In the age of technology, how do we replenish our social connections when we feel disconnected from our friends and acquaintances?
Feeling socially disconnected may lead us to lower our threshold for determining that another being is animate or alive, according to new research.
"This increased sensitivity to animacy suggests that people are casting a wide net when looking for people they can possibly relate to - which may ultimately help them maximise opportunities to renew social connections," explained psychological scientist and lead researcher Katherine Powers from the Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
As social beings, we have an intrinsic motivation to pay attention to and connect with other people.
"We wanted to examine the influence of this social motive on one of the most basic aspects of perception: deciding whether or not a face is alive," Powers stressed.
Powers and colleagues asked 30 college students to view faces which were actually morphs created by combining inanimate faces (such as a doll's face) with human faces.
The findings revealed that desire for social connections was associated with a lower threshold for animacy.
"In other words, participants who had high scores on the social connections measure did not need to see as many human-like features in a face order to decide that it was alive," Powers maintained.
In an another experiment, some students were told that their future lives would be isolated and lonely while others were told their lives would contain long-lasting, stable relationships.
"As expected, students who had been told they would be isolated and lonely showed lower thresholds for animacy than those who were told they would have long-lasting relationships," the authors stated.
"These findings not only enhance our understanding of the factors that contribute to face perception, mind perception and social relationships, but also shed light on newer types of relationships that have emerged in the modern age, Powers concluded
The paper was published in the journal Psychological Science.
