Oddly enough, I have a surprising amount of experience with this. I used to play piano for a church of ~500 where my dad is one of the pastors in my hometown, and played a lot of music around town as well. All of those factors together meant that a lot of people knew way more about me than I knew about them.
In my experience, many of these folks thought they have much more of a relationship than I did. People who knew my name and would strike up conversations in the grocery store like I knew them at all outside of these conversations. The worst part is that I got used to pretending like I knew people and navigating very fake conversations, in a way that I was not a fan of. It's a form of masking that I got very good at.
I'm moving back to my hometown soon because I've gotten a remote job and my family needs the support system right now. This is an aspect I'm not very excited to get back to.
Alright, same thing here, but a bit smaller, cause my Dad was just the troop leader of a large contingent of scouts. Hundreds of parents and kids knew me, but I mostly just âpretendedâ to know them like you did.
Iâve met up with these people, didnât know a single one of them. You just plainly say, âsorry, itâs been quite a few years how do we know each other?â
If they push harder, just say, âsorry, my Dad knew a lot of people, itâs all a flash of faces when youâre a kid.â
Trust me, people will get it and not give ya a hard time. When one person did, the others told him to bugger off and stop being so self important.
From there on, you can start anew. Just ask them their names and move on.
Yes. This is the answer. Harder up front but works out better for everyone in the long run.
Without trying to gas you up or make you feel one way or another about it via the associations of these words/ definitions/ lables, this sounds like a textbook example of a parasocial relationship, or a microcosm of what celebrities must experience.
> this sounds like a textbook example of a parasocial relationship
I really had to try and not use that word, but it very much was.
Parasocial is a bit different. Parasocial is when the celebrity fakes engagement with stuff like mass messaging that pretends to be personal.
I have a similar experience in my neighbourhood. I live on the corner and have no privacy across my backyard. I spend a lot of time playing with my young kids. Needless to say all the boomers âround here know everything about me.
My advice is to accept it, donât âover maskâ but donât forget that there are a handful of benefits to the situation. Lean into the benefits.
It is a survival mechanism: tribalism and community, protect each other.
I wonder if this is an opportunity to start fresh with these people. I.e., just openly announcing what you told us?
No idea if it would work, but IME most adults are understanding about the challenges of adolescence.
And I'm just guessing here, but I'll bet you're more likely to get some real friends by being open.
(I'm not saying it's easy. Just throwing the idea out there for your consideration.)
I'm not sure that it's an unreasonable thing for humans (or more generally: communal conscious agents) to work this way. Indeed we should probably just accept it for now and make use of the phenomena as the article suggests by connecting people with more details about others in-authority around them.
Once a person knows more (relevant, accurate & truthful) information about another person then they will have a better mental-model of them, and I think that this will often make them feel like the other person could know them in better detail in-response as a person (even though there has only been one direction of information-flow so far).
The error could be huge if the base-assumption is wrong, but if it's not wrong then we could already know some specific details of the other person's mind quite well indeed (meme-complex-detected!).
In certain cases, especially around the description of qualities such as approachability and humility, hearing of these things from a speaker and in particular if they are common with the listener, could reasonably suggest that the speaker might also recognize these same qualities in the listener, and this could imply a possible connection without any bi-directional information transfer needed.
Unfortunately such concepts are widely exploited for rather dubious purposes. I'd generally hope that people could learn to separate the informational content of communication from the emotional content of communication. The advertising technique of 'the trusted third-party spokesperson' (independent doctors recommending pharmaceuticals, etc.) relies entirely on this sense of trust and tribal identitarianism.
During the run-up to the 2008-2009 subprime crisis, there were housing brokers who relied heavily on identitarianism and trust to market adjustable-rate mortgages to various groups. Matching up sellers to buyers by race/religion/gender etc. was a pretty effective technique for getting signatures on loan agreements. The result was many trusting people ended up with loans that blew up on them a few years later, resulting in many loan defaults and resulting economic collapses.
On the other hand, using such tactics is helpful in getting accurate information to people. If you ran a public health campaign aimed at reducing infectious disease transmission, a positive goal by almost any measure, then matching the message to the group would likely improve adoption of various effective measures (handwashing & general sanitation, for example).
In general, though, people are better off if they can extract the information from a sales pitch and make their decisions on the basis of rational analysis, not on emotional resonance.
Exactly this. If you learn that someone is from your same tribe, shares the same experiences, or shares the same values this transmits real information.
The information can mean that the other does in fact understand you better, even if they don't know you personally.
I would argue that it's a valid heuristic and not out of place in the modern world.
You see it all the time in social interactions where individuals want to be relatable. Of course I can be manipulated, but that doesn't mean it isn't of value
This is one of the reasons why I have pulled back from social media. In feeds I see a random sample of the most anxious people I grew up with and find myself knowing more about their lives than I do about people I care about. I'd prefer to spend my finite attention on relationships that are actually important to me.
The solution for that is probably to spend time with your close friends, not hide from everyone else.
Attention is finite.
This exact topic was discussed today on the "no stupid questions podcast" by "Freakonomics" author Stephen Dubner and "Grit" author Angela Duckworth:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/100-is-it-weird-for-ad...
I was just about to ask OP if they listened to NSQ this morning.
How does this relate to parasocial relationships with online streamers or NSFW content providers on places like OnlyFans?
It seems like it would largely apply. Part of the attraction is the reciprocal positive feedback and sense of familiarity.
This obviously could allow for a widening misalignment on a deeper level than we can easily observe.
I'm curious how this misalignment may manifest for the person's mental and physical health - as well as greater societal health in the long-term. If a person isn't bonding in reciprocal way with others ideally and in-person, and to use or have those people as a "soundboard" or counterweight to themselves.
If they are mostly with their own beliefs or current understandings of things without them being challenged by enough social interaction - then beliefs won't be kept in as much check as otherwise would be, where there's more chance that you'll be around peers that will question or challenge your beliefs on a deeper level; not thinking even anything super nefarious but we learn and organize our own brain/thoughts by talking with others, and how critical thinking is developed.
If using a parasocial relationship as a crutch without realizing it, nor being guided towards not needing it as a crutch, then there's going to be a growing imbalance for the individual and society's function.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with online streaming of games or OnlyFans NSFW content - it becomes a problem when it's more than just entertainment and more of an addiction.
If your hypothesis is that parasocial relationships are not a healthy substitute for social relationships, I think most people would intuitively agree.
I think the bigger question is the degree to which Parasocial relationships replace or compete with social relationships. I am more skeptical on this point.
I thought this paper was an interesting introduction and exploration of the topic:
The one-and-a-half sided parasocial relationship: The curious case of live streaming
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882...
So to combat falling into parasocial not-really-relationships, we should see their content as not really them, not really indicative of who they are, anything we have to tell ourselves to not feel as if we're connected when we're not. False connection is worse than no connection at all, like believing lies is worse than "I just don't know".
As someone who struggled with and had to âfirst principlesâ social skills, I feel this even in many mundane interactions.
People wear masks all the time because sometimes their true self is not conducive to what they are doing at that time.
For a celebrity entertainer who needs to appeal to a crowd of tens of thousands, their Dunbarâs number, even optimistically, will be orders of magnitude smaller.
Therefore, the gap of inner circle-audience will be made up by an act relying on their ability/looks/charm which is necessarily contrived and not reflective of their true self.
Yeah and the people who seem to have a smaller gap seem to die young. Farley and John Candy were said to be very nice to the "little people".
> In one set of studies, participants answered three multiple-choice questions about their lives; half then saw their partnerâs responses to the same questions and half did not. All participants were then told that their partner was trying to guess their own answers. Participants who saw their partnerâs responses believed that this stranger understood them better than those who did not.
This seems perfectly rational to me. The participants thought their partners had a symmetrical role to them by the design of the experiment. So they assumed if they received information about their partners then their partners must also have received information about them. They are making a reasonable inference based on a false premise that they were deliberately misled into accepting.
Perhaps if I read more I would see the experimental design has been glossed over and it isn't as simple as this, but this is what stuck out to me.
Yeah, just listen to a podcast of some dude or dudette for several years and man they become part of your life.
Had a friend vent about their parents cutting a phone call off cause the parents were 'having breakfast with friends' and they were about to be on again. on tv. friends == fox & friends.
Get a daily email with the the top stories from Hacker News. No spam, unsubscribe at any time.