Shared Experience Amplification

Shared Experience Amplification

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Shared experience amplification is the finding that an experience is felt more intensely when another person shares it, and more so when that person is psychologically close. Erica Boothby and colleagues reported in 2014 that sharing an experience with another person, even without communicating, intensified it.

What it is

In the first set of studies, sharing an experience with another person, without talking about it, intensified both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. A follow-up in 2016 found that the amplification of pleasant experiences depended on closeness: it appeared when the co-experiencers were psychologically close and not when they were distant.

A related paper by Eshin Jolly and colleagues in 2019 looked at the motivation to share. Across seven experiments in three studies, participants were strongly motivated to take part in shared experiences. The motivation did not come with a matching rise in enjoyment, and participants said they were motivated by a desire to form social connections.

In effect

In the article on why Harry Potter is getting a TV series, shared experience amplification is used to describe what happens when people watch together. A household watching together is a close-company setting, so the finding suggests that a familiar story watched in company may feel more intense than one watched alone. The studies themselves were laboratory experiments, and the step to a television series is an interpretation made on this site.

What it does not say

It does not say that watching with others is always better, and it does not say that people enjoy a shared experience more in every setting. The 2016 results tie the effect for pleasant experiences to closeness. The 2019 results separate the wish to share from enjoyment itself. None of the studies used a television series.

Sources

  1. Boothby, E. J. and colleagues (2014), Psychological Science.
  2. Boothby, E. J. and colleagues (2016), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
  3. Jolly, E., Tamir, D., Burum, B. and Mitchell, J. (2019), Wanting without enjoying: The social value of sharing experiences, PLOS ONE.