Why we want to be liked and shared?

I can perfectly understand if your reaction is “What sort of a question is that? Isn’t it obvious?”.?I say with all sincerity: No, my friend, it is not so obvious to me. It is true that some put their thoughts out there without much of a thought to if they will be liked or shared. I presume that will be a small minority.

What else explains the click-bait titles we encounter in so many platforms. They are clearly competing for attention, the views. Only after views does the possibility of a like or share ever arises. When the title and the content do not match-up, one feels a major disappointment – a frequent phenomenon these days. Why are so many people taking such desperate measures?

Why we want to be liked and shared?

Status

When we are liked and shared, we acquire status. With status, we feel safer. It is our primal quest to be the “alpha” male or “alpha” female. The “alphas” get a large share of society’s resources. Each of us have “status” anxiety that varies only by degrees. You can see sophisticated folks in coats and suits trying to take more air time in forums because they want to establish their status. They risk sounding hollow by speaking longer. They will still take that risk. While the “status” explanation seems like a good candidate, it does not explain our end of the post call for – like it, share it and subscribe to my channel. A person seeking status does not request.

Security

Other animals come quite equipped to deal with the world. Humans are not. Babies are “cute” because human beings need a lot of nurturing post birth. Reciprocally, we are biologically wired to be moved by “cuteness”. Babies can out-compete each other to be cute. This is because when they are adored, they are likely to be taken care of. This gives them a sense of security. We haven’t outgrown this need, and we seek security in being liked. Seeking security is also a good candidate explanation but it fails to explain provocative postings aimed at backlash. These posts seem to live up to the adage, “Let them love us, let them hate us, but let them not forget us”.

Need to Influence

All of us have a need to influence others. This is one of our prime needs. All those who wish to be liked or shared are high on this need. We wish to convert the world to our point of view. We want to advocate for some causes, for a behavior or course of action. If we assume this is the reason, we should find people pursuing similar aims across posts and across platforms. Instead, we see people trying different things to be liked and shared. Also, several posts are in the nature of a “paradoxical” question with no advocated point of view. It is as if they were meant to only get noticed and not to persuade others to pursue a certain course of action. As a thought experiment if you ask someone, would you rather be viewed by a thousand and influence none or would you be viewed by 10 and change their perspective for good, what are they likely to say?

The Answer

All of the above seems inadequate explanations. Before I give my answer, allow me to narrate an incident.

Twenty years ago, I had taken a newly formed team to an offsite. Lot of team mates were recent hires. The problem statement we were addressing was the many power-centres in the team, folks not trusting each other because they do not know each other that much. So, the first “game” we played was a round of introduction. This consisted of a person coming and giving a 30 to 60 second introduction and performing his signature action. The second person who came in had to say something about the first person, imitate their signature action and then go about introducing themselves and perform a signature action. The third person had to summarize the first two persons and perform their own. We had sequenced the first 4 or 5 individuals in the way we wanted to eventually effect the pecking order. We then left the field to anyone who volunteered to go next. Initially, the first person and the second person felt that they were being “ragged”. However, they took it nicely as they were senior people and thought to themselves that the organizers were trying to create norms.

Initially there was a reluctant to volunteer. We also sat quiet waiting for whatever happens. After 10 individuals, everyone was rushing to volunteer next. They realized that the later they came, the more they had to remember. And to be remembered, they had to perform very memorable signature actions. As you can very well imagine, this became a race to perform the most bizarre actions and a race to get there into the center-stage first.

Now here was a game that encouraged a specific behavioral dynamic. There was lots of laughter as people forgot the previous incumbents, or mis-did their signature actions and as a design team we had counted all the “Freudian slips” for understanding the team dynamic. The point of describing the game in this post is a different one.

Notice how the “game-like” environment encourages us to assume certain rules and maximize certain points, discarding what we ourselves feel about the whole thing. These “game-like” environments distort our value system is a point so beautifully made by C. Thi Nguyen - philosophy Professor at the University of Utah.

For those who would like to dip into the original, I will encourage you to google him. In fact, it is Nguyen’s work that inspired this post itself. See more at objectionable.net

In any game, we are assuming an identity and playing a strategy to maximize payoff. If we look at our endeavors rationally, the best post will be forgotten in days and a great “poster” will be forgotten in months or years. This is the nature of the medium and our relation to it. So why do we bother?

We post on social media to play this game. This game is easily available to us. We want to be liked and shared because that is the point system in this game.?