Social freedom shapes whose version of reality you adopt, new research suggests

New research provides evidence that the culture or social environment we live in influences whose version of the world we adopt as our own. People in settings where relationships are easily formed and broken tend to align their worldviews more selectively with people who help them achieve their goals, partly by feeling less in sync with those who don’t. The findings were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Human beings have an inherent need to make sense of the world, a process often shaped by the people around them. Psychologists refer to this merging of inner states, beliefs, and judgments as shared reality. As noted in a study covered by PsyPost in 2021, this psychological factor acts as an important bonding mechanism. It allows two people to experience the world through a common lens, deepening their connection.

People do not attempt to establish this deep mental connection with just anyone. They are often motivated to build shared reality with instrumental others, which refers to friends, family members, or colleagues who help them achieve specific personal or professional goals. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2023 indicated that experiencing a shared reality with these helpful individuals is associated with greater academic and personal success. Sharing reality with helpful people has been linked to greater confidence in one’s own abilities and may help keep those relationships intact.

The research, led by Abdo Elnakouri, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston and director of the Worldviews in Motion Lab, alongside Eli J. Finkel of Northwestern University and Abigail A. Scholer of the University of Virginia, explored how the broader cultural context might alter this dynamic. Specifically, the authors focused on a concept called relational mobility. This refers to the degree of freedom people have in a given society to form new relationships and end existing ones.

“Honestly this came as an idea to previous work our team had done on shared reality and goal success,” Elnakouri told PsyPost. “I came across the relational mobility variable through reading and going to conferences. Seemed like a possible cool extension.”

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“Research finds those in high relational mobility contexts invest more in their relationships: they express more love, give grander gifts, and reveal deeper secrets,” Elnakouri said. “In these contexts, people don’t take their relationships for granted (the person can leave!), working harder to invest in them. So it made sense that this might extend out to shared reality as well.”

In low relational mobility contexts, social networks are more rigid, and people are largely tied to their existing connections. In high relational mobility settings, by contrast, people can easily choose new ties or walk away from current ones. Elnakouri and his team suspected that when people live in highly mobile environments where partners could leave, they might feel a stronger need to secure their most beneficial relationships.

“Specifically, I wondered whether relational mobility might push people to not only invest their hearts ❤️, but also their minds 🧠 in those they care about,” Elnakouri continued. “Might people be motivated to share reality, or ‘merge minds,’ with others when in a high relationally mobile context?”

To test this idea, the researchers first analyzed an archival dataset containing responses from nearly 17,000 participants across 39 countries. Participants completed questionnaires assessing the relational mobility of their local environment. They also reported on their relationship with a close friend or romantic partner, rating how much emotional support that person provided and whether they could count on the person in times of need. In addition, they rated how much they felt the person truly understood them, which served as a basic measure for shared reality.

People who lived in more relationally mobile settings tended to report more shared reality with their close partner. This association depended on how supportive the partner was. Comparing countries, the gap arose because people in high-mobility countries reported less shared reality with less supportive partners; when the researchers instead used participants’ own perceptions of mobility, the gap arose because people reported more shared reality with supportive partners.

To build on these initial patterns, the researchers conducted two social network studies with undergraduate students at a Canadian university, 353 in the first and 277 in the second. Both samples were composed mostly of women. Instead of focusing on just one close relationship, participants nominated people they had been in contact with during the past month (up to 30 in the first study and up to five in the second), rating each person’s helpfulness for their goals and their degree of shared reality.

When looking at these broader social networks, the researchers did not find that high relational mobility predicted an overall increase in shared reality. Instead, the effects centered on the relative difference between helpful and unhelpful members of their network. In both the 39-country dataset and the network studies, the scientists also measured other types of similarity, including shared personality traits, upbringing, and geographical background, but these did not follow the same pattern, suggesting the dynamic was specific to shared reality.

In three of four analyses, students who saw their social world as highly mobile showed a bigger gap between helpful and unhelpful people in their networks. In one analysis, this gap stemmed from lower shared reality with less helpful people; in the others, the shifts with helpful and unhelpful people were not statistically significant on their own. A measure of how free participants themselves felt to leave relationships showed no such pattern, which the authors interpret as a sign that concerns about others leaving drive the effect.

“I think the fact that people seem to primarily distance themselves from those who do not support their goal in high relationally mobile contexts was interesting,” Elnakouri explained. “So when people have choices, they look to more exclusively invest in those who are invested in them. It could have been the case that people only drew closer to those who helped them with their goal instead of distancing themselves from those that didn’t.”

Because the first three datasets relied on correlational data, the authors conducted an experiment to test whether shifting perceptions of relational mobility would directly alter shared reality. They recruited 590 adults and asked them to nominate three specific people in their lives: one who was helpful for their career goals, one who was not helpful for their career, and a third newer acquaintance unrelated to their career. In a separate pilot study of 102 people, the researchers confirmed that their experimental writing task shifted how freely people felt others around them could come and go.

In the main experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the high relational mobility condition, they wrote about whether the third acquaintance might eventually drift away and leave their life. In the low relational mobility condition, they wrote about how that person might stay close and remain in their life.

Participants in the high relational mobility condition reported less shared reality with their less helpful career contacts (an average of 3.69 on a 7-point scale, compared with 4.04 in the low mobility condition). Shared reality with helpful contacts did not differ between conditions, suggesting that a sense of social fragility leads people to mentally distance themselves from less helpful ties.

“To answer that question, we find that the answer is ‘yes,’ but with one crucial caveat,” Elnakouri said, looking across the research program as a whole. “It looks like relational mobility pushes people to invest more in some relationships, yes, but also less in others.”

“The takeaway: cultures seem to shape how we see the world, but also who we look to in order to form our perceptions of the world/reality,” Elnakouri noted. “I think this is a cool connection between work on culture, shared reality, relationships, and self-regulation.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding these findings. In the first study, participants were recruited through Facebook and 86 percent were women, which may limit generalizability. In addition, the social network studies relied on student samples at a single university, and the experiment manipulated perceptions by focusing on thoughts about a single acquaintance. Study 1 also measured shared reality with a single survey question, which captures only a narrow slice of the concept; the later studies used a more complete, validated questionnaire.

Social fluidity is also just one piece of the puzzle. “Effect sizes were what you’d expect from typical social psychology studies, so there is sure to be plenty of other factors shaping our worldviews!” Elnakouri pointed out.

There is also the question of how these selective alignments impact society at large. The authors suggest that if people in fluid social environments build shared reality more selectively with those who benefit their goals, they might form insular bubbles, leading to diverging views from those outside their immediate circles. Future research could test whether more relationally mobile cultures are more prone to defensiveness, polarization, and divided worldviews.

The research team plans to continue investigating how environmental contexts and personal goals interact. “I want to continue to explore how people’s worldviews are shaped by complex dynamics across multiple levels of analysis (e.g., self-regulatory needs, cultural context) that too rarely come into conversation with one another,” Elnakouri said.

The study, “Choosing Our Reality: Relational Mobility Shapes When and With Whom People Share Reality,” was authored by Abdo Elnakouri, Eli J. Finkel, and Abigail A. Scholer.