- Our everyday thoughts are profoundly social in content.
- Do fundamental social needs or incoming social information drive our thoughts?
- The sociality of the world around us shapes our spontaneous thought.
‘When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares … You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers. You’re thinking about your spouse, about your kids, about your boss.’ [1]
Our everyday thoughts are profoundly social, so social we are hardly aware of how often we think about our relationships with others. But thinking about others and our relationships with others is what we (mostly) spend our thinking time doing.
Photo by Juri Gianfrancesco on Unsplash
Social isolation (or solitary confinement) has been used as a punishment since the advent of prison cells. It involves depriving individuals of social interaction for an extended period by confining them to a prison cell, alone, and denying them the comfort of others. Solitary confinement is a severe punishment with profound effects on psychological functioning, causing feelings of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness. Those subjected to it often experience a poverty of speech and thought, as well as hallucinations and imaginary conversations.[2]
While it would be generally unethical to replicate these extreme conditions in a lab— there is the possibility of real harm to participants—short periods of voluntary self-isolation may offer some insight into the effects of social deprivation on our psychological functioning.
Two competing ideas suggest that either fundamental social needs or incoming social information drive our social thoughts.
To address which account is correct, Judith Mildner and Diana Tamir conducted three studies examining the content of spontaneous thought during mind wandering in three social contexts: solitude, social presence, and social interaction.[3] Additionally, they used functional brain imaging to measure neural activity while participants considered social and nonsocial targets.
They found that the sociality of the world around us shapes our spontaneous thought. Conditions of (mild) solitude (sitting in a room by yourself) decreased spontaneous social thought and neural activity in the mentalizing network of the brain when thinking about a close friend. The mere social presence of others did not change spontaneous social thought, whereas social interaction increased spontaneous social thought. Being around others is not enough: You must talk to them to drive social thinking in your brain.
It seems, from this work, that the social content of spontaneous thought arises because of the predominance of social content—mediated by social contact and conversation—in the world around us. Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, probably slowly stopped having predominantly social thoughts, until he made contact with humans again. Conversation is central to the experience of social life: Robinson Crusoe might even have conducted conversations aloud with himself as a substitute for conversations with others.[4]
References
[1] Gazzaniga, M. (2008). The Seed Salon: Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga, transcribed at https://2thinkgood.com/2008/07/01/tom-wolfe-seed-interview/
[2] Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (Harvard University Press) Shane O’Mara
[3] Mildner, J. N., & Tamir, D. I. (2021). The people around you are inside your head: Social context shapes spontaneous thought. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(11), 2375.
[4] O’Mara, SM (2023). Talking Heads: The New Science of How We Create Our Shared Worlds. PenguinRandomHouse – Bodley Head/Vintage. ISBN: 9781847926487