Curbs counterintuitively, that is, and just to be clear up front, it's not Bungie's Halo 3 or some other "surprise-surprise" popular shoot-em-up, but rather something specially designed by McGill University researchers to boost personal self-confidence by modifying players' perceptions of social threats. It's not just some odd little pet project either, but rather a serious study whose results appear in the October issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
McGill University researcher Mark Baldwin and a team of graduates have drafted several games designed to emphasize positive feedback in potentially negative social situations. Designed to train the mind "to orient more toward positive aspects of social life," the games are based on the emerging field of "social intelligence" which theorizes that much of our daily stress comes from the way we perceive the world in social terms. The initial study, which involved selecting the one smiling face among several other frowning as quickly as possible, showed a 17 percent reduction in cortisol production after a week. Cortisol is the hormone produced by the adrenal gland in response to stress.
Aside from the irony that you can make a career out of testing a theory most of us take as common sense, the study certainly jibes with my experience of the world. We're awash in socially cue-less information. I monitor hundreds of news feeds daily (and less than you'd think are game-related) and rarely interact in person with people that aren't (a) my family, (b) my friends, or (c) my wife. The phone rarely rings, because it's so much easier to send email, never mind that I'll in most cases never see or hear the person on the other end of the transaction. On the side, I manage the official website of a major UK author, a project I launched back in 2003. We'd corresponded by email more or less daily for years, spoke on the phone once, but I only just met him in person this summer. How much more time do we spend today than 10 or even five years ago sitting in front of computers tapping out linguistic symbols intended to convey meaning to someone we can't (and may never) see or hear?
On the other hand, I often meet more people online in a typical month than I did "growing up offline," which for me, extended through high school. Online gaming, email, message boards, blogs, news sites, social networking, messaging tools -- pretty much any place you can publicly scrawl something these days, you're bumping into people you've never met, each and every one just as opinionated as you. Do you feel social affirmation when people agree with you? Social rejection when they don't? How about when you're totally ignored? Do you ever wonder what email feedback like "Thanks for the help!" really means if it isn't followed by a smiley-face emoticon? How many social flare-ups at work could you put down to misunderstandings vis-a-vis text-only conversations?
Humans are physiologically designed to integrate subtle social cues. Voice inflection, speech rhythms, physical gestures, facial expressions, etc. Our brains process innumerable signals when engaging in face-to-face social interaction. What do you suppose they do when you strip 99.9% of those signals away?
I have a friend (a musician) who talks about the mild sense of rejection he feels when music studio producers who've told him to email over lunch or coffee or at random gigs don't email back. I know of writers who use a different return address (usually a P.O. box number) so they can check for acceptance letters (but mostly rejections -- hey, it's the norm for even the best writers!) only when they're psychologically prepared to. Aside from competitive online gaming, e.g. live text or voice chats, probably the best place to watch the social tragicomedy play out today is on message boards, the closest you can get in the warp and woof of anonymous textual interaction to a mobocratic playground. (If you doubt the latter, just imagine top world leaders trying to settle an issue like arms control on your favorite online forum.)
The McGill study is more wide-ranging, of course, and purports to cover anything from fear of public speaking to meeting new people to helping athletes perform better. I stress online interaction only because it's uniquely cue-less and, depending on the lateral applicability of the study's results, probably presents the greatest social challenge going forward as more of us spend more time meeting more people whose personas amount to abstract strings of characters