This fascinating 2014 study from the psychology department at Yale University found evidence that “Shared Experiences Are Amplified” – that is, regardless of the inherent quality of an experience (pleasant vs. unpleasant), experiencing it with another individual intensified the quality of the experience – i.e., it was more pleasant or unpleasant – as opposed to making an unpleasant experience pleasant, or vice versa. The idea that “coattention” as it’s described has a qualitative impact on an experience falls squarely into the themes I’m looking to explore.

Briefly, the subjects were asked to taste two different pieces of chocolate, taken from the same source: once while a fellow “subject” in the room (an accomplice working with the study) was doing the same thing (the shared experience), and once while the accomplice was doing something different – i.e., viewing a booklet of pictures (the unshared experience). From the paper:

“We found that participants liked the chocolate more and found it more flavorful when the experience of eating it was shared than when it was unshared…. This is the first demonstration that a person’s sensory experience of a stimulus can change depending on whether another person who is present is engaging with the same stimulus or engaging with a different stimulus. These results are consistent with our hypothesis that shared experiences are intensified compared with unshared experiences.”

The experiment was repeated, but this time with bitter-tasting chocolate to see if the results would be the same. Sure enough, the results supported their original hypothesis: “a bitter chocolate tasted worse when the experience was shared than when it was not shared.”

In keeping with my premise of audience dynamics in art and entertainment, this is pretty compelling evidence of the power of shared experiences even if it is measured on a much smaller scale. This certainly speaks to the spiritual aspect I explored in my comments on nightclubs and dancing – much like the desire for churchgoers to worship as a group – the appeal of collective experience, and its effect on how we perceive external stimuli seems to directly address this moment of pre- and post-COVID existence – and could reach even further into subjects like phenomenology and the idea of a collective consciousness.