Shared intensity

Do you like to share? Be honest, when you have a delightful piece of sugar-free banana and macadamia bread in front of you, is your first impulse to offer your companion half or do you jealously guard the entire portion and find yourself involuntarily snarling when someone extends a tentative hand to liberate a corner for the tasting? When you are watching a wonderful piece of French drama is your instinct to pause it and ask a friend to come and watch it with you or do you watch it on your own memorising the best lines for use in conversation tomorrow? What about when you find a café that makes a really terrible soy-latte? Do you invite someone to visit that café and share that experience with you? Opportunities for sharing abound in life and it doesn’t always have to be with someone you know. It might be that you view an artwork in an art gallery or witness a sunset with a complete stranger. The question is does sharing an experience alter the way in which you interact with it?

This is what was studied in a new piece of research where subjects came to the laboratory where they met another subject who would be completing the task at the same time. In actual fact this other “subject” was part of the research team. The pair were told that they would take part in a range of activities including tasting chocolate and looking at booklets of artwork side by side at a table. The experiment was constructed so that on one occasion the real subject was tasting chocolate when the fake subject was also tasting chocolate and then on a second occasion the real subject tasted chocolate while the fake subject was looking at artworks. The chocolate pieces were identical and were taken from the same bar of 70 per cent cocoa dark chocolate but the subjects rated the pieces of chocolate as being more tasty when they ate them at the same time as the other person.

In a second experiment the researchers used a very bitter raw piece of 90 per cent cocoa chocolate and this time the results were magnified but in the other direction. On this occasion the subjects rated the shared chocolate as less tasty than the other identical piece.

It appears then that sharing an experience with someone else, even silently and with a stranger, intensifies the experience such that good experiences seem better and bad experiences seem worse. As the researchers point out if you are having dinner with friends or family but checking your Facebook page or playing something on your phone at the same time then you are “unsharing” that moment and the meal, for everyone, will be will be less sweet. It explains too, why two people who watched a film together will come away and rhapsodise about it where the person who watched it solo will be thinking, “Really?”

Underneath all our individualism and isolating technology humans are still social creatures. It is the socialising and the language that allows it which has enabled our minds to expand as they have; consciousness has entered where connection has created space. Life is a game; share it.