Fictional friendships

I learned a new term yesterday: parasocial relationship.

It means "a strong, one-sided social bond with a fictional character or celebrity."  I've never much gotten the "celebrity" side of this; I don't, for example, give a flying rat's ass who is and is not keeping up with the Kardashians.  But fictional characters?

Oh, yeah.  No question.  I have wondered if my own career as a novelist was spurred by the parasocial relationships (now that I know the term, dammit, I'm gonna use it) I formed with fictional characters very early on.  In my first two decades, I was deeply invested in what happened to:

• The intrepid Robinson family in Lost in Space.  This might have been in part because I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen, who is drop-dead gorgeous even though in retrospect the character she played didn't have much... character.
• The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Some of the old Star Trek episodes are almost as cringeworthy as Lost in Space, but when I was ten and I heard Scotty say, "The warp core is gonna blow!  I canna stop it, Captain!  Ye canna change the laws of physics!", I believed him.
• Carl Kolchak from the TV series The Night Stalker.  Okay, so apparently I gravitated toward cringeworthy series.
• Luke Skywalker and his buddies.  I'll admit it, I cried when Obi-Wan died, even though you find out immediately afterward that he's still around in spirit form, if Becoming One With The Force can be considered an afterlife.

Books hooked me as well, sometimes even more powerfully than television and movies. A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Chronicles of Prydain...  I could go on and on.  Most of which caused the shedding of considerable numbers of tears over the fate of some character or another.

More recently, my obsession is Doctor Who, which will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia because I seem to find a way to work some Who reference into every other post.  Not only do I spend an inordinate time discussing Doctor Who trivia with other fans, I have found a way to combine this with another hobby:

I made (L-to-R) a ceramic Weeping Angel, Dugga Doo, Dalek, Beep the Meep, and K-9, which sit on my desk watching me as I work.  I'm careful not to blink.

The reason this comes up is a paper in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at these parasocial relationships -- specifically, whether the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertain years following had weakened our relationships with actual people, perhaps with a commensurate strengthening of our one-sided relationships with fictional characters.

The heartening results are there hasn't been a weakening of our bonds to our friends, but our bonds have strengthened to the fictional characters we love.  So, real friends of mine, you don't need to worry that my incessant fanboying over the Doctor is going to impact our relationship negatively, unless you get so completely fed up with my obsession you decide to hang around with someone who wants to discuss something more grounded in reality, like fantasy football teams.

"The development, maintenance, and dissolution of socio-emotional bonds that media audiences form with televised celebrities and fictional characters has long been a scholarly interest of mine," said study author Bradley J. Bond, of the University of San Diego, in an interview with PsyPost.  "The social function of our parasocial relationships with media figures has been debated in the literature: do our parasocial relationships supplement our real-life friendships?  Can they compensate for deficiencies in our social relationships?...  Social distancing protocols and quarantine behaviors that spawned from the global COVID-19 pandemic provided an incredibly novel opportunity to study how our parasocial relationships with media figures function as social alternatives when the natural environment required individuals to physically distance themselves from their real-life friends...  [The research suggests that] our friendships are durable, and we will utilize media technologies to maintain our friendships when our opportunities for in-person social engagement are significantly limited.  However, our favorite celebrities and fictional characters may become even more important components of our social worlds when we experience severe alterations to our friendships."

Which I find cheering.  The events of the last few years have forced us all into coping mode, and it's nice to know that the tendency of many of us to retreat into books, television, and movies isn't jeopardizing our relationships with real people.

So I guess I'm free to throw myself emotionally into fictional relationships.  However much they cost me in anguish.  For example, I will never forgive Russell T. Davies for what he did to the brilliant and fearless Captain Adelaide Brooke in the last minutes of the episode "The Waters of Mars:"

Dammit, Russell.  She (and her entire crew) deserved better.

Be that as it may, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my fanboy tendencies, and that by and large, such obsessions are harmless.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my ceramic replica of the TARDIS.  Maybe I can install a little speaker inside it so when I press the button, it'll make the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.  How cool would that be?

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All the lonely people

I'm a big fan of the band OneRepublic, but I don't think any of their songs has struck me like their 2018 hit "Connection."

"There's so many people here to be so damn lonely."  Yeah, brother, I feel that hard.  This whole culture has fostered disconnection -- or, more accurately, bogus connections.  Social media gives you the appearance of authentic interaction, but the truth is what you see is chosen for you by an algorithm that often has little to do with what (or whom) you're actually interested in.  A host of studies has documented the correlation between frequent social media use and poor mental health, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem -- but as usual, the causation could run either way.  Rather than social media causing the decline in emotional wellness, it could be that people who are already experiencing depression gravitate toward social media because they lack meaningful real-life connections -- and at least the interactions on Facebook and TikTok and Instagram and whatnot are better than nothing.

Whichever way it goes, it appears that social media, which has long billed itself as being the new way to make friends, has left a great many people feeling more isolated than ever.

I know that's true for me.  I'm pretty shy, and don't get out much.  I volunteer sorting books for our local Friends of the Library book sale once a week; I see my athletic trainer once a week; I have a friend with whom I go for walks on Saturday mornings.  That's about it.  My social calendar is more or less non-existent.  And despite my natural tendency toward introversion, it's not a good thing.  I've had the sense -- undoubtedly inaccurate, but that doesn't make it feel any less real -- that if I were to vanish from the face of the Earth, maybe a dozen people would notice, and half that would care.

It's a hell of a way to live.

Sadly, I'm far from the only person who feels this way.  Disconnection and isolation are endemic in our society, and the scary part is the toll it takes.  Not only are there the obvious connections to mental health issues like depression and anxiety, a study out of Oregon State University published this week in the Journal of Psychology found that chronic loneliness is connected to a slew of other problems -- including poor sleep, nightmares, heart disease, stroke, dementia, and premature death.  The study, which involved 1,600 adults between the ages of eighteen and eighty, was absolutely unequivocal.

"Interpersonal relationships are very much a core human need," said psychologist Colin Hesse, director of the School of Communication in OSU’s College of Liberal Arts, who led the study.  "When people’s need for strong relationships goes unmet, they suffer physically, mentally and socially.  Just like hunger or fatigue means you haven’t gotten enough calories or sleep, loneliness has evolved to alert individuals when their needs for interpersonal connection are going unfulfilled...  Quality restorative sleep is a linchpin for cognitive functioning, mood regulation, metabolism and many other aspects of well-being.  That’s why it’s so critical to investigate the psychological states that disrupt sleep, loneliness being key among them."

The open question is what to do about it.  Social media clearly isn't the answer.  I don't want to paint it all as negative; I have good interactions on social media, and it allows me to keep in touch with friends who live too far away to see regularly, which is why I'm willing to participate in it at all.  But to have those interactions requires wading through all of the other stuff the algorithm desperately wants me to see (including what appear to be eighteen gazillion "sponsored posts," i.e., advertisements).  The bottom line is that people like Mark Zuckerberg and the other CEOs of large social media organizations don't give a flying rat's ass about my feelings; it's all about making money.  If it makes MZ money, you can bet you'll see it lots.  If it doesn't?

Meh.  Maybe.  Probably not.  Certainly you shouldn't count on it.

So the alternative is to try to get out there more and form some authentic connections, which is much easier said than done.  All I know is that it's important.  There may be people in this world who are natural loners, but I suspect they're few and far between.  The majority of us need deep connection with friends, and suffer if we don't have it.

And the Hesse et al. study has shown that there's more at risk than just your mood if you don't.

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Likes attract

A bit over 23 years ago, a friend introduced me to a woman she'd known since they were toddlers together.  I was recovering from an unpleasant divorce, trying to adjust to being a single dad, and (honestly) was pretty lonely.  The friend told me we'd get along great -- mutual interests in music, birdwatching, gardening, and travel.

"Two such similar people should definitely get to know each other," she said.

Despite the fact that even on a good day, I raise social awkwardness to the level of performance art, I got up my gumption, called her up, and asked her out.  Sure enough, we hit it off brilliantly.  That summer, we went with some friends on a three-week trip to Iceland.  After a few more adventures big and small, we decided to make it permanent.  We're still together.

Carol and me in Cornwall in 2015

And our friend was right; we are really similar.  We nearly finish each other's sentences sometimes.  And I can't keep track of the number of times one of us has said something random, and the other has responded in shock, "I was just going to say that."

Some new research out of Boston University suggests a reason why the old adage of "opposites attract" might not be that accurate.  We're attracted to people who are like us, usually (at least at first) about one or two standout traits -- like birdwatching and gardening -- because of self-essentialist reasoning.  This is the idea that our core being is shaped by our passions and our dislikes, and when we find someone who resonates with us on some of those, we assume they'll share our other personality traits, as well.

That we'll be "soulmates."

"If we had to come up with an image of our sense of self, it would be this nugget, an almost magical core inside that emanates out and causes what we can see and observe about people and ourselves," said Charles Chu, who co-authored the study.  "We argue that believing people have an underlying essence allows us to assume or infer that when we see someone who shares a single characteristic, they must share my entire deeply rooted essence, as well."

The problem is, that thinking has a flaw.  You can share one or two deep connections, and still be different on a whole lot of other things, including some important ones -- maybe even some that are deal-breakers.  "We are all so complex," Chu said.  "But we only have full insight into our own thoughts and feelings, and the minds of others are often a mystery to us.  What this work suggests is that we often fill in the blanks of others' minds with our own sense of self and that can sometimes lead us into some unwarranted assumptions."

With Carol and me, for example, there's the still-baffling disconnect we have over books.  With a very few exceptions -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one, and the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett -- I can nearly guarantee that if I love a book, she won't, and vice-versa.  Even with authors we both like (for example, Christopher Moore), we don't resonate with the same books.  She loved Fluke and I thought it was too weird and implausible, even by Moore's standards, to work; I found Coyote Blue brilliant and it's probably her least favorite of Moore's books.  (At least we agree on A Dirty Job and its sequel, Secondhand Souls, which are flat-out genius.)

Fortunately, the fact that Carol thinks my all-time favorite book, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, is a total snooze-fest wasn't enough to make either of us reconsider our choice in a partner.  I can't imagine how hard it must be to click with someone over one thing, and then find that there are deep and irreconcilable differences in something potentially divisive, such as politics, religion, or morality.  But even so, it's worth getting past our tendency to self-essentialist reasoning.  After all, it's when we encounter, and stay connected with, people who aren't like us that we tend to learn the most.  That applies to friends as well as romantic liaisons; one of my best friends, the wonderful author Gil Miller (speaking of books you definitely need to read, you should check his out as soon as you're done reading this) is pretty different from me in a lot of ways, but we've formed a close friendship founded on a deep mutual respect and an understanding that both of us base our beliefs on thoughtful consideration -- and are willing to entertain the possibility of changing our minds.

And maybe that's what it boils down to; respect, willingness to listen, and an understanding that we might actually not be right about everything.  As author Robert Fulghum put it, "Don't believe everything you think."

In any case, the recent research does shed some light about how connections form in the first place.  The mutual friend who introduced Carol and me certainly got it spot-on.  And even if we can't agree about what books to read, it's good to know we still have lots in common, 23 years later.

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The smell of friendship

A topic I covered in my intro to biology classes was the phenomenon of pheromones.

A pheromone is a chemical secreted by one individual that causes a behavioral change in another member of the same species.  There's a great variety -- sex pheromones (which causes the behavior you see in male dogs when a female dog goes into heat), alarm pheromones (such as the "attack" chemical released by killer bees that causes swarming), territorial pheromones (such as urine marking in wolves), and so on.  They're biochemical signals; much the way hormones signal between organs, pheromones signal between organisms.

This inevitably led to the question, "Do humans have pheromones?"  The answer is, "Probably, but it's hard to demonstrate conclusively."  Certainly, the "pheromonal" perfumes and colognes you've probably seen ads for are ripoffs; there is no evidence that there's anything you could add to a perfume that would act as an aphrodisiac.  (For some reason, I've mostly seen ads for this stuff in science magazines.  Maybe they think we nerds need all the help we can get in the romance department, I dunno.)

One of my AP Biology students years ago got interested in the topic of attractant pheromones, and designed a clever experiment to see if he could detect an effect in humans.  He had a bunch of volunteers agree to the following protocol: (1) shower first thing in the morning; (2) use odorless soap, shampoo, and deodorant, and don't put on any scented products; (3) don't eat any food that could change your body odor, such as garlic, curry, or asparagus; and (4) wear a plain white t-shirt (provided by the researcher) for an entire day, then seal it in a ziplock bag at the end of the day.  He then took the collected t-shirts (I think there were about twenty in all) and got a bunch of students to smell them, and rank them best-to-worst for odor.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lateiner, T-shirt-2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The results were pretty interesting.  There was a tendency for people to rank higher t-shirts that had been worn by volunteers of their preferred gender.  (There weren't any bisexuals in the test sample; maybe we think everyone smells good, I dunno.)  The most interesting part was that between the t-shirt wearing group and the t-shirt smelling group, there were a couple of pairs of siblings -- and they ranked their siblings as smelling terrible!

Curious results, which I was immediately reminded of when I stumbled on some research out of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel which showed there might be a pheromonal aspect not only of sexual attraction, but of friendship.

The procedure they followed was remarkably similar to my student's, if considerably more rigorous and technical.  They recruited twenty pairs of people who reported that they were friends, and further, had "clicked immediately" -- a phenomenon I think we can all relate to.  (It's equally common to meet someone you dislike immediately -- but that'd have been a lot harder to study.)  They then did a similar t-shirt wearing protocol, but at the end of the day, instead of having someone smell it, they used an electronic volatile chemical analyzer to determine what odor-carrying substances there might be in the shirts.

What they found was that the chemistry of the sweat left behind in the t-shirts was remarkably similar between people who were friends.  Further -- and even wilder -- they then had the volunteers pair up with same-sex strangers from the research group, eventually testing all possible same-sex pairings, and had them stand in close proximity for two minutes (in silence).  They then were asked to rank the person from 1 to 100 in terms of how comfortable they were, whether they felt a connection, and whether they'd be interested in meeting the person again.

Across the board, the more similar the pair's sweat chemistry, the higher the rankings were.  "The finding that it could predict clicking by body odor similarity alone—this was really cool," said study co-author Inval Ravreby.  "We were really excited to find this."

The researchers did admit that the effect was small (although statistically significant) and there was a lot of overlap in the data, but the fact that there's a trend at all is pretty amazing.  Human behavior is complex and multifaceted, and it's amazing how much of it is due to subliminal cues.  Despite our generally high opinions of our species, we're still animals -- and we interact with each other not only in human-specific ways but in the more instinctual ways other animals use.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you should try to find friends by walking up and sniffing people.  But maybe that feeling of an instant connection we sometimes have is more due to our sense of smell than it is any kind of cognitive assessment.

Think of that the next time you're having lunch with your best friend.

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A dog's best friend

First, I'd like to thank my readership in general, and the people who put in donations and guesses for the 50/50 contest in particular, for their support in bumping Skeptophilia over the one million hits mark!  We hit a million at about 12:00 noon, Tuesday, April 15, and the winning guess (and winner of half of the donations) was submitted by Dorothy S. of Trumansburg, New York, who was only off by two hours!  We have chosen to donate the other half of the pot to the wonderful National Center for Science Education, for all of the work they do in fostering the teaching of science in America's classrooms.  Thanks again to all who played, and please know that I value each and every hit and comment I get.  Here's to the next million!

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I've always been an animal lover.  I grew up with dogs, and have also had one or more cats all of my adult life.  Add to that a near-fanatical passion for birding, and a general fascination with wildlife of all sorts, and it's no wonder I went into biology.

My background in evolutionary genetics has also driven home the point that humans aren't as different from the rest of the animal world as a lot of us seem to think.  The false distinction between "human" and "animal" is a pretty hard one to overcome, however, which explains the argument I got into with a professor at the University of Washington over a lizard he'd killed for experimental purposes when I was in an animal physiology class.

Even back then, I understood that non-human animals die for experimental purposes all the time.  Despite my youth, I had thought deeply about the ethical conundrum of sacrificing the lives of our fellow animals for the benefit of science and medicine, and had come to the conclusion (an opinion I still hold) that it is a necessary evil.  But what I could not stomach was the professor's cavalier attitude toward the life he'd just taken -- joking around, acting as if the little warm body he held in his hand had been nothing but a mobile lump of clay, worthy of no respect.

"It's not like animals have feelings," I recall his saying to me, with a faint sneer.  "If you spend your time anthropomorphizing animals, you'll never make it in this profession."

I remembered, while he was lecturing me in a patronizing fashion about my soft-heartedness, pets I had owned, and I had a momentary surge of self-doubt. Was he right?  I began to question my own sense that my dogs and cats loved me, and were feeling something of the same kind of bond toward me that I felt toward them.  Was my dog's wagging tail when I talked to him nothing more than what C. S. Lewis called a "cupboard love" -- merely a response that he knew would get him fed and petted and played with, and a warm place to sleep?

But I couldn't bring myself to believe that thirty years ago, and I don't believe it now.  And I'm happy to say that just this week there was research published that showed that pet dogs (and probably cats as well) have the same neurochemical reaction in their brains that we do with respect to love, friendship, and bonding.

The study came from the lab of Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University, the "world's expert on oxytocin."  He's actually written a book on it (The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity) and has come to the conclusion that it is the chemical basis of pair bonding, friendship, the emotional side of love, and the pleasant feelings associated with being with the people you like.  I've written about his research before, specifically about his conclusions the the oxytocin spikes during friendly activities contribute to positive social interactions of all kinds (and vice versa).  It's a nice example of the snowball effect; the more happy and social we are, the more oxytocin our brains produce; and the more oxytocin our brains produce, the more happy and social we are.

Zak has now extended his research to look at friendship-bonding in animals.  Anyone who has ever watched two dogs who are pals chasing each other will be unsurprised to hear that the oxytocin levels in dogs spikes when they're around their friends.  Now, my long-ago professor might challenge this, saying something like, "Well, of course.  They are social animals, and have evolved to depend on their fellow pack members for food, protection, and mates.  It's no surprise that they show bonding behavior and neurochemistry with members of their own species."

But Zak has found that dogs, in particular, can show the same response to members of a different species -- demonstrating pretty conclusively that dogs can form emotional bonds that are completely unrelated to evolutionary advantage, and are analogous to the reciprocal ones human pet owners experience:

At an animal refuge in Arkansas, where a large variety of animals interact with one another, I obtained blood samples from a domestic mixed-breed terrier and a goat that regularly played with each other. Their play involved chasing each other, jumping towards each other, and engaging in simulated fighting (baring teeth and snarling). Both animals were young males. We then placed the dog and goat into an enclosure together and let them play. A second blood sample was done after 15 minutes.  

We found that the dog had a 48 percent increase in oxytocin. This shows that the dog was quite attached to the goat. The moderate change in oxytocin suggests the dog viewed the goat as a "friend." 

More striking was the goat's reaction to the dog: It had a 210 percent increase in oxytocin. At that level of increase, within the framework of oxytocin as the "love hormone," we essentially found that the goat might have been in love with the dog. The only time I have seen such a surge in oxytocin in humans is when someone sees their loved one, is romantically attracted to someone, or is shown an enormous kindness.

All of which doesn't surprise me at all.  There is no reason any more to doubt Charles Darwin's contention in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals -- that emotional depth forms a continuum across the animal kingdom.  We get the benefit of emotional attachments to our pets, but they experience much the same connection to us, and for the same neurochemical reasons.

Which makes me feel vindicated, honestly.  And also less embarrassed about what a complete sap I am about animals.  When we lost our aged border collie, Doolin, last November, I went into a real period of mourning -- and so, I think, did our other dog, Grendel.  But just last week we brought in a new member of the family to be a pal for Grendel.

Skeptophilia, meet Lena the Wonder Hound.

After being together for only a week, they have already begun to play together, and just last night we caught Grendel washing Lena's face, causing Carol and me to begin chanting, "Grendel's got a girlfriend!  Grendel's got a girlfriend!"  (Maturity-R-Us, lemme tell you.)

I don't know about you, but it makes me happy to know that when I come home to find a pair of wagging tails waiting for me, the feeling I experience is something that my dogs are probably experiencing themselves -- towards each other, and toward my wife and I.

Zak is right, you know.  Oxytocin rocks.