A new international study suggests the social environment in which people live shapes whose version of reality they adopt. Researchers found that in cultures where relationships can be formed and dissolved with relative ease, individuals align their worldviews more selectively with those who help them achieve their goals, partly by feeling less in sync with less helpful others. The findings were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
The team behind the research includes Abdo Elnakouri, 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. They examined a concept known as relational mobility—the degree to which a society allows people to form new relationships and end existing ones—and how it might influence shared reality, the sense that two or more people experience the world through a common lens.
“Honestly this came as an idea to previous work our team had done on shared reality and goal success,” Elnakouri said. “I came across the relational mobility variable through reading and going to conferences. Seemed like a possible cool extension.”
The researchers note that in high relational mobility settings, people tend to invest more in their relationships because the potential for a partner to leave is greater. “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.”
To test whether relational mobility could shift shared reality, the team began with an archival dataset spanning nearly 17,000 participants across 39 countries. Respondents reported on how mobile their local environment felt, the level of emotional support from a close partner, and whether they could count on that person in times of need. They also rated how much their partner understood them, a basic measure of shared reality.
The analysis suggested that people in more mobile settings tended to report greater shared reality with their close partner, and that this effect depended on the partner’s level of support. Across countries, the pattern varied: in higher-mobility nations, the gap in shared reality widened when partners were less supportive; when researchers treated mobility as perceived by participants, the pattern shifted to a stronger link between shared reality and supportive partners.
Two further social-network studies conducted at a Canadian university with undergraduate students, involving 353 and 277 participants respectively, broadened the picture. Instead of focusing on a single close relationship, participants listed people they had interacted with in the past month and rated each person’s helpfulness for their goals and their degree of shared reality.
Across these broader networks, high mobility did not predict an overall rise in shared reality. Instead, the effects centred on the relative difference between helpful and unhelpful network members. Across the studies, other similarities such as shared personality traits or upbringing did not follow the same pattern, suggesting the dynamics were specific to shared reality rather than general similarity.
In three of four analyses, students who perceived their social world as highly mobile showed a larger gap between helpful and unhelpful individuals in their networks. In one analysis, the gap arose from lower shared reality with less helpful people; in the others, the shifts with helpful and unhelpful contacts were not statistically significant on their own. A measure of how freely participants felt they could leave relationships showed no such pattern, which the authors interpret as indicating 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.”
To move beyond correlation, the researchers conducted an experiment with 590 adults, asking them to nominate three individuals: one who was helpful for their career goals, one who was not, and a third newer acquaintance unrelated to their career. A separate pilot study of 102 participants confirmed that a writing task could shift perceptions of how freely people around them might come and go.
In the main experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either a high relational mobility condition—writing about whether the third acquaintance might drift away—or a low mobility condition—writing about how the person might remain in their life.
Those in the high mobility condition reported less shared reality with their less-helpful career contact (an average of 3.69 on a 7-point scale) than those in the low mobility condition (4.04). Shared reality with the career-related, more helpful contact did not differ between conditions, suggesting that concerns about social fragility lead people to 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.”
He added: “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. I think this is a cool connection between work on culture, shared reality, relationships, and self-regulation.”
Researchers caution that the findings come with limitations. The first study relied on Facebook recruitment with a participant pool that was 86 per cent women, which may limit generalisability. The social-network studies used student samples from a single university, and the initial study used a single-question measure of shared reality, with later studies employing more comprehensive questions. The authors acknowledge the effect sizes are modest, and that many other factors influence how people form worldviews.
Looking ahead, the authors suggest that fluid social environments could foster insular bubbles if people selectively share reality with those who advance their goals, potentially contributing to divergent worldviews. They plan further exploration of how environmental contexts intersect with personal goals across multiple levels of analysis to deepen understanding of how our worldviews are formed.
The study is titled “Choosing Our Reality: Relational Mobility Shapes When and With Whom People Share Reality,” and was authored by Abdo Elnakouri, Eli J. Finkel, and Abigail A. Scholer.
