What if the bullfighter was wrong when he said that the best thing about having an "affair" with a Hollywood star was telling it later? "Extraordinary experiences are enjoyed in the moment, but they harm us socially in the long run," says Gus Cooney of Harvard University, co-author of a curious study published in the journal Psychological Science .
“Our research participants thought that having experienced or witnessed an unusual event would make them the stars of the conversation. However, social interaction is based precisely on what we have in common ”.
Cooney and his colleagues divided 68 volunteers into groups of four and played movies on them. One of them would watch a video about the impressive tricks of a street magician, and the other three, rather boring cartoons. Afterward, the four of them were seated at a table for a five-minute informal conversation. Well, the spectators who had seen the film of the magician confessed to feeling excluded in the subsequent discussion.
This unease was possibly accentuated because they anticipated that they would be the center of attention . To confirm this, the psychologists later explained the experiment to other people and asked them to guess a result. Invariably, they said that viewers of the magician video would feel better and talk more than the rest, when the opposite had happened.
