Let's talk about it: social distancing. If you're watching this in the spring of
2020 you know what it feels like the only place left to go is the grocery and
the only social interaction you really get is yelling into the void online.
It doesn't feel good. In fact, it feels very bad and it kind of begs the question:
how long can you last? How long can you be in isolation?
Well, first thing's first, we need to define isolation because as it turns out, there's a lot of different
types. From a medical perspective differing levels of isolation are used
as a precaution when dealing with different conditions but the isolation
I'm curious about is the one I've never expected to bother me: social isolation.
It's described as the absence of social interactions contacts and relationships
and as an introvert I was smug and I thought that's basically me, social
distancing won't change anything and I was very wrong here's the thing right: we
live in a society. Socialization has been a vital component of our species longer
than we have technically been our species. During the Stone Age, early
hominins were believed to have developed complex forms of social transmission to
communicate how to make better tools, tools for our survival. And this
intersection of socialization and education has persisted past survival
nowadays socializing serves as this constant sounding board for our behavior
It's through interacting with others that we develop our own identity and
perspective, and if we lose access to that some very strange things happen
When you first enter isolation, you might feel fine even for a couple of days but
as time goes on you'll notice that everything becomes sharper as you grow
hypersensitive to normal stimuli your heart will start racing and paranoia and
anxiety might start settling in. You'll begin to struggle to keep focus. After a
few weeks the fantasies you've been escaping with turn violent.
You'll start slipping between depressive episodes and bouts of aggression doing
anything to feel something. And then after enough time has passed, you'll just
vanish. Not physically, but researchers who watch prisoners in solitary
confinement noticed a complete breakdown or disintegration of the identity of the
isolated individual. This can be described as a simultaneous attack of
several symptoms that effectively erase the personality of the isolated
individual. And somehow, that's not even the scariest part. No, that happens after
isolation. In 1970, a psychologist named Harry Harlow was widowed. He wasn't a
kind man but he was established in his field. Controversial but renowned for a
particular avenue of research. You see, he spent the majority of his life studying
the behaviour of rhesus macaque monkeys he began by exploring what motherhood
really meant to these primates - breaking it down into its fundamental components
of touch, motion, and play. But the cost of his experiments was cruelty, this really
deep and unimaginable cruelty that he designed and pursued every single day. It
won him recognition, but it warped him.
As time went on he sunk deeper and deeper
into alcoholism and depression; losing his wife appeared to be the final straw.
He turned his research to isolation in an attempt to incite depression in his
subjects, he designed an instrument he liked to call the pit of despair and
into it would go newborn monkeys. They lived completely isolated in individual
chambers for up to a year. While none died in isolation, when they were
eventually socialized for the first time in their life, they would go into a shock.
Harlow said that long isolation obliterated the animals socially
Obliterated. Erased. That's the language we use to describe the effects of
isolation on social creatures. All of us in isolation right now with varying
degrees of access to communication and comfort,
is that what we have to look forward to?
Now obviously I can't test this out on actual human beings, right? That seems
really difficult and unethical - I've watched The Good Place. So, I did the next
best thing. Sims, in case you didn't know, it's a
sandbox game designed to simulate real life. You can generate these people
called Sims and set them off to live their own autonomous lives. Our goal is
to identify how isolation affects the average person (or sim) but we need to be
more specific. How does it affect them?
So, let's try to focus on one of the primary
indicators in the game: mood. So we want to figure out how a Sim's emotions change
when they're in isolation. This means that we want to look at the difference
between Sims in isolation versus the ones who are free. Now you might be
inclined to just let a Sim be free for a while and see how they behave and then
pop them into isolation later, and track the changes. But the problem with that is
that you don't know if any of the changes in behavior is due to isolation
or because of some other reason we don't know. So, maybe you think it would be
better to compare two sims side by side. One in isolation and one free, but that
also has a problem. Those Sims might be inclined to experience different
emotions in the first place. Maybe the Sim in isolation is just predisposed to
being sad so you overestimate the effect of isolation. This bias is introduced by
how we select our subjects and it's a really big problem. Now to get around
that, in real life, we would run a randomized controlled trial. So, we get a
really really big group of people and randomly sort them into two groups:
isolated and free. Because we do it randomly with a bunch of people, we
shouldn't face the issue of one group being significantly more likely to be
sad than the other. But luckily this isn't real life, this is Sims. We can just
duplicate them so we have two Sims with the exact same name, age, and propensity
to experience specific emotions. So in total, for each sim, I ran two trials:
poor conditions and rich conditions.
In each trial, one sim was in isolation while its
duplicate was free to do whatever they wanted. To keep track of all this, I obviously made
a spreadsheet, and so my experiment:
"The Sims of Despair" began.
So, it's been four days and I now have 280 observations across ten sims in four
different treatment variations.
This is my life I guess.
We've got the wealthy and isolated, wealthy and free, poor and isolated, and poor and free.
Okay so each observation contains the number of times a sim experienced one of the emotions on
a given day. This means that if they were sad and then fine and then sad again
we would have two sad and one fine. Now obviously this doesn't represent how
long a sim felt a certain emotion. For example they could have just been sad
all day and had like a blip of being fine
or the other way around.
But I have been staring at Sims for four days so I don't care anymore.
Really came up with the concept of this video without realizing how
boring it would be to execute.
But anyway, each sim in each treatment variation was
tracked for seven days it was originally supposed to be ten weeks but they kept dying
They keep burning to death!
So despite my sketchy measurement system we're just gonna assume that
these are accurate enough. First off, if we combine the subjects in each
variation and calculate the percentage each mood appeared every day we get
these graphs. There are two really interesting things here. First off, notice
how many more times positive or neutral emotions like happiness or inspiration
appear among the wealthier Sims compared to poorer Sims who appear to be sadder
more tense and uncomfortable. Regardless of whether they were isolated.
Next, notice the differences between the isolated and the free. Among wealthy Sims
we do see more instances of sadness but overall the two groups look pretty
similar. The same cannot be said for the poor Sims. Poor isolates were dominated
with sadness after just two to three days, while their counterparts still
experienced more emotional variety. But five emotions really stand out overall
happy, fine, uncomfortable, sad, and tense. If we take a closer look at their
development over time, we get an even better idea of the truth. Wealthy Sims
experience being happy or fine more often than their poor counterparts
regardless of isolation. And while isolates in general we're more likely to
feel sad, the poor ones were hit especially hard.
Now, obviously we should take these "findings" with like a truckload of salt because
they're from a video game and an incredibly small sample size but at the
same time it's kind of common sense. But there is one other thing I noticed in
this little experiment, something that wasn't captured in the numbers because
by the time I noticed I was too deep in and I didn't want to restart and it's
why the isolated Sims were so sad. You see, they weren't upset about missing
work or not going to school or not even pursuing their aspirations. No, the thing
that really got them that really broke them down into desolation...
it was a lack of social contact.
Just like Harry Harlow's monkeys, these Sims couldn't
bear to be alone and it broke them down and erased them so that all that was
left behind was sadness
and a need to pee.
If you think about it social distancing is a really weird name because a virus can't spread through
friendship alone. Sure, right now, if you can, you should be physically distancing
to protect those frontline workers who don't get that option. But that's all the
more reason to keep socializing in other ways. You don't get the option of just
seeing your co-workers or your friends in class, you need to be really
intentional about socializing right now and it's an effort that we're not used
to making, but it's really worth doing! Call your friends, call your family, have
a game night or a movie night or start a book club. Just do something. Do anything
to keep yourself tethered to the social world because if there's one thing
staring at sims for four days straight has taught me it's that
you shouldn't really cheap out on an oven because it'll catch fire and kill you
and
right now we need each other more than ever.
I hope you liked that video if you did you
know, like and subscribe. I don't know what to say
it's a really weird time right now. I hope you're doing okay. Hope you're
feeling safe. I hope that you're self isolating if you
can and if you can't thank you for everything that you're doing
but either way have a lovely day.
it's so weird right now.