A climb, a staircase, a sloping road can seem like an insurmountable wall at certain moments, and an almost pleasant path at others. For years the psychology of perception has studied why this happens on a physiological level – weight to carry, age, tiredness – but a study published in 2008 on Journal of Experimental Social Psychology tried to answer a more unusual question: can the presence, or even just the thought, of a person who loves us be enough to literally change what we see?
It must be said right from the start that the experimental paradigm on which this line of research is based it is not free from methodological criticismwhich we will discuss later, although the specific effect related to social support held up to at least one independent replication.
How the brain deforms reality based on perceptions: the study on slopes
The starting point is this study by Dennis Proffitt and colleagues, who since the 1990s have documented how the visual perception of slopes is not an objective and fixed datum, but depends on the energy resources available to the viewer: those who are elderly, tired or forced to carry extra weight estimate steeper climbs than those who are young, rested or without weights on them. According to this so-called “action economy”, the brain exaggerates the difficulty of an obstacle in proportion to the actual effort it would cost to overcome it.
Simone Schnall, Kent Harber, Jeanine Stefanucci and Proffitt himself wondered whether the same mechanism also applies to a non-physical but relational resource: social support. To find out, they conducted two experiments reported in this work.
The first experiment: the hill, the backpack, the friend
Thirty-four University of Virginia students were observed standing in front of a hill, with a slope of 26 degrees. All participants – those who were alone and those who were in company – were made to wear a backpack filled with weights equal to 20% of their body weight: it served to create the same condition of effort for everyone. Those who were in company estimated the slope as less steep than those who were alone. The most curious fact concerns the duration of the friendship: the longer the two knew each other, the less steep the climb seemed to them.
It’s a result consistent with the idea that social support matters, but it alone doesn’t prove it: the participants weren’t randomly assigned to the “alone” or “couple” condition — they were already friends, or already alone, when they were recruited on the street, so there may be other factors (personality, for example) behind the observed effect.
The second experiment of the study
The second experiment used true randomization. Thirty-six students at the University of Plymouth spent two minutes imagining a loved one, a supportive person, or a neutral acquaintance (a shop assistant often seen but never really met), or someone who had let them down in a time of need. Only later, with the same type of backpack, did they estimate the slope of a hill as 29 degrees. Those who had thought about the loved one saw the climb as less steep than the other two conditions — and the effect may have been explained by the perceived warmth and closeness towards that person.
In both studies, however, the illusion affected only the explicit estimates — the verbal and the visual ones. If the participants were asked to blindly adjust, with just the palm of their hand, a tablet tilted until it corresponded to the slope of the hill, the presence – or the thought – of the friend did not change anything: the estimate remained close to reality. It is a dissociation that recalls the distinction, well known in neuroscience, between the visual path that generates our conscious awareness and the one that guides movements without passing through thought: the brain softens what we think we see, but does not deceive the system that makes us move our feet in the right place.
How much does this discovery hold up today
The specific effect of social support surpassed at least one independent replication, published years later, that confirmed it — finding that it takes just a text message to a friend to get it. The broader paradigm on which the study is based, however – the idea that a physical weight changes perception, not just the effort required – has remained at the center of a debate among researchers for years: some have shown that a similar effect can be obtained just by making participants believe what the experiment expects of them, without any real perceptual change. Proffitt responded by defending the original approach, but the discussion remains open.
What emerges most clearly, in the end, is that company in itself is not enough: the quality of the relationship counts. And our body, meanwhile, is not fooled.
