We are living through a historical paradox when it comes to human connection. Right now we are connected to more people than any humans who have ever lived. At the same time, many of us report having never felt more alone.
Social media sits at the center of that paradox. It has transformed how we meet the world, reshaping commerce, culture and human connection.
My mom sees that paradox from the other side of the screen. She is the director of trauma training at McLean Hospital just outside of Boston and, as all moms do, gives me a wiser perspective. Every day, she sees adolescents come in seeking help, witnessing firsthand how technologies built to connect us have the potential to instead deepen loneliness.
To understand why this is happening and the adaptive approaches marketers can take to help change the social media experience, we need look no further than our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed something simple: Primates spend much of their day tending one another’s fur. Across primate species, time spent on the ritual rose with group size. Primates, he argued, build community through physical touch.
Researchers on Berkeley neurobiologist Doris Tsao’s team showed macaques various images while scanning their brains, and found six small areas that lit up far more for faces than any other images. This research led to the insight that we are not creatures who happen to like faces—our brains have specific regions just for processing them. Every face on a thumbnail image taps hardware that evolved millions of years before the iPhone.
Emory University researchers Sarah Brosnan and the late Frans de Waal asked capuchins to exchange tokens for food. A monkey given a cucumber after seeing another receive a tastier, preferred grape sometimes threw the cucumber back.
Now think about your social feed. We call it a feed for a reason: Too often, it fuels the part of us that keeps score. Every viral takedown, every “you deserve this” campaign trades on an ancient ache for that which we do not have. For all our sophistication, we are still marketing to capuchins with credit cards.
The pull of connection, the obsession with faces, the sting of comparison—these studies show traits that live inside all of us, embedded more deeply than we realize.
But there is one more study that my mom and I keep returning to. A study that gives us hope. The same researcher, Frans de Waal—who was one of my professors at Emory—documented what happens after a chimpanzee conflict. Sometimes, an uninvolved chimp approaches and embraces the loser and offers comfort through physical touch. Vulnerability was the permission structure for connection.
Each of these primate truths shows up in our work as marketers. They offer a choice about which human instincts our work rewards.
