Social Discord in the Age of Coronavirus: revealing our evolutionary dependency on community

by Meg Elliot @megan_daisy_

COVID 19’s rampage across the world has made us all reassess what is important. I’ve missed people, most of all. The bodily knowledge of another’s proximity, the sensation of being amongst many. This is currently manifesting in a deep comfort when around groups of people as I pass through my little town, or sit in a coffee shop with a friend. I’m writing this in the busy market hall in Shrewsbury. I have a coffee to my right, and a slightly sickly-sweet egg custard waiting to be devoured before me. The market is long and light, with the low rumble of constant chatter just distinguishable beneath high pitched pop-funk broadcasting from a nearby cafe. Sat amongst all this life when the world feels closed-in all around me, feels the closest thing to a communal hug, in this post-hug world, that I’ve felt in a long time. Its effect on me is one of great comfort. And it is nothing new. In fact, this desire to be around others in close contact has ensured the survival of our species from its beginning. At our deepest level, we yearn for human contact. 

Dependence on one another has helped us survive. Living in small tribal communities, familiarity with one another was integral to the cohesion and survival of the group. Caring for one another increased our chances of survival; to be cast out alone could be fatal. Yet, proximity to one another and physical touch are also invaluable for human bonding. It stimulates positive relationships and ‘has been shown to boost opiate-related reward mechanisms in the brain’. A person’s “warmth”, both figuratively and literally, connotes safety and love. It manifests in our language, too. Someone rude may be described as having given you the “cold shoulder”, while close companionship between two people may be compared to a “warm friendship”. Our connection to one another's physicality, whether conscious or not, informs our perception of them and the world they inhabit. 

In 2012, psychologists Adam Fay and John Maner carried out two experiments that explored the connection between temperature and our desire to socialise. The first involved 116 participants holding cups. Some held warm cups, others held cold. After five seconds holding the cups, they were asked to estimate the distance between them and the wall in front of them. On average, the ones holding the warm cups believed the wall to be closer than the ones holding the cold. The second experiment saw the participants sitting on chairs, some heated and some not. They were asked to decide along a five-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, in response to two statements: “My feelings are easily hurt when I feel that others do not accept me”, and “I would find it very satisfying to be able to form new friendships with whomever I like”. Those sitting on the warm chairs reported a ‘greater need to belong’ in correlation with the relative statements, than those on the cold chairs. Fay and Maner concluded that being ‘primed with warmth’ encouraged the person’s likelihood to be open to affiliative behaviour, or to be more open to socialising. This ‘embodied cognition’ is directly influenced by our bodies' response to the physical world. Our language-world associates people with warmth, and so the combination of this figurative world with the physical experience of another’s warmth combines cognitively to associate people with its associated characteristics: safety, affection, calm.

So, physical proximity to another person, the literal and figurative understanding of ‘warmth’ that is associated with other people, makes us more likely to form close social bonds, or at least feel more open to making connections. The one thing our retreat into the online world has omitted, is the physical dimension of human contact. Where I used to revel in nightly phone calls with friends these appointments have become increasingly weighted by an awareness of our physical distance. Social media removes the authentic experience of face-to-face interaction: heat rising from a shared pot of tea, the surround-sound of a friend’s voice amidst the hum of cafe chatter, a squeezed embrace goodbye. 

The absence of this important element in human connection can lead to what Bjørn Grinde describes as ‘social discord’, a phenomenon that can leave us feeling depressed and anxious. Social discord can arise from a distance between our evolved ways of living and the modern world. For example, humans are inherently pack mammals. We have the ability to form meaningful and lasting relationships with up to 150 people at a time, and have evolved to depend on close knit communities for mental and physical nourishment. Dislocated from our communities, we have been restricted to smaller social bubbles. Yet, even before COVID, our communities had been growing distant, with Grinde noting that  ‘people do not develop positive community relations of the strength and duration evolution has shaped our mind to expect.’ Our vast metropolitan centres bear the legacy of such dislocations. London, for example, was once described to me as an ‘anonymous beehive’, buzzing and alive, but faceless. This is the joy and the tragedy of London: we see everyone, but know no-one beyond our cherished few. These beehives are all around, active in the micro-worlds we carry about in our phones, and on the streets of our own small towns and cities. Disassociated from the people who surround us, we may feel the effects of social discord, made worse by COVID 19.

Until recently, our settlements reflected our dependence on physical relationships for care and comfort. 

Catalhoyuk, in Turkey, was first inhabited 9000 years ago. An estimated 3000 to 8000 people lived there in a tight-knit community where they literally lived on top of one another. Catalhoyuk’s inhabitants would traverse the tops of the houses, dropping into them via ladders that led to hearth-rooms. The dead were buried beneath the house, which were themselves built on previous houses, in some places reaching 21 metres high. It’s hard to imagine a world where people lived in such close proximity to one another, and is most likely an unrealistic solution to contemporary social discord, but it offers a glimpse into a reality that centred the community, their shared social rituals and methods of mutual support.

We all have an instinctive tendency to seek out places where there are people, and have done for thousands of years. Yet, our societies have changed unimaginably from the people who clustered Catalhoyuk. Instead of communal feasting, we are sooner seen sharing a family meal after a hard day's work, or travelling to see particular and selected friends. Our social bubbles are smaller and more disparate, and yet the potential to meet new people is greater than ever. Contemporary community has morphed into something far less bodily, and less immediate. Yet, our forced dislocation from one another has brought home the importance of community, it has shown us the benefits, and drawbacks of social media as a means of connection-making, whilst exposing the rifts in our pre-COVID communities. Rebuilding our social structures post-COVID must mean re-thinking the way we connect with the people in our localities, it means moving slower and with more care for ourselves and the people who compose the world around us.