I come across this interesting article. Here the Psychologists (Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management) arrive on the conclusion that social isolation really make you feel that room is colder than actually it is!
They divided a group of volunteers into two. One group is asked to recall the experience when they were expelled from certain group or club. Another group was told to evoke experiences when they have gained a membership of certain club or group. Later on they were asked to guess the room temperature on the pretense that the building’s maintenance staff wanted that information. And the findings were really surprising.
Those who were told to think about a socially isolating experience gave lower estimates of the temperature. In other words, the recalled memories of being ostracized actually made people experience the ambient temperature as colder.
In another experiment, instead of relying on volunteers’ memories, the researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having the volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out.” Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. (source:Science Daily)
Read about the findings 🙂
“It’s striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded,” Leonardelli said. “Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation.”
Can we take this metaphor literally and not descriptively? Watch your behavior next time, when you go out alone. 🙂
Namaskar Alka ji,
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Thank you.
Hmm……ponder……1. What about those who want neither coffee nor ice-cold Coke but plain water…..what could be their state of mind?
2. Some guys are feel hot all the time. Are they getting too many balls tossed to them.
I have a hypothesis now…some people dont get balls tossed to them but still perceive that balls are being tossed to them. Others get balls tossed to them but can perceive it or only want specific balls to be tossed to them. So finally it mostly in the mind. 🙂
Paradox, That’s exactly what the experiment says. Its in the mind. And when these kinds of studies are conducted they are about generalizations not about exceptions, I think. Some guys could kill when you toss a ball to them. Just read in newspaper few days ago, that a guy dropped some books of another guy and he got killed for that. Here they are studying about common man, not exceptional human beings.
I have very strong and contrarian opinions on this one, Alka – like it or lump it. Those who are deep and self-sufficient characters, with adequate personal interests to stay occupied with, will never feel cold, lonely, left-out or whatever: rather (and I say this from personal experience) you might discover that they prefer their own company, and that of a few select like-minded friends: otherwise, they would be glad to be left alone, and they hate crowds of noisy people who lack good manners and who have no deep, genuine, healthy interests in common. I do. And I’m sure there are some people like me too; though maybe not too many among today’s below-30s, who have grown up with very low self-esteem and no real personal interests, so they are desperate for crowds and noise and attention, however they might get it, and however trivial or uncouth it might be (like girls flaunting their ‘assets’ in order to get noticed!)
Suvro, I agree. But research studies are mostly about generalizations. And a normal individual would definitely feel left out and cold in a situation like this.