Shared Experiences

Day 123: One thing I learned today…

Erica Boothby is a Cornell University researcher and expert on shared experiences. It is noted that our instinct to share kicks in automatically from the time we are young. Think of a baby or toddler continuing trying to get a parents attention and saying “look”.

An interesting study was conducted with infants and shared experiences by Mike Tomasello.

The study included having a strange looking puppet or other objects pop out of the wall and the infants noticed it and pointed at it. The parents pretended not to see it at first.

Varied how parents reacted once the child started to point at the object

Group 1- looked at the child and the puppet/object

Group 2- looked just at the puppet/object

The objective was not for the parents to look but the actual act of sharing the experience. Over time, those babies whose parents didn’t share the experience stopped pointing.

Erica Boothby also studied shared experiences and conducted an experiment with individuals and chocolate.

Chocolate tasting:

Group 1- Shared experience- tasting chocolate at the same time

Group 2- Not shared experience - 1 person tasted chocolate, other person was looking at something else

The chocolates throughout the study were identical, however participant thought they were different and rated them. Those who shared the experience with someone else rated the chocolate higher than those who did not (even though it was the same chocolate).

Sharing an event with others ef

fects us more than we may think. DO you prefer to share experiences with others?

Source:

Liszkowski, U., Carpenter, M., Henning, A., Striano, T., & Tomasello, M. (2004). Twelve‐month‐olds point to share attention and interest. Developmental science, 7(3), 297-307.

Boothby, E. J., Clark, M. S., & Bargh, J. A. (2014). Shared experiences are amplified. Psychological science, 25(12), 2209-2216.

The Happiness Lab - 5. Caring What You’re Sharing