Screen Worlds and Emotional Reality

People—actors, athletes, politicians, personalities—who appear on TV or on social media often receive mail from viewers and “followers.” The messages can be intensely emotional; they range from declarations of undying love to hate-filled threats.

The undying love can be creepy, even dangerous. For example, an “admirer” tried to break into model Gigi Hadid’s apartment in New York five times. The messages HE left on her FaceBook page, included, “I love you. I know everything now. Wait for me, soulmate.”

Hate-filled threats are even scarier than unwanted love, and it doesn’t take much to generate them. A Green bay Packers wide receiver received death threats on FaceBook after a fumble that cost his team a game.

Why would anyone invest so much emotion in a stranger? Pathological explanations abound, but the behavior is perfectly normal from an evolutionary perspective.

Humans are designed to interact intensely with one another. Cooperation was essential for survival in hunter-gatherer times. We no longer live in bands, but the drive to connect is coded in our genes. For many fans, a football team elicits all the emotions that evolved in hunter-gatherer bands—a sense of affiliation and belonging, gratitude when the team wins, shame when it loses. Indeed, the team becomes a kind of band, and all the fans are members. When a player makes a mistake it feels like a betrayal.

But death threats? They certainly don’t promote solidarity or cooperation. But as anthropologist Lorna Marshall tells us in Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers (1971), among the !Kung Bushmen, talking not only “keeps up good, open communication among the members of the band,” but it also “...serves as the principal sanction in social discipline” [italics added] (p. 351). Are the hate-mailers trying to maintain “social discipline” in the band according to their sense of order? They can’t possibly believe, consciously, that a football player will never fumble again if they threaten him or that a politician with whom they disagree will mend his or her ways if they express their dissatisfaction forcefully enough. They are, rather, acting out an ancient impulse designed to make sure that no one will ever betray the band again.

The worlds that appear on our screens are designed by clever, gifted individuals to appear real and to activate in the viewer the entire suite of human emotions. The screen worlds are designed to deceive. Why be surprised that many watchers are taken in and form “relationships” (in their own minds) with the people they see on the screen? These relationships feel real, because they activate real emotions (see our blog “Are We Inured to Lies?”).

People in the TV and social media industries—and many economists—claim that viewers are easily able to distinguish between simulated reality and the real thing. Indeed, some people do this automatically. But others don’t make the distinction. For them, the on-screen world is just as real a part of their environment as their next door neighbor. They respond to what they see on screen as they would to a situation in which they are personally involved. After all, it’s only human.