Ben Rine

And so in much the same way, we have evolved to really love being around each other from both sides, the dogs too, because it's good for our survival.

Yeah, so if you think about, there's sort of like steps to this, where the top step might be an in-person interaction.

You go a step down, it's a video call.

You go a step down, it's a phone call.

You go a step down, it's a text message.

And as we move down this sort of staircase, we're losing social cues.

So from in-person to video call, you lose eye contact.

It's not possible to make eye contact online, unless you're looking at the camera, but then you're not making eye contact.

Then you go to a phone call, you lose the facial expressions, body language, you go down to a text message, you're losing vocal tone.

And so the reason I outline this is because when we interact with another human, the way that our brains know we are interacting with someone is through those important social cues, facial expressions, vocal tone, body language.

Those signals are what turn on the brain's social areas, like the areas that drive empathy, for instance, and help us understand what the other person is thinking.

so when you gradually strip away those important cues and you kind of flatten the texture of our interactions down to a text message where it's just words or you know on twitter or x which just words we're losing a lot of the important information that tells our brains this is a social interaction and also that tells our brains this person on the other side of this interaction has feelings and here's what those feelings are and so i

believe it makes a lot of sense that as we strip away that texture we wouldn't get as much out of the interaction we probably wouldn't stimulate those social reward systems quite as much and that is what the data suggests so far that actually the less lifelike the interaction is so text messages left less lifelike than a video call for instance the less life like it is the less enjoyment people get out of it the they don't feel quite as good coming out of it however

A text message, for instance, is still better than no interaction at all.

So there's really this kind of gradient of quality that corresponds with how much we get out of the interaction on a kind of neurobiological basis as well.

And I also, I really...

argue this point that because our empathy systems are not engaging, we do not experience as much empathy online and social media because we can't witness those social cues.

And I think that may be why the Internet is so hostile, why people are so prone to leaving mean comments, posting harassing posts, all sorts of things.

There's a really high rise in this recently.

And I think it's because our empathy systems are really not turning on in this social format that we've designed online.