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Written By: Editorial Team | Published : October 6, 2014 12:48 PM IST
According to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. those who share extraordinary experiences might, in turn, end up feeling worse.
The study, carried out by Cooney and colleagues, included 68 participants who were divided in groups of four. In each of the four groups, one participant was assigned to watch a highly-rated '4-star' video of a street magician performing for a crowd, while the other three participants were assigned to watch a lower-rated '2-star' animated video. All participants were aware about each other's video assignments. After watching the videos, the participants sat around a table and had a 5-minute unstructured conversation.
It was observed that participants who watched the 4-star video, supposedly the 'extraordinary experiencers' reported feeling worse after the group discussion than did those who watched the 2-star video, who felt more excluded during the discussion. Participants in two additional studies were asked to imagine how either they or another person would feel as an extraordinary experiencer taking part in the first study. As expected, they mistakenly predicted that the person who had the extraordinary experience would feel better than the ordinary experiencers throughout the whole experiment. Not only that, they predicted that they would talk more during the post-movie discussion, and would not feel excluded.
According to psychological scientist and study author Gus Cooney of Harvard University, extraordinary experiences may be pleasurable for a moment but could leave one socially worse off in the long run. Cooney continued that the participants in their study mistakenly thought that having an extraordinary experience would make people the star of the conversation but they were wrong, because to be extraordinary was to be different than other people, and social interaction is grounded in similarities.
With inputs from ANI
Photo source: Getty images
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