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There’s an episode of the TV show The Big Bang Theory in which one of the main characters, Howard, travels to the International Space Station, where he hangs out with NASA astronauts, experiences zero gravity, and ponders the cosmos — while his friends are stuck back on Earth. So you can imagine Howard’s excitement when he returns home, desperate to tell his gang about all the extraordinary things he did.
Howard comes home to find his friends huddled in the living room, having a pie-eating contest. He bursts through the door and says, “I’m back from space!”
His friends look up for a moment, and then in perfect unison, shove their faces back into their pie.
Howard spends the rest of the episode trying to convince people to listen to his stories from the space station, but no one wants to hear about solar flares. They’re more interested in more ordinary, earthly topics.
The joke is clearly at the expense of Howard, who lacks some social grace, but there’s a bit of Howard in all of us: We often try to dazzle our listeners with extraordinary stories, unaware that people’s eyes are glazing over, and that we’d be better off talking about a topic we all have in common.
This is the hypothesis we set out to test in a paper we published in the journal Psychological Science.
We recruited Harvard undergraduates to come into our lab in groups of four. The experiment was simple: Participants first watched a movie, and then had a 5-minute conversation. But there was a twist: Three of the four participants were randomly assigned to watch an "ordinary" movie (e.g., a low-budget animation short), while one participant was assigned to watch an "extraordinary" movie (e.g., a viral video of an amazing magician). The key to the experiment is that before participants had the conversations, we asked them to predict the future: Would they be happier during the upcoming conversation if they had watched the extraordinary movie or the ordinary film? Then we compared participants' predictions to reality. Sure enough, participants predicted that watching the extraordinary movie would make them happier. But in fact, participants who watched the extraordinary movie were significantly less happy — and the reason is that they felt excluded from the post-movie conversation.
At first, it seems paradoxical to say that extraordinary experiences can make us unhappy. How can eating Beluga caviar and drinking vintage champagne be anything other than amazing? The answer is that of course these experiences are amazing. But the key is to recognize that extraordinary experiences are amazing in the moment. They’re not so amazing once they’re over, and we go back to everyday life. That’s because extraordinary experiences make us different from other people, which means we are less able to fit in, and, as a result, less happy.
Why don’t others want to hear about our extraordinary experiences?
Maybe people are just jealous: I didn’t get to go island hopping in French Polynesia, so it makes me bitter to hear your amazing tales if you did. But while surely this is sometimes true, I think it’s too cynical, because people do seem quite curious about extraordinary experiences. The problem is that when we try to bring our extraordinary experiences to life by recounting them to other people, we don’t do a very good job. Consider a conversation I recently overheard at a coffee shop: A middle-aged guy (who looked a lot like a pirate) who had just come home from vacation was talking to a woman of similar age.
“You were in the Yucatan?” she asked him.
“It was amazing,” he said, leaning back in his chair, reliving the memory. “We went cave diving. Almost total darkness.”
“Sounds intense.”
At this point, the pirate realized he needed to illuminate cave diving for his conversation partner, but his story began, “You enter the cave systems, in these cenotes, but with the buoyancy it’s really tricky not to damage the formations.”
A flicker of confusion was visible in the woman's face as, over the next few minutes, her curiosity turned to boredom, until the only thing keeping her awake was the coffee she was sipping. This snippet shows how easy it is to bounce between the twin pitfalls of insufficient and excessive detail, and how all the usual challenges of communication are amplified when talking about extraordinary experiences, because our listeners lack context and it's so much easier to confuse them.
We of course should not start avoiding extraordinary experiences, or stop talking about them — sometimes they make for really great stories. The point is that we need to recognize that talking about such experiences is operating without a safety net. Words can always fail us, but the failures are much more spectacular when our listeners have no context for what we’re talking about. And that’s why if you start cataloging your conversations (or eavesdropping on others’), you’ll find that conversations based on ordinary topics have a surprising vitality, while conversations based on extraordinary topics tend to meet an early end.
A selfie from outer space might get a lot of likes on Instagram, but it makes a surprisingly poor topic of conversation. The mistake is confusing experiences that are amazing to have with experiences that are amazing to talk about. After all, having an extraordinary experience just requires that we stand there and let it wash over us, like a warm surf in the Maldives. But talking about an extraordinary experience is much trickier, and our words often bear little resemblance to the real thing. Conversation is something we construct together, and so it thrives on what we have in common. When you depart from this script, don’t be surprised if you end up talking to yourself.
References
Cooney, G., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2014). The unforeseen costs of extraordinary experience. Psychological Science, 25, 2259–2265.
