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world of friends
Study: Folks include TV characters in universe
By Mike Jasik
Have a lot of friends, do you?
Perhaps not as many as you think—at least if you’re a heavy TV watcher.
That’s the suggestion of a just-published study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
In the study, Kanazawa argues that humans are unable to distinguish between real people and the people they see on TV and end up unconsciously conflating the two.
He bases his hypothesis on a central tenet of evolutionary psychology: the idea that human brains are best able to process the stimuli that they evolved to recognize tens of thousands of years ago.
Stimuli that were not present at the beginning of human evolution—during what Kanazawa terms the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, or EEA—are less readily digested.
TV, of course, did not exist in the EEA. If early man had regular contact with another person, it was most likely because that person was a friend or relative.
“So our brain is predisposed to think that people we see on TV are our real friends, and 'spending time' with them is equivalent to spending time with real friends in real life,” says Kanazawa.
He substantiates his thesis with copious amounts of data culled from the 1993 U.S. General Social Survey.
The survey shows, among other things, that people who have a large number of friends they see often are more likely to express satisfaction with their friendships.
Kanazawa says that an analysis of the different viewing habits of men and women supports his claims.
"Past research, including my own, has shown that women are more likely to have kin among their close friends, whereas men are more likely to have co-workers among theirs," he says.
His analysis hinges on the assumption, admittedly shaky, that sitcoms and dramas by and large revolve around familial relationships, while news programs depict people in the workplace.
Kanazawa found that women who watched greater than average amounts of dramas and sitcoms were more likely to profess satisfaction with their friendships.
Similarly, men who watched more news programs and newsmagazines expressed more satisfaction with their friendships.
The same was not true when the situation was reversed, ie., men who watched lots of sitcoms and dramas were not more likely to be happy with their friendships, nor were female news junkies.
Taken together, Kanazawa believes this means that seeing actors on television in situations familiar to each gender as a friendship environment leads people to conclude unconsciously that they are part of that environment.
He links the rise of TV viewing to the decline of other forms of community activity.
"Watching TV is our form of participating in civic groups because we don't really know that we are not participating in them," he writes.
While admitting to being intrigued with the study and its claims, professor Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television, takes issue with Kanazawa’s methods and conclusions.
"You can't make these kind of gross over-generalizations about men and women," says Thompson, emphasizing that men and women do not create relationships in strict spheres of life, like family and home.
"Unless the results say men and women are like this all the time, you can't make a conclusion."
Thompson also disputes the idea that dramas and sitcoms can be divided between familial and workplace situations, when many programs depict both aspects of life.
Kanazawa contends that his "generalizations" about men and women derive from basic human nature.
"This is a reflection of the importance of male-male coalitions for political purposes for all male primates, and the need for help from kin in childrearing for female primates. It should therefore be true among
unemployed males and female CEOs," he says.
"The same pattern--males more likely to have friends among nonkin equals and females to have friends among kin--hold for chimpanzees and bonobos, and they don't 'work.'"
He also says it doesn't matter that some dramas and comedies may include a work element.
"[Dramas and sitcoms] don't all have to be about families. They just have to be more likely to depict families than evening news."
Kanazawa's study is featured in the May 2002 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior, the official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
May 13, 2002
© 2002 Media Life-
Mike Jasik is a staff writer for Media Life.
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