I keep reading about how detrimental social media usage is, with people avoiding face-to-face interaction and feeling inferior when they see everyone else looking gorgeous and having fabulous lives. Would you recommend taking regular breaks from social media?
--Instagrammer Girl
Put on 10 pounds recently? No problem! There's surely an app that'll stick your head on the bod of some 22-year-old actress who works out 13 hours a day and subsists on Nicorette gum and bottles of air blessed by monks.
Social media is often seen as Satan with cat memes. It gets blamed for everything from eating disorders to the decline in the bee population. But consider that how a person uses social media can shape how it affects them.
Psychologist Sarah M. Hanley and her colleagues note that there are two different kinds of social media users: active and passive. Active social media users create content and communicate with others. Passive users browse newsfeeds and posts without commenting. They're basically read-only info consumers.
For both active and passive users, taking a vacation from social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram is a thing lately -- the digital version of cutting out sugar (at least temporarily). But is it actually a good thing?
Hanley and her colleagues blocked research participants' access to social media sites for a week. They figured this would benefit passive users -- the silent observers -- giving them a break from the noxious barrage of how rich, beautiful, and successful everyone else seems to be.
In fact, passive users' well-being wasn't really affected positively or negatively during their social media exile. However, active users ended up being kind of bummed (or, in researcher terms, they had diminished "positive affect" -- a decrease in positive, pleasant moods, and feelings).
This makes sense, because using these sites in an engaged way -- when, say, a mob isn't coming after you because you like your coffee "wrong" -- can be a positive thing, increasing social connection. So when active users pull the plug on their social media, they separate themselves not only from the negatives but also from the social and emotional benefits of engaging with others.
In short, social media is a tool -- same as an ax, which you can use to cut wood for a lovely campfire or to chase terrified teenagers through the forest. You can choose to take an emotionally healthy approach to social media: be an active participant instead of a passive one by posting stuff or at least participating in conversations, even in small ways. If somebody's barrage of fabulosity gets you down, you might remind yourself of all the reality that gets cropped out -- a la, "Here's a pic of my boyfriend and me in Cabo for two weeks...during the 1 minute and 37.6 seconds we weren't fighting. #Cabocouples #grateful #livingmybestlife"
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
My newly divorced business colleague keeps asking for my hot friends' phone numbers. I think this is highly inappropriate. If things go badly, I'm stuck in the middle! I keep hinting that I don't think it's cool for him to put me in this position, but he doesn't seem to be getting the message. Help.
--Stuck
It's so annoying when your colleagues leave their mind-reading helmets at home.
In such cases, there is a way to get your message across, and it's by directly expressing it -- in words. This is not exactly a mystery of the universe I'm revealing here. But like many women, you probably have a tendency to default to hinting and hoping for compliance.
This looks like a flaw in female psychology -- until you hold it up to an evolutionary lens, as the late psychologist Anne Campbell did in looking at sex differences in assertiveness. Campbell explained that being direct -- unambiguously stating what you want -- can make another person angry and lead them to retaliate, possibly physically. A woman who is physically harmed might not be able to get pregnant or fulfill her role as her children's primary caretaker, making her a genetic dead end. So, women especially have been driven to protect themselves and their reproductive parts. Campbell believes this led to the evolution of female indirectness -- not as flaw, but as a feature.
The thing is, the evolved emotions driving this behavior aren't your master, and you don't have to obey them. You simply have to be willing to pay the price of rebelling: feeling a little uncomfortable when you draw outside the evolved emotional lines. This just takes telling the guy "no mas." He's free to look up friends of yours on social media and contact them there if he wants, but he needs to stop asking you for their numbers. You're down with bringing in more clients, but you draw the line at acting as the corporate recruiter for his penis.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
August 20, 2019I'm a 36-year-old single man. I see buying a woman dinner as a nice part of courting. Lately, however, women keep pretending to be interested in me only to vanish after I've taken them out for an expensive dinner. How can I avoid women who just want to use me as a meal ticket?
--Duped
A first date should be an opportunity to get acquainted -- with you, that is, not wine from Napoleon's private stock and steak from a cow that attended French boarding school.
Welcome to the "foodie call" -- a woman dating a man she isn't attracted to in order to get a free meal. Social psychologist Brian Collisson and his colleagues surveyed heterosexual women to see whether they'd deceived men to get free eats. Though the women "generally" rated foodie calls as unacceptable, about a quarter to a third of the women they polled reported engaging in a foodie call.
Helpfully, Collison and his team found that there's a particular type that tends to milk men out of meals, and it's women who scored high in the "dark triad." This is a three-pack of antisocial personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (named for Niccolo Machiavelli, author of "The Prince").
Machiavellianism involves a tendency to manipulate and deceive others for personal gain. Psychopathy is marked by a lack of empathy and remorse. The researchers note that people who score high in it are unlikely to consider their date's perspective and "the intense negative emotions" that come from being led on. And finally, there's narcissism. Narcissists are self-adoring, self-focused, entitled creeps who tend to be "socially adept." ("All the better to separate a man and his disposable income, my dear!")
As for how to filter out the gourmet grifters, I always advise that first dates (and maybe even second dates) should be three things: cheap, short, and local. I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" that you should meet for happy hour drinks or coffee for an hour or two -- at most. "This helps keep things from going too fast (a big source of misery and resentment)." Additionally, "If a date turns nightmarish, it will at least be a Hobbesian nightmare: nasty and brutish but also short." Finally, and more to the point of your question, it's pretty hard to feel taken for a ride on a coffee date: "Man, did she ever play me for that double decaf latte!"
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I'm on Twitter, and occasionally, I'll tweet something seemingly innocuous and then have dozens or even hundreds of enraged strangers attack me with ugly tweets. What's the best response when this happens?
--Besieged
You can take the careful approach on social media, staying away from hot-button topics like politics and animal rights -- only to get a beatdown from a Twitter mob for your #totalitarian!!! #whitenationalist!!! aversion to aftermarket eyelashes on car headlights.
It turns out that pile-ons by Twitter mobs are often less about content (differences of opinion) than about coalition-building -- though the haters brandishing the virtual flaming pitchforks probably aren't conscious of this.
A growing body of evidence supports evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides' theory that humans have a "coalitional psychology." They explain that "because everything can be taken from a powerless individual or group," we seem to have evolved a motivation to band together and work as a unit to "enhance, defend or repair" our group's status. Basically, it's in-group versus out-group, us versus them.
Not surprisingly, the common-enemy thing turns out to be big for group bonding (social glue through collective hating). Outrage functions as a "group-mobilizing resource," notes Tooby, triggering the mob to go off on the poor out-group person who dared express an idea the group is opposed to.
Because outrage is emotionally-driven, and because it's so often coalition-energizing, there's no reasoning with the members of the mob coming after you: "But...you're misunderstanding what I meant!" In fact, defending yourself in any way usually fuels the fire. Every tweet you put out there can be turned into something foul and horrible that you supposedly believe.
Often, the best approach is to go into your settings and "lock" your Twitter profile for a while so only followers you've approved can communicate with you. You can turn off notifications and block everyone who's awful to you. And you can also take a break from Twitter until the mob moves on to their next victim, someone who's tweeted something truly repugnant, such as, "I don't get the big deal about LaCroix" -- only to have thousands of strangers from around the globe demanding their death.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
August 13, 2019I'm a married lesbian working on having another baby with my fab wife. My new best friend is an attractive straight girl who lives in another state. We talk and text every day. It isn't sexual or romantic at all, but my friend gets me in a way that, I'm sorry to say, my wife does not. My wife seems jealous. I've noticed her moping around when I'm on the phone and sometimes rolling her eyes when I'm laughing with my friend. How can I reassure her without giving up my new friend?
--Concerned
Spouses can't meet each other's every need -- and shouldn't be expected to. Like, if you're doubled over in pain, you don't just hand your wife some dishwashing gloves and a knife and be all, "Kitchen-floor appendectomy, babe?"
Still, it makes sense that your wife is getting all green monster-y. Human emotions, including jealousy, are a tool chest for solving the mating and survival problems that have kept popping up throughout human history.
Jealousy is a guard-dog emotion, rising up automatically when we sense that our partnership might be threatened -- like by an attractive rival moving in on our boo. Research by evolutionary psychologist David Buss finds that our jealousy, in turn, triggers mate-retention behaviors, such as going around all hangdog mopeypants to try to guilt our partner into spending less time with their sparkly new friend.
Now, it seems like you could just reason with your wife: "Come on...my friend's fiercely hetero, she lives in another state, and I'm having another baby with you." However, though we each have the ability to reason, reasoning takes effort, while emotion comes up automatically, without mental elbow grease. So it turns out that emotion does a lot of our decision-making, and then we dress it up as reason after the fact (maybe like a little Socrates action figure).
Your best bet is be extra loving to your wife -- basically to lovey-dovey her off the ledge. Psychologist Brooke C. Feeney's research on the "dependency paradox" finds that the more an insecure partner feels they can count on their partner for love and comforting the less fearful and clingy they tend to be.
In other words, you should consistently go a little overboard in showing affection, like by sending your wife frequent random texts ("in supermarket & thinking about how much i love u"), caressing her face, doing little sweet things. Basically, stop just short of boring her to death with how much you love her. This, in turn, should make her more likely to yawn about your friendship than go all junior prosecutor: "Did you just shave your legs for that phone call?!"
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
My male neighbor was married to a wonderful woman for 15 years. She died, and he was grieving heavily for several months, telling my husband and me she was the love of his life and he didn't "know how to do life" without her, etc. Well, six months later, he was dating, and in less than a year, he's engaged to somebody new! I'm beginning to wonder if all his "I'm so grief-stricken" was just for show.
--Irate
The way you see it, he went through some Stages of Grief: 1) Wow, this is terrible and life-shattering. 2) Boobs!
However, it isn't surprising that you're "irate" at what you perceive to be a suspiciously speedy recovery. Evolutionary psychologist Bo Winegard and his colleagues believe grief evolved to be, among other things, a form of advertising. "Prolonged and costly" grief signals a person's "propensity" to develop deep emotional attachments to others. This, in turn, suggests they can be trusted as a friend, colleague, or romantic partner.
The reality is, there are individual differences in how people respond to loss that don't always square with widely held beliefs about how grief is "supposed" to work. These beliefs, explains grief researcher George Bonanno, "tend to create rigid parameters for 'proper' behavior that do not match what most people go through." They end up fostering doubt and suspicion about what's actually successful coping. "When we cast suspicion on a bereaved person just because we think she coped with death too well or got on with her life too quickly, we only make her loss more difficult to bear."
Understanding this, maybe you can try to be happy for the guy and support him in his new relationship. Don't assume that his finding new love means he's forgotten his late wife or no longer misses her. Consider, as Bonanno observes, that if somebody had a wonderful relationship, they may feel an acute void and long to have the wonderfulness back. And to be fair, there was some passage of time here. It's not like the guy was all up in his phone at the funeral, drying his tears in between swiping right on Tinder.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I was talking with this guy whom I've known for over six years who lives a plane ride away. It was late at night on a weekend, and he was saying all this mushy sexy stuff and how he wanted to fly me out to his city, blah, blah, blah. Afterward, he never called or texted again. It's been weeks now. He's done this before -- come on really hot and heavy and then disappeared. And he doesn't drink or do drugs, so that isn't an explanation. Why do men do this?
--Feeling Dumb For Believing...Again
Well, on the upside, he isn't afraid to express his feelings. On the downside, if you're like many women, you prefer your relationships long-form -- more Nicholas Sparks' "The Notebook" than 3M's "The Post-it Note."
You aren't the only one on these calls who buys into everything the guy says he has in store for you (and no, I'm not suggesting there's an FBI agent listening in from a "cable company" van). While this guy is on the phone with you, chances are he believes what he's telling you -- which is to say, deception has a brother, and it's self-deception.
Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers defines self-deception as "the active misrepresentation of reality to the conscious mind." As for how the self can end up being "both the deceiver and the deceived," Trivers and fellow evolutionary researcher William von Hippel explain that our mind seems to have "information-processing biases" that "favor welcome over unwelcome information" in a way that reflects our goals. (Think rose-colored horse blinders.)
Trivers and von Hippel note that believing our own hooey helps us sell it to other people: If you aren't conscious that you're lying, you won't be burdened by the mental costs of maintaining "two separate representations of reality" or show physical signs of nervousness at possibly getting caught, such as a higher-pitched voice.
Understanding all of this, you should probably go easy on yourself for being a bit of a slow learner on the "fool me twice" thing. If this guy was also putting one over on himself in these phone conversations, that probably made it much more believable to you. Mark him as emotionally toxic and come up with a plan in case he calls again. Options include blocking his number, not picking up, or figuring out how to control the conversation if he veers off into Sweetnothingsville. On a positive note, it does seem he's accidentally telling the truth in one area: You do seem to be the woman of his dreams -- as you always vanish from his consciousness as soon as he wakes up.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I went on three or four dates with this dude, and he said it wasn't really working for him and stopped calling. I'm kind of confused about what went wrong or what put him off. My friends tell me to leave it alone. Doesn't he owe me more of an explanation for why he isn't interested anymore, considering we went on multiple dates?
--Baffled
You are owed: 1. The correct change. 2. The news that a guy you've been dating is no longer interested. Period. It is not his job to tell you that you are, say, bad in bed or have all the table manners of a coyote on recent roadkill.
Still, it's understandable that you're pining for an explanation. Research by psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggests that being in a state of uncertainty -- not knowing what's what -- makes us very uncomfortable. It makes sense that we evolved to feel this way, as going through the world in a state of ignorance would not exactly increase our chances of survival, mating, and passing on our genes: "Oh, what a pretty berry! Here's hoping it won't cause violent convulsions and death!"
However, there is a way to alleviate the mental itchiness from not knowing, even in cases where there's no way to know what really happened. You could say that we believe what we think -- and especially what we repeatedly think. Studies by memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus find that every time we recall a story (or even something we're told might have happened to us) it encodes it more deeply in our minds, often to the point where it starts to seem like it actually happened.
In line with this, come up with a story for why the guy bailed -- ideally one that's easy on your ego -- and tell it to yourself repeatedly. For example, imagine him saying, "I just remembered that I'm emotionally unavailable" or, if that seems a little boring, "Your slight nose whistle is actually endearing, but it seems to have a thing for Dave Matthews covers, and I just can't stand that band."
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
August 1, 2019I've heard that we're romantically attracted to people who look like us. Is that true? I don't think any of my boyfriends have looked anything like me, but I have seen couples who look so similar they could be related.
--Wondering
You can kinda see the merits of dating your doppelganger: "I'm looking for myself, but as someone else so I don't always have to empty the dishwasher and scream out my own name in bed."
There is this notion that opposites attract. Actually, the opposite often seems to be the case. According to research on "assortative mating," people tend to pair up with partners who are physically similar to them -- creating a matchy-matchy assortment -- more often than would be expected through random chance.
To explore how much matchiness is appealing to us, social-personality psychologists R. Chris Fraley and Michael J. Marks used a computer to blend each research participant's face into the face of a stranger of the opposite sex. They did this to increasing degrees, morphing in 0%, 22%, 32%, 39%, and 45% of the research participants' features. Their research participants rated the strangers' faces most sexually appealing with the 22% blend -- that is, with just 22% of the participants' own features mixed in.
In another morphing study, neuropsychologist Bruno Laeng and his colleagues mixed each participant's face with that of their romantic partner -- with 11%, 22%, and 33% blending. And again, 22% was picked consistently -- suggesting that people find their romantic partners more attractive when they look just a bit like them.
Granted, it could be a coincidence that the exact same percentage -- only 22% morphed -- popped up in both studies. However, what's noteworthy is that more resemblance didn't lead to more attraction. This jibes with how some degree of similarity is genetically beneficial, increasing the likelihood of desirable traits showing up in partners' children. (Tall plus tall equals tall.)
However, evolution seems to have installed a psychological mechanism to keep us from lusting after extremely similar partners, such as siblings and first cousins. Such close relatives are more likely to have the same rare recessive genes for a disease. A recessive gene when paired with a dominant gene (say, from a genetically very different partner) doesn't express -- that is, the person doesn't develop the disease. But when two recessive genes get together...PARTAAAY!
As for you, though you say you haven't resembled your partners, it's possible that you actually have in subtle ways you didn't notice. Back in 1903, researchers Karl Pearson and Alice Lee looked at 1,000 couples in the U.K. and found correlation in height, arm span, and left forearm length between husband and wife.
This isn't to say everyone's going to resemble their romantic partner, but we seem subconsciously drawn to people who share our features to some extent: "You know, Pooh Bear, looking at you is kind of like looking in the mirror...and for a second, being horrified that I have a forest-like grove of chin hair."
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
I've been with my wife for 23 years. I know sex is important, but sometimes we're tired or not in the mood. I want to keep our intimacy alive. What are some things we can do to stay connected physically?
--Embarrassed Having To Ask
Many couples do eventually need help from a professional to connect physically -- whether it's an advice columnist, a sex therapist, or a bank robber who leaves them duct-taped together in the vault.
It turns out the answer isn't all that complicated: Basically, you just need to bring in some of the G-rated part of foreplay and afterplay (without the sex in between). Psychologist Debby Herbenick and her colleagues note that researchers have found three things -- kissing, cuddling, and massage -- to be "important aspects of sexual intimacy ... associated with relationship and sexual satisfaction."
Helpfully, the Herbenick team chiseled apart what they call the "KCM composite" -- the way kissing, cuddling, and massage get mushed together in studies. They felt that this blending might obscure "important differences" in the effect of each. In fact, they found that cuddling seems to be uniquely powerful, increasing emotional intimacy (as well as sexual pleasure) in a way kissing and massage do not.
Though you're seeking a solution for when you're too zonked for sex, it's important to make sure that cuddling is often an end in itself. This, paradoxically, should help keep your sex life alive: Your wife will see your cuddles as an expression of your love rather than a sign that you just want something out of the sexual vending machine. Ultimately, cuddling for cuddling's sake is probably the best way to keep from getting to the point where "taking care of her in bed" involves holding a mirror under her nose to see if she's still breathing.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
