# Shared reality: a key driver of human behavior

I once asked Robin Hanson if he really thought status-seeking was such a dominant driver of human behavior. I said humans had dozens of factors motivating their behavior, it was crazy to claim there was One Big Thing. He replied (something to the effect of) "well, even if each factor has a small effect – five percent, six percent – one of them has to be the biggest."

* * *

There's a concept I refer to as 'shared reality' that I think is up there with 'status' as something humans seek, shaping a lot (maybe ten percent?) of our behavior.

Knowing and playing with the concept of shared reality has noticeably improved my relationships and given me more surface area on many social dynamics (e.g. connection, attachment, idle banter, tribalism).

What is shared reality?
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There is a [Columbia research lab](https://cuhigginslab.com/research-areas/) that studies "shared reality"[^51y1qoagcgf] among other topics. They define it as:

> the perceived commonality of inner states with others

By example: If two people chuckle at a pun, and then *see* each other chuckling such that they *both* perceive that the other had a similar pun-chuckle-experience, they are in a state of shared reality (at least, for that pun-chuckle-experience in particular).[^3x8x2lar07r]

Shared reality is at play when people

*   go to sports events / concerts / movies together.
    *   That emotional rush when everyone cheers / sings / laughs at the same time.
*   travel / eat / dance together.
    *   That moment when you both see / eat / intuit something cool, look at each other and see you've had a similar experience, and get a rush of connection[^5mxhjckaszj].
    *   Or that moment when you have an experience and suddenly want to share it with others, so you offer 'try this!' or 'look at that!' or take a picture and share it.

### Shared reality is nice

The research literature mentions that people are 'motivated to create shared realities' but doesn't really discuss why. I think people want it because it's pleasant[^7c87gyxu1sm]. And conversely, that the opposite of shared reality (disconnected reality?) is unpleasant, and something people avoid.

This strikes me as an important part, because put together with the above definition it makes for a model that better predicts how people will behave, and what is sometimes causing people to feel better/worse.[^s5asfsh5xlm]

Here's a stab at an updated definition:

> people seek a perceived commonality of inner states with others (because it's pleasant). People try to maintain that perceived commonality and/or avoid perceived uncommonality (because failing to do so is unpleasant).

Wow, that's pretty clunky. Oh well.

Here be ~~dragons~~ reality masking puzzles[^e8rdd5h6xnl]
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As you might expect with something that involves 'people seeking a perceived X', attempts at shared reality often skip right over actually sharing an experience to merely convincing oneself/others that an experience was shared. I think this is often playing out in the various forms of conformity[^ovwtncuutk]. Some quick examples:

*   When spending the holidays with family, I often feel a gentle pressure/request to do the same activity (sit/eat/talk together), even if I’d rather be doing something else.[^ae4kxmft7z]
*   When talking with my parents about AI, I notice myself bouncing between frustrated that they don’t think about it the same way I do, and subdued/confused, agreeing that this whole thing is probably overblown. I think this flailing is motivated by a desire to connect (and fear of disconnection / not being seen and known by them)
*   Social drinking/smoking
*   Bandwagoning / groupthink

I've developed a kind of backing-away immune response to many of these conformity / shared reality pressures[^oty4jd17im]. I think this is from a mix of baseline skepticism and recent attempts to draw personal boundaries. But in my efforts to avoid the downsides of shared reality, I have developed a kind of auto-immune disorder to the otherwise nice thing of connecting with other people.

Is shared reality incompatible with truth-seeking?
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I think they can be compatible, at least a modified version of shared reality. Step #1 is probably coming to terms with the bad news.

**The bad news:** Our experiences are not the same. There will always be dimensions of our experience that are different. We can try to run away from this fact or pave over it, but the reality of the situation will haunt us until we face it.[^sx28nxy6yhr]

**The good news:** We share the same world. We don't have to force ourselves to have the same direct experience, we can share an *understanding* of each other's experience.

If Ben loves cooking but Ada doesn't, they can still share reality in their understanding that Ben loves cooking. Ben's experience of cooking is a real part of the world that Ada can earnestly seek to understand and get the warm-fuzzies of connecting with Ben.[^7bybvj91wuv][^fp60b0djy2c][^amaskaupq8]

Or in another approach, Tory Higgins[^z032e306i99] suggests that instead of sharing the same evaluation (Ben is good/bad at cooking) you can share attention (the Ben <> cooking thing).

Using shared reality in my relationship
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My partner and I have worked with this cluster of concepts over the past couple years, and it has noticeably reduced tension and increased connection.

Some notes:

*   Previously, we'd often feel a little bad if we were having different experiences (and would also feel bad from the resulting pressure to change our experience to match the others')
*   I think we noticed this and at some point, started to make explicit declarations that it was OK to have different experiences.[^8kywbv5zjs]
*   This didn't help much initially, I think partially because we didn't quite mean it and partially because we didn't know how to connect when we had different experiences. 
*   The shared reality concept entered around this point, and we started to notice how when we made a bid for attention, often our specific desire was to share the same experience.
    *   This also came with some sadness and mourning at the realization that the thing we wanted wasn't real/possible
*   With practice, we found a way to earnestly share and witness each others' experience that gave the warm-fuzzies of connection, without feeling forced to shape our experience to match the other.[^vz9b8k07sdc]
*   Over time, a virtuous cycle emerged that eased some long-standing tense disconnection and left us more secure/connected and free
*   Nowadays, this looks like a comment my partner made this morning: “I had an urge to thank you for putting up these lights, but I realize I mostly want to share my experience of how they are nice.” Previously I found expressions of gratitude uncomfortable because it often felt like an ambiguous request was being made, but this one was nice!

Note: this is not a guide for how to improve relationship dynamics. I'm using these as examples, not instructions. [^n0yt46oe4s]

and beyond
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I've also had success using this in my relationships with my family[^rge1vtpzq2]. My mom doesn't have a concept of shared reality, but I can still use it on my end. So when she reaches out and asks me what I'm doing at my job, I can take that as an invitation for me to share my reality. If I don't feel like talking about my work, I can instead share whatever else is going on, like a story about roller blading around San Francisco.

Maybe I'm weird/neuroatypical/whatever, but I've been amazed that ignoring the content of the question (how is work?) and instead replying directly to my guess of the meta-content (could we connect / share reality?) gets a much better response.

[^51y1qoagcgf]: I think they're pointing at the same concept as the one I'm using, but it feels like I'm looking at the concept from a slightly different direction. I get into this more in footnote 5 

[^3x8x2lar07r]: Note there's an additional dynamic in this example that I think isn't encapsulated in the definition (but is a useful gear of the model): being in common knowledge about the shared inner state amplifies the experience of shared reality. 

[^5mxhjckaszj]: Yes I think shared reality is pointing to the same thing as connection, but it's a more mechanistic (and predictive) model of what's going on. And the name points to the dynamic more than 'connection' does, so I like it.  

[^7c87gyxu1sm]: I encourage you to check your own experience to see if this is the case. A couple people have noted that 'it's pleasant' doesn't add much to the model, but it helps me borrow from a lot of models I have of pleasure/displeasure dynamics, which better predict when and why people will try to share reality. I also often model it as a 'need' à la NVC or love languages 

[^s5asfsh5xlm]: This pleasant/unpleasant frame seems different than the academic literature, or at least what I've read Papers on synonymous concepts are mostly describing a phenomenon, like social tuning where people tune their beliefs about themselves and the world to better fit the beliefs of people around them. Tory Higgins, the lead of that Columbia lab who co-authored a book called Shared Reality goes the extra step of looking behind the phenomena at the fundamental 'motivation' to share reality, and then goes on to wax poetic about how this makes humans special and underlies most of society's successes and ills.  

[^e8rdd5h6xnl]: I understand reality masking puzzles to be instances when you get positive feedback for obscuring the truth, and so your map of reality gets worse and worse. These are contrasted with reality-revealing puzzles, which reward you for discovering the truth. See this post, thanks to Anna Salamon for the excellent concept 

[^ovwtncuutk]: Check out the see also section of the Wikipedia page and the blue boxes at the bottom) for even more concepts. What's up with this cluster of behaviors? 

[^ae4kxmft7z]: I've gotten mileage out of reframing this dynamic as a bid for a shared reality stag hunt. It's very nice to have shared reality with your whole family, and worth paying some cost to give it a shot. 

[^oty4jd17im]: I have a pet theory that this immune response gets compounded when your experience is significantly different from your peers (e.g. if you're neuroatypical) because you often get the negative experience of 'unshared' reality. So your experience of shared reality pressures is that people try to manipulate you into believing false things in a way that's alienating/unpleasant. Rather than a pleasant low-key social dynamic, which is I think how most people experience it. 

[^sx28nxy6yhr]: This is a pretty lonely realization. Hot take: lots of individual and collective effort goes into avoiding this realization, like drinking alcohol which 'lowers inhibitions' in part by making me assume that everyone is generally friendly and on the same page as me. 

[^7bybvj91wuv]: Unfortunately I think it's not as much of a rush as when you believe someone is perfectly sharing your experience, but that rush is also creating the disappointment you will feel later when you realize that in fact it was not a perfectly shared experience. I think in the long run the shared understanding version leads to a more wholesome, solid kind of social happiness. 

[^fp60b0djy2c]: I think Non-Violent Communication and Circling both practice this kind of earnest witnessing, where you try to to understand the other person's needs/experience, and attempt to share your own. 

[^amaskaupq8]: Of course, you can also play around with sharing direct experience. Sharing food, movies, dancing, adventures, rituals, singing, climbing trees... all of these are lovely sources of shared reality warm-fuzzies. But I suggest holding the connection lightly, because otherwise you might find yourself in a furious argument about whether Risk is a good board game because you don't want to lose shared reality with your childhood friends. 

[^z032e306i99]: In the epilogue of his book, he talks about how shared reality pressure causes increased political polarization. He's excited about the possibility of people with different politics sharing reality over how guns/abortion/etc are important and worthy of attention (even if their opinions about the content differ). 

[^8kywbv5zjs]: This (and other things like "I welcome your X") was stumbling in the way a lot of NVC / circling / authentic relating stuff is stumbling at the beginning. But I expect it helped to start practicing (and notice what was weird and improve from there). 

[^vz9b8k07sdc]: 'Free' feels apt... previously I think we both felt a little trapped by a pressure to squish our preferences and experiences into shapes that better matched each other. Deviating felt like putting our connection and relationship at risk. 

[^n0yt46oe4s]: Please don't just attempt to 'witness your partners experience' as the solution to your problems, I expect it'll go wrong. We're using tons of different little techniques borrowed from all over the place, surely many of them are crucial and not mentioned here. 

[^rge1vtpzq2]: And also many other domains like around the office, hanging with friends, etc. but this post is getting too long.