Them Less Positively Than They Evaluate Their Partners. Psychological Science, 095679762098075.
Wolf, W., & Tomasello, M. (2019). Visually attending to a video together facilitates great ape social closeness. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286(19087).
Wolf, W., & Tomasello, M. (2020a). Watching a video together creates social closeness between children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 189, 12.
Wolf, W., & Tomasello, M. (2020b). Human children, but not great apes, become socially closer by sharing an experience in common ground. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 199, 104930.