Concept
Shared Experience Amplification
social-bonding wellbeing perception
Experiences — even purely sensory ones like tasting food — are felt more intensely when shared with another person than when experienced alone, independent of the experience itself changing in any way.
Patrick Fagan cites a 2014 Yale study in which 23 female undergraduates tasted the same dark chocolate bar twice: once in the company of another person doing the same task simultaneously, and once alone while completing an unrelated task (viewing artwork). Participants rated the identical chocolate as 28% less tasty when eaten alone than when eaten with someone else (see Boothby Clark Bargh Shared-Chocolate Study). Fagan connects this to the everyday observation that a meal often tastes noticeably better at a restaurant, surrounded by other diners, than the same meal eaten alone at home.
Fagan draws on this principle to explain why some of his most memorable "Just Do Stuff" experiences were the social ones (a cuddle workshop, a My Little Pony convention, a BDSM nightclub visited as an observer) rather than solitary ones (a solo bungee jump, which he found comparatively boring) — see Patrick Fagan Just Do Stuff Year-Long Experiment Case.
Discussed in
- Episode 241 — 241-a-year-long-happiness-experiment-try-one-new-thing-a-week-did-it-work