Really interesting article recently by Bella DePaulo. Based on an interesting piece of research by Yuechen Wu, Rebecca W. Hamilton, Nicole You Jeung Kim, and Rebecca K. Ratner.

The research is called 'Navigating Shared Consumption Experiences: Clarity About a Partner's Interests Increases Enjoyment' and is something I was pleasantly surprised to find, because it is confirmation by research of an idea I have been toying with for a while.

Basically, research gives mixed results on whether going places, e.g. museums, sports, etc, are more enjoyable alone or with others. Because the results are mixed that suggests there are some things which make going places more enjoyable alone or with others. The paper tested an idea about why, Here is how it worked:

Participants assigned to the shared experience conditions were paired with the student sitting next to them to engage in a "movie festival tour" (N = 208; 104 pairs). These pairs did not know each other
well, but all were students at the same business school. Each pair was randomly assigned to either the high-clarity or low-clarity shared experience conditions. Those assigned to the solo experience condition (N = 75) engaged in the same activity alone.

The tour was viewing posters for various movies and beforehand the test subjects were asked about how interested they were in the event, as well as an unrelated question about marketing classes.

People alone went into the event, the pairs were split in half. Half were told how interested the other person was in the event, half were told the answer to the irrelevent question. They all look at the posters and then answer a few questions

The result was that for the groups, when they were told about their assigned partner's level of interest in the posters they were both better able to focus on the activity, and they were better able to socialise with their partner.

Those who had been given clarity of how interested their pair was also reported higher levels of enjoyment of the activity (on par with the group who were alone).

Another finding was that incongruence, the difference between how much you are interested and how much the person you are with was interested, had an effect. Greater incongruousness seems to lead to less enjoyment.

But the study doesn't stop there, it tries to work out the mechanism behind this, I'll quote a bit of the article.

We propose that when consumers have low (vs. high) clarity about the partner's interest in the activity,
they are distracted by trying to figure out how to navigate the experience with the partner, which reduces their ability to focus on the activity and enjoy the experience.

So they surveyed people about that, asking 203 people to recall an activity with a close friend or relative where they were clear or unclear about how much that person enjoyed the activity. They were then asked similar questions to part 1 about ability to focus, ability to socialise and enjoyment.

The responses generally reflected the proposed reasoning. If you are wondering about the person you are with, you are less focused on the experience.

There are a couple of other studies in the article which narrow this down a bit, if you are into that sort of thing it is an interesting read. They look at how this effect changes depending on the ease of navigating an activity, and the effect of how relevent the partners interests are to the activity. But those first to studies are the bit that I found interesting.

Now there are a few caveats, the authors are very clear of the US nature of the study, so maybe there is a difference for me in the UK (although I would expect this to be even more relevent here, given we seem to have a culture of not saying if we are interested or uninterested in things). There is also of course that the participants for the first study were all very specifically students. As well as that there is the annoying difficulty that asking questions may prompt people to think in a certain way. But I think the general conclusions likely stand.

As I said at the beginning, this is very interesting to me. I always remember prefering to travel alone, and when i was young, though I was with my family I preferred the times where I could wander around myself. If the article is correct then it could be that I was trying to work out how much the other people I was with were enjoying that activity and that distracted me from my own enjoyment. This seems to match my thoughts.

I am crap at reading emotions. I am often in a position where I have no idea whether people I am around are enjoying themselves, or whether I should hurry up and move, or whether I should talk more, or less. This does cause a bit of stress when I could just be enjoying myself.

So this was interesting, someone actually doing a proper set of studies which come to these conclusions. It certainly gave me a lot to think about.

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