It seems to me that people have three major ways how to achieve the shared reality:
The ideal scenario is that two or more people meet, and they discover that by coincidence they have the same opinions, are in the same mood, etc. This is more likely to happen, if you have many people who already share the situation, for example classmates.
If this doesn't happen naturally, the usual thing is that one person, probably the one with the most dominant personality, declares "reality is X", and the remaining people accept "X" as the reality. This creates some tension; the other people are on some level aware that accepting "X" is just their payment to avoid feeling alone. (Ironically, if two people feel the same tension, and share that feeling, they now have a shared reality "we say X, but we actually feel Y". (More ironically, something this can become the dominant reality; hypothetically there could be a group where everyone publicly declares "X" and privately says "actually Y; I was only saying X because of the social pressure". But I think that usually there is someone who really believes in X, or who believes that the belief in X is desirable.))
And then there are people who are unwilling or unable to accept other people's realities, but also lack the skill to impose their own reality on others, and their remaining option is just to keep looking until one day they hopefully find someone who already shares their reality.
Now of course these are not exclusive, many people probably do a combination of all three.
EDIT:
Seems like I forgot an important option:
or maybe it's just a subtype of the first option (conformity). Sometimes there is a leader and everyone else moves towards the leader; sometimes there is no leader and everyone moves towards the center of the group.
You seem to be framing shared reality as implicitly competitive, where individuals must assert or demur on what something is or means. If you fix a component of reality this can be somewhat true, but I think this will tend to make people think of the totality of possible realities under discussion as fixed. As a result, you seem to focus on control over territory on the small island of reality, whereas I would describe it as simultaneously paying attention to the same drop of water coming out of a fire hose. The adopt/push dichotomy also seems a poor match for OP's experience, such as here:
With practice, we found a way to earnestly share and witness each others' experience that gave the warm-fuzzies of connection, without feeling forced to shape our experience to match the other.
Relatedly, you seem to be claiming that individuals can only see reality from a single perspective. This doesn't seem right - people seem to be fully capable of containing conflicting perspectives about a single thing simultaneously (internal family systems is a framework where this is especially obvious).
It looks like you intended for the methods of achieving a shared reality to be exhaustive, but IMO the easiest way to create a shared reality is to genuinely experience the same thing at the same time in the same way as someone else. OP's description of being in a concert, for example, seems a weird activity to put into "prefer to interact with people who already live in the same reality". Instead, it seems more about creating contexts in which you and others will experience the same reality.
Thanks, I seem to have a blind spot here. About two things:
But how do people decide whether to adopt what they perceive to be their companion's shared reality?
It seems like that's an obvious entry point for considerations of status.
Can you say more about why you call this shared reality? Most of the examples seem to me more like wanting someone to have the same emotion you are having (especially joy) in response to the same stimulus. Which is indeed great, but I think calling it reality obscures more than it illuminates.
Example: right now your parents don't share your beliefs or feelings about AI. I agree that's not a shared reality. But I would call it a shared reality if they were close to your beliefs (that AI is imminently dangerous) whether or not they shared your emotional reaction.
I think this isn't just a naming issue, that despite me agreeing with basically all of your recommendations we have somewhat different gears in our models and the differences are interesting. But I could definitely be wrong, I go in loops when trying to explain the differences.
Sure! The main reason I use the term is because it already exists in the literature. That said, I seem to be coming at the concept from a slightly different angle than the 'shared reality' academics. I'm certainly not attached to the term, I'd love to hear more attempts to point at this thing.
I think the 'reality' is referring to the subjective reality, not the world beyond ourselves. When I experience the world, it's a big mashup of concepts, maps, visuals, words, emotions, wants, etc.
Any given one of those dimensions can be more or less 'shared', so some people could get their yummies from sharing concepts unrelated to their emotions. In your example, I think if my parents had something closer to my beliefs, I'd have more of the nice shared reality feeling (but would probably quickly get used to it and want more).
Some side notes, because apparently I can't help myself:
Thank you! I still find the term "shared reality" referring to subjective emotional state confusing, to the point it's confusing other people don't have this objection. I want to push for separating "shared facts" and "shared feelings", held back only by the fact that I don't understand why other people don't think this is obvious so it feels like I'm missing something.
I tentatively propose "emotional resonance" for the feeling of shared emotions. Sounds like "shared reality" is already claimed by academia and maybe has conntations I don't want, maybe the factual aspects can be covered by "shared facts" or "shared worldview" (which would include value judgements).
Hmm, I want a term that refers to all those many dimensions together, since for any given 'shared reality' experience it might be like 30% concepts, 30% visual & auditory, 30% emotion/values, etc.
I'm down to factor them out and refer to shared emotions/facts/etc, but I still want something that gestures at the larger thing. Shared experience I think could do the trick, but feels a bit too subjective because it often involves interpretations of the world that feel like 'true facts' to the observer.
Wherein I write more, because I'm excited about all this:
The first time I heard the term 'shared reality' was in this podcast with Bruce Ecker, the guy who co-wrote Unlocking the Emotional Brain. He was giving an example of how a desire for 'shared reality' can make it hard to come to terms with e.g. emotional trauma.
by believing the parent's negative messages to you (either verbal or behavioral), you're staying in shared reality: and that's a big aspect of attachment. ... especially shared reality about yourself: 'they think I'm a piece of crap, and I do too. So I feel seen and known by them even if the content is negative'.
In this case, the parent thinks the kid is a 'piece of crap', which I expect doesn't feel like an emotion to the parent, it feels like a fact about the world. If they were more intellectually mature they might notice that this was an evaluation - but it's actually super hard to disentangle evaluations and facts.
I guess I think it's maybe impossible to disentangle them in many cases? Like... I think typically 'facts' are not a discrete thing that we can successfully point at, that they are typically tied up with intentions/values/feelings/frames/functions. I think Dreyfus made this critique of early attempts on AI, and I think he ended up being right (or at least my charitable interpretation of his point) - that it's only within an optimization process / working for something that knowledge (knowing what to do given XYZ) gets created.
Maybe this is an is/ought thing. I certainly think there's an external world/territory and it's important to distinguish between that and our interpretations of it. And we can check our interpretations against the world to see how 'factual' they are. And there are models of that world like physics that aren't tied up in some specific intention. But I think the 'ought' frame slips into things as soon as we take any action, because we're inherently prioritizing our attention/efforts/etc. So even a sharing of 'facts' involves plenty of ought/values in the frame (like the value of truth-seeking).
I very much agree that when you're not getting feeling X it can be very difficult to distinguish territory disagreements from feeling disagreements, especially when you're SNS activated. Having a term to cover all cases seems extremely useful. It also seems useful to have specific terms for the subsets, to help tease issues apart.
"Reality" to me seems much better suited towards the narrow, territory-focused aspect of feeling X, and I see a lot of costs in diluting it. Both because I wish I could say "reality" instead of clunkier things like "narrow, territory-focused", and because having a term where it's ambiguous whether you mean feeling X or objective facts is just begging for explosive arguments. I'm particularly worried about person A's (inside view) refusal to change their view of facts without new data feeling to person B like a refusal to care about feeling X.
Ideas for feeling X:
Also thanks for starting this conversation, I'm finding it really valuable even if that's manifesting mostly as critique.
Sure! I love talking about this concept-cluster.
I have a hunch that in practice the use of the term 'shared reality' doesn't actually ruin one's ability to refer to territory-reality. In the instances when I've used the term in conversation I haven't noticed this (and I like to refer to the territory a lot). But maybe with more widespread usage and misinterpretation it could start to be a problem?
I think to get a better sense of your concern it might be useful to dive into specific conversations/dynamics where this might go wrong.
...
I can imagine a world where I want to be able to point out that someone is doing the psychological mistake of confusing their desire to connect with their map-making. And I want the term I use to do that work, so I can just say "you want to share your subjective experience with me, but I'm disagreeing with you about reality, not subjective experience."
Does that kind of resonate with your concern?
Yeah I definitely don't think calling it "shared reality" will ruin anything. It would be another few snowflakes in the avalanche of territory-map ambiguation, similar to when people use "true" to mean "good" rather than "factually accurate".
I've made a couple of attempts at a longer response and just keep bouncing off, so I think I'm out of concepts for now. Would love to pick this up in person if we run into each other.
it's confusing other people don't have this objection
For me, the cow has left the barn on "reality" referring only to the physical world I inhabit, so it doesn't register as inaccurate (although I would agree it's imprecise). "Reality" without other qualifiers points me towards "not fictional".
"emotional resonance" ... "shared facts" or "shared worldview"
I notice I'm resistant to these proposals, but was pretty happy about the term "shared reality". Here are some things I like about "shared reality" that I would be giving up if I adopted one of your suggestions:
Reality is immediate and brings my attention to what's in front of me. For example, in "the reality of the situation is that not everyone will have a place to sit down if we have the party at my place". Here, "reality" is serving as a term that means "the space of possibilities that are laid out in front of us" (it excludes things like outlandish situations or anything that could have been done before now).
"Shared reality" as a term sounds nice to me; it rolls off the tongue. As a result, it's the sort of thing that I would use in casual conversation.
Shared reality spans both emotional content and statements about the physical world.
I can't think of a term that hits these points well that isn't reality, but perhaps you can think of something I missed. Of your proposed terms:
Emotional resonance hits (II) but fails (I) and (III).
Shared facts hits (I) but misses (II) and (III) for me.
Shared worldview hits (II) and (III), but is so far from (I) that I imagine I'd have a similar hangup as you do with 'shared reality' if I heard someone use that term to describe the experience of oneness when singing along at a concert.
I think this is not necessarily about emotion, but rather more generally paying attention to the same thing and having roughly convergent interpretations/representations.
Also think that "shared reality" makes it sound a bit too mysterious for my taste but perhaps it would make it more catchy for some people, which would help a useful meme spread? (babble)
Also, Tomasello's concept of shared intentionality is probably very adjacent, although perhaps not exactly the same or at least puts emphasis on a different aspect?
Shared or collective intentionality is the ability and motivation to engage with others in collaborative, co-operative activities with joint goals and intentions
Thanks for this post, it was insightful and perfectly timed; I've been intermittently returning to the problem of trust for a while now and it was on my mind this morning when I found your post.
I think shared reality isn't just a 'warm fuzzies' thing, it's a vital component of cooperation.
I think it's connected with the trust problem; your ability to trust someone is dependent to some degree on a shared reality.
I think that these problems have been severely exacerbated by our current technologies and the social landscape they've shaped, but I'm also highly intrigued by the possibility that we can throw this in reverse - that there is an achievable engineering solution to this problem; that this is something we can not only 'fix' with the right technologies, but also empower far beyond 'baseline'.
I'm interested in talking with anyone who's exploring the trust problem in some way. I think even a 20% effective solution to this problem would be world changing; the trust problem is at (or near) the root of many of the dysfunctional aspects of our civilization.
I'm especially interested in anyone who strongly disagrees with me - about either the importance of the problem or the feasibility of finding a solution.
I agree about the cooperation thing. One addendum I'd add to my post is that shared reality seems like a common precursor to doing/thinking together.
If I want to achieve something or figure something out, I can often do better if I have a few more people working/thinking with me, and often the first step is to 'get everyone on the same page'. I think lots of times this first step is just trying to shove everyone into shared reality. Partially because that's a common pattern of behavior, and partially because if it did work, it would be super effective.
But because of the bad news where people actually have different experiences, cracks often form in the foundation of this coordinated effort. But I think if the team has common knowledge about the nature of shared reality and the non-terrible/coercive/violent way of achieving it (sharing understanding), this can lead to better cooperation (happier team members, less reality-masking, better map-sharing).
I'm also not sure what you mean about the trust problem, maybe you mean the polls which claim that trust in government and other stuff has been on the decline?
What exactly is the trust problem you're referring to?
Is it you think that people are not as trusting as you think they should be, in general?
This is great, and speaks to my experience as well. I have my own frames that map onto some of this but don't hit some of the things you've hit and vice versa. Thanks for writing!
Exciting stuff. This feels like a big puzzle piece I'd been missing. Have you written more about this, somewhere?
~vague gesturing at things I find interesting:
-How do different people (different neurotypes? different childhoods? personality types?) differ in the realities they want to share?
-How do shared realities relate to phenomena like extraversion, charisma, autism?
-What's the significance of creating shared realities by experiencing things together?
Besides, do you use other neglected people-models that are similarly high-yield? Vague gesturing appreciated.
Nice to hear!
This may shed some light onto why people have fun playing the Schelling game. It's always amusing when I discover how uncannily others' thoughts match my own, e.g. when I think to myself "X! No, X is too obscure, I should probably say the more common answer Y instead", and then it turns out X is the majority answer after all.
OK, I've added a disclaimer to the main text. I agree it's important. It seems worth having this kind of disclaimer all over the place, including most relationship books. Heck, it seems like Marshall Rosenburg in Non-Violent Communication is only successfully communicating like 40% of the critical tech he's using.
I once asked Robin Hanson if he really thought status-seeking was such a dominant driver of human behavior. I said humans had dozens of factors motivating their behavior, it was crazy to claim there was One Big Thing. He replied (something to the effect of) "well, even if each factor has a small effect – five percent, six percent – one of them has to be the biggest."
There's a concept I refer to as 'shared reality' that I think is up there with 'status' as something humans seek, shaping a lot (maybe ten percent?) of our behavior.
Knowing and playing with the concept of shared reality has noticeably improved my relationships and given me more surface area on many social dynamics (e.g. connection, attachment, idle banter, tribalism).
There is a Columbia research lab that studies "shared reality"[1] among other topics. They define it as:
the perceived commonality of inner states with others
By example: If two people chuckle at a pun, and then see each other chuckling such that they both perceive that the other had a similar pun-chuckle-experience, they are in a state of shared reality (at least, for that pun-chuckle-experience in particular).[2]
Shared reality is at play when people
The research literature mentions that people are 'motivated to create shared realities' but doesn't really discuss why. I think people want it because it's pleasant[4]. And conversely, that the opposite of shared reality (disconnected reality?) is unpleasant, and something people avoid.
This strikes me as an important part, because put together with the above definition it makes for a model that better predicts how people will behave, and what is sometimes causing people to feel better/worse.[5]
Here's a stab at an updated definition:
people seek a perceived commonality of inner states with others (because it's pleasant). People try to maintain that perceived commonality and/or avoid perceived uncommonality (because failing to do so is unpleasant).
Wow, that's pretty clunky. Oh well.
As you might expect with something that involves 'people seeking a perceived X', attempts at shared reality often skip right over actually sharing an experience to merely convincing oneself/others that an experience was shared. I think this is often playing out in the various forms of conformity[7]. Some quick examples:
I've developed a kind of backing-away immune response to many of these conformity / shared reality pressures[9]. I think this is from a mix of baseline skepticism and recent attempts to draw personal boundaries. But in my efforts to avoid the downsides of shared reality, I have developed a kind of auto-immune disorder to the otherwise nice thing of connecting with other people.
I think they can be compatible, at least a modified version of shared reality. Step #1 is probably coming to terms with the bad news.
The bad news: Our experiences are not the same. There will always be dimensions of our experience that are different. We can try to run away from this fact or pave over it, but the reality of the situation will haunt us until we face it.[10]
The good news: We share the same world. We don't have to force ourselves to have the same direct experience, we can share an understanding of each other's experience.
If Ben loves cooking but Ada doesn't, they can still share reality in their understanding that Ben loves cooking. Ben's experience of cooking is a real part of the world that Ada can earnestly seek to understand and get the warm-fuzzies of connecting with Ben.[11][12][13]
Or in another approach, Tory Higgins[14] suggests that instead of sharing the same evaluation (Ben is good/bad at cooking) you can share attention (the Ben <> cooking thing).
My partner and I have worked with this cluster of concepts over the past couple years, and it has noticeably reduced tension and increased connection.
Some notes:
Note: this is not a guide for how to improve relationship dynamics. I'm using these as examples, not instructions. [17]
I've also had success using this in my relationships with my family[18]. My mom doesn't have a concept of shared reality, but I can still use it on my end. So when she reaches out and asks me what I'm doing at my job, I can take that as an invitation for me to share my reality. If I don't feel like talking about my work, I can instead share whatever else is going on, like a story about roller blading around San Francisco.
Maybe I'm weird/neuroatypical/whatever, but I've been amazed that ignoring the content of the question (how is work?) and instead replying directly to my guess of the meta-content (could we connect / share reality?) gets a much better response.
I think they're pointing at the same concept as the one I'm using, but it feels like I'm looking at the concept from a slightly different direction. I get into this more in footnote 5
Note there's an additional dynamic in this example that I think isn't encapsulated in the definition (but is a useful gear of the model): being in common knowledge about the shared inner state amplifies the experience of shared reality.
Yes I think shared reality is pointing to the same thing as connection, but it's a more mechanistic (and predictive) model of what's going on. And the name points to the dynamic more than 'connection' does, so I like it.
I encourage you to check your own experience to see if this is the case. A couple people have noted that 'it's pleasant' doesn't add much to the model, but it helps me borrow from a lot of models I have of pleasure/displeasure dynamics, which better predict when and why people will try to share reality. I also often model it as a 'need' à la NVC or love languages
This pleasant/unpleasant frame seems different than the academic literature, or at least what I've read
Papers on synonymous concepts are mostly describing a phenomenon, like social tuning where people tune their beliefs about themselves and the world to better fit the beliefs of people around them.
Tory Higgins, the lead of that Columbia lab who co-authored a book called Shared Reality goes the extra step of looking behind the phenomena at the fundamental 'motivation' to share reality, and then goes on to wax poetic about how this makes humans special and underlies most of society's successes and ills.
I understand reality masking puzzles to be instances when you get positive feedback for obscuring the truth, and so your map of reality gets worse and worse. These are contrasted with reality-revealing puzzles, which reward you for discovering the truth. See this post, thanks to Anna Salamon for the excellent concept
Check out the see also section of the Wikipedia page and the blue boxes at the bottom) for even more concepts. What's up with this cluster of behaviors?
I've gotten mileage out of reframing this dynamic as a bid for a shared reality stag hunt. It's very nice to have shared reality with your whole family, and worth paying some cost to give it a shot.
I have a pet theory that this immune response gets compounded when your experience is significantly different from your peers (e.g. if you're neuroatypical) because you often get the negative experience of 'unshared' reality. So your experience of shared reality pressures is that people try to manipulate you into believing false things in a way that's alienating/unpleasant. Rather than a pleasant low-key social dynamic, which is I think how most people experience it.
This is a pretty lonely realization. Hot take: lots of individual and collective effort goes into avoiding this realization, like drinking alcohol which 'lowers inhibitions' in part by making me assume that everyone is generally friendly and on the same page as me.
Unfortunately I think it's not as much of a rush as when you believe someone is perfectly sharing your experience, but that rush is also creating the disappointment you will feel later when you realize that in fact it was not a perfectly shared experience. I think in the long run the shared understanding version leads to a more wholesome, solid kind of social happiness.
I think Non-Violent Communication and Circling both practice this kind of earnest witnessing, where you try to to understand the other person's needs/experience, and attempt to share your own.
Of course, you can also play around with sharing direct experience. Sharing food, movies, dancing, adventures, rituals, singing, climbing trees... all of these are lovely sources of shared reality warm-fuzzies. But I suggest holding the connection lightly, because otherwise you might find yourself in a furious argument about whether Risk is a good board game because you don't want to lose shared reality with your childhood friends.
In the epilogue of his book, he talks about how shared reality pressure causes increased political polarization. He's excited about the possibility of people with different politics sharing reality over how guns/abortion/etc are important and worthy of attention (even if their opinions about the content differ).
This (and other things like "I welcome your X") was stumbling in the way a lot of NVC / circling / authentic relating stuff is stumbling at the beginning. But I expect it helped to start practicing (and notice what was weird and improve from there).
'Free' feels apt... previously I think we both felt a little trapped by a pressure to squish our preferences and experiences into shapes that better matched each other. Deviating felt like putting our connection and relationship at risk.
Please don't just attempt to 'witness your partners experience' as the solution to your problems, I expect it'll go wrong. We're using tons of different little techniques borrowed from all over the place, surely many of them are crucial and not mentioned here.
And also many other domains like around the office, hanging with friends, etc. but this post is getting too long.