3BI: the joy of anticipation, phone psychology, and the majority illusion
Hello and happy (Good) Friday!
I got back from a great vacation in Saint Lucia this week feeling rested and energized to get a new newsletter out.
Soufriere, St Lucia
Anticipation brings happiness
We’re all in a pretty good mood today because it’s Friday. Even though it’s a workday, we feel the happiness of the weekend approaching. Interestingly, we tend to feel better on Fridays than we do on Sundays, when we actually have the day off.
This is because, in many cases, the anticipation of something brings us more joy than the thing itself. From the great book Happy Money:
Researchers have suggested that we experience a “wrinkle in time,” such that events that lie in the future provoke more emotion than identical events in the past.
…
In a study of more than one thousand people in the Netherlands, vacationers exhibited a bigger happiness boost in the weeks before their trip, rather than in the weeks afterward. And people generate even more emotional images of Christmas and New Year’s when they imagine these events in November than when they look back in January on their actual experiences.
Practically, this means it’s important to have things to look forward to. Ensuring we consistently have vacations, social gatherings, and other enjoyable activities on the calendar allows us to reap the benefits of anticipation regularly.
The benefits of putting our phone away
One benefit of my vacation was the big reduction in screen time. Instead of spending all day in front of a computer, phone, or TV, I was mostly on a beach with a book or at a restaurant enjoying food and company.
It’s relatively common knowledge that checking our phones all day isn’t ideal, but some new research suggests that it isn’t just the activity of being on the device, but its mere presence.
From BBC:
In one recent study, for example, researchers asked participants to either put their phones next to them so they were visible (like on a desk), nearby and out of sight (like in a bag or pocket), or in another room. Participants then completed a series of tasks to test their abilities to process and remember information, their problem-solving, and their focus.
They were found to perform far better when their phones were in another room instead of nearby – whether visible, powered on or not. That held true even though most of the participants claimed not to be consciously thinking about their devices.
The mere proximity of a phone, it seems, contributes to "brain drain." Our brains may be subconsciously hard at work in inhibiting the desire to check our phones, or constantly monitoring the environment to see if we should check our phone (eg, waiting for a notification). Either way, this diverted attention can make doing anything else more difficult. The only "fix," the researchers found, was putting the device in a different room entirely.
So, it seems like a good idea for our wellbeing to put our phone far away from us occasionally.
The Majority Illusion
“The internet isn’t real life” is a phrase commonly used to remind those of us who spend too much time online that what we see there isn’t typically an accurate reflection of the real world. It turns out that there’s a scientific name for this phenomena: the Majority Illusion. From MIT:
This is the phenomenon in which an individual can observe a behavior or attribute in most of his or her friends, even though it is rare in the network as a whole.
They illustrate this illusion with a theoretical example: a set of 14 nodes linked up to form a small world network, just like a real social network (see picture above). They then color three of these nodes and count how many of the remaining nodes link to them in a single step.
Two versions of this setup are shown above. In the left-hand example, the uncolored nodes see more than half of their neighbors as colored. In the right-hand example, this is not true for any of the uncolored nodes.
But here’s the thing: the structure of the network is the same in both cases. The only thing that changes is the nodes that are colored.
This is the majority illusion—the local impression that a specific attribute is common when the global truth is entirely different.
Basically, this means that a particular opinion or belief can seem much more widely held than it actually is when a small group of individuals with a particular viewpoint are highly vocal and visible. Those louder examples occupy more of our attention and memory, leading us to overestimate the prevalence of their viewpoint in the larger population.
This is especially prevalent and impactful in social and political movements:
“The effect is largest in the political blogs network, where as many as 60%–70% of nodes will have a majority active neighbours, even when only 20% of the nodes are active,” they say. In other words, the majority illusion can be used to trick the population into believing something that is not true.
Since humans are strongly influenced by social proof, such misperceptions can end up influencing our own opinions and behaviors.
Have a great weekend.