When we reflect on the social fabric of our lives, we tend to focus on the most impactful relationships — best friends, lovers, family. These feel to us like the anchors of happiness and well-being.
The helping professions have a similar focus. Research shows that, for adolescents, the quality of romantic and best-friend relationships is among the stronger predictors of mental health issues. For adults, both high quality friendships and romantic relationships correlate with subjective happiness.
Perhaps nowhere does this focus on “big deal” relationships stand in sharper relief than in marriage and relationship counseling, a $26 billion per year industry that feeds over 120,000 therapists in the U.S. alone.
Clearly we put a lot of stock in a few close relationships. Estimates are that most people have no more than about five individuals in their innermost social circle, and many people get by just fine with as few as three. One factor keeping the inner circle small is time: It’s estimated to require about 200 hours of interaction to forge one close friendship. That’s an investment you can’t manage with a whole lot of people.
Now, in behavioral terms, social acquaintances are sources of reinforcement. Back in the 1970s Gerald Patterson conceptualized marital relationships in terms of reinforcer exchange and developed an approach to marital therapy that emphasized making marital interactions more mutually reinforcing. More recently, Psychologist John Gottman has made a name for himself with a similar framework that is readily translatable into reinforcement terms.
In contemporary ABA, we adopt a similar approach when teaching social skills to people with autism and finding ways to make their social interactions reinforcing. When comparing friendships involving persons with autism and neurotypical individuals, both similarities and differences have been reported, but obviously the existence of friendships is considered to be an important part of healthy development.
I take issue with none of the above except to say that our view of relationships and social interactions may be incomplete. Consider this anecdote from University of Sussex Psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, as related in a National Public Radio interview. Sandstrom had begun a graduate program after working for a decade as a computer programmer:
“I was 10 years older than my fellow students [and] I wasn’t sure I was meant to be there. I didn’t instantly feel like a part of that community.” Enter the hot dog lady. On her daily walk from one university building to another, Sandstrom would pass a hot dog stand. “I never bought a hot dog, but every time I walked past, I would smile and wave at her and she’d smile and wave at me” … She made me feel happy… I felt better after seeing her and worse if she wasn’t there.”
That experience led Sandstrom to study what she calls minimal social interactions: brief, seemingly unimportant connections with other people, often strangers, that happen in passing. Compared to the social reinforcers of big-deal relationships, minimal social interactions are likely of lower quality and intensity. They are momentary and unitary, whereas inner-circle relationships involve complex exchange-of-reinforcer systems involving lots of different kinds of social reinforcement spread out across multiple time frames. Despite these differences, Sandstrom’s research shows that the volume of minimal interaction correlates with well-being.
Other research seems to point in the same direction. For instance, in general the larger the city the lower the population rate of depression. A possible reason: As a city’s population rises, so too does the number of social contacts a person is likely to have. There is even a quantitative law called the “12% Rule.” For each order of magnitude in population growth, city residents experience a 12% increase in social contacts. From a recent article in Psyche magazine:
If residents of a city of 1 million people averaged 43 social contacts within the same city, then residents of a city of 10 million people would be expected to average 63 social contacts. Why is this important for depression? For about 10 years, we have known that the number of social contacts people have is strongly associated with the risk for depression: the more people you interact with, the lower your risk of experiencing depressive symptoms.
Note that we’re talking about far more different contacts than that close circle of 3-5 friends mentioned previously (indeed, the inner circle of city people is not larger than that of rural people). Thus, most of the increase in contacts accounted for the by the 12% Rule would appear to involve minimal social interactions.
All told, our societal (and clinical) obsession with close relationships overlooks a major source of reinforcement, and raises interesting theoretical questions focused on how minimal interactions — those smallest units of social reinforcement, or atoms of happiness — contribute to the overall picture of well being.
Let’s discuss this in terms of general reinforcement principles. It’s been demonstrated that social reinforcers work pretty much like other reinforcers in concurrent schedule arrangements. In other words, the matching law applies to social reinforcers (e.g., see this study and this study from John Borrero). Given two sources of social reinforcement, we will invest more social “effort” into the richer one.
However, the relevant studies showing this effect standardize the type and quality of social reinforcement (the sources differ in frequency of occurrence only). And we’ve already established that minimal social interactions and “maximal” interactions likely differ in a variety of ways. In behavioral economic terms, are these two types of reinforcement substitutes? To state that question more casually, is it possible that having a lot of minimal social interactions could make up for having fewer close relationships? As far as I’m aware, our clinical literature is moot on this point, but given how much less response cost is involved in minimal social interactions, this would seem to be an important issue to resolve for a discipline that supposedly is all about enhancing well being. It would be of great practical value to know whether there are different recipes for happiness, perhaps involving different proportions of minimal interactions and close relationships.
For what it’s worth, our basic theoretical models suggest that reinforcer substitutes are pretty common. For instance, the generalized matching law seems to hold up pretty well when concurrent schedules involve qualitatively different types of reinforcement. But the relevant studies tend to involve nonhumans, and I’m not aware of many human experiments that simultaneously vary the type, frequency, duration, and quality of reinforcement, as the minimal-versus-maximal social interaction question seems to imply.
I asked Peter Killeen, master of quantitative models of behavior and author of an early study suggesting the matching law applies to social behavior, about whether the collective value of many small, low quality social reinforcers could match or even exceed that of fewer, high quality social reinforcers. Peter pointed out that discounting theory speaks to this — in other words, minimal and maximal social interactions also differ in terms of delay to and probability of occurrence. Peter concluded that, “If you just think in terms of decreasing marginal utility, you have to be right. Many little reinforcers should add up to more utility than the same time in one big one. (But then, what does math know of love?)” For the stout of heart, I strongly recommend Peter’s excellent review article, “Discounting and the portfolio of desires,” for the basis of his reasoning.
More generally, in whatever fashion minimal social interactions may trade off against close relationships, it seems to me that a discipline concerned with social skills and social behavior probably ought to know more than we appear to about minimal social interactions and their collective role in happiness and well being. This seems a fertile area for future behavioral research, but a good start is catching up on the existing work in this area, hence Postscripts 1 and 2 below.
Postscript 1
Quick and casual introductions to the concept of minimal social interactions:
- National Public Radio: “Why a stranger’s hello can do more than just brighten your day“
- The Atlantic: “The surprising benefits of talking to strangers“
Postscript 2
Gillian Sandstrom’s research on minimal social interactions
Postscript 3: A connection to burnout?
Last year I wrote on the growing problem of burnout among applied behavior analysts. The present topic could well be relevant to that problem. Consider that a widely-acknowledged contributor to burnout is ratio strain — having too much to do in too little time, something that happens frequently in a lot of practices, especially some operated by investors who have no particular passion for ABA (or concern for the well being of practitioners). As the client list grows longer and days remain the same length, what gets crowded out? I’m guessing that among the casualties are pleasant minimal interactions with co-workers and clients. Not only that, but when people leave work exhausted they may lack the energy for activities that provide access to additional minimal interactions — going out to eat or taking walks in the park or hitting the gym whatever. If the equation for burnout includes too much work and too little reinforcement, then to properly characterize the problem we must consider not just the Big Reinforcers, like pay and job advancement, but all sources. If I’m right, then a workplace that programs for frequent minimal social interactions could well inoculate against burnout.