Should we envy the man whose most faithful companion is his remote
control?
A recent study found that men who watch network news are
significantly more satisfied with their friendships than are men with the
same number of friends who do not watch these programs. Women who watch a
lot of television also report more rewarding friendships, but these women
prefer sitcoms and prime-time dramas.
This paradoxical correlation between a nonsocial activity and
satisfaction with one's social life makes sense from an evolutionary
perspective, according to study author Satoshi Kanazawa, Ph.D., a
sociology professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. The
human brain is hardwired to respond to stimuli as it did in its ancestral
environment, where television and movies didn't exist. Kanazawa says that
we have evolved to believe that "all realistic images of people you
encounter repeatedly are friends and family. In the environment of
evolutionary adaptedness there was no one-way acquaintance, as there is
today with celebrities."
Kanazawa says that gender differences in "viewer-friendly" programs
reflect the fact that women cite family members as their closest friends,
hence the impact of family-oriented comedies and dramas. Men are more
likely to consider coworkers their best friends, a distinction that is
reflected in their affinity for network news.
Sociologists frequently attribute excessive television viewing to
civic disengagement. But Kanazawa was so convinced that humans
unconsciously consider television a social outlet that he reviewed data
from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in
search of an empirical link between watching television and a subjective
assessment of one's friendships. He found such data in the General Social
Survey (GSS), administered annually to approximately 1,500 subjects. The
survey varies each year, but in 1993 respondents were asked about both
their television-viewing habits and their friendships.
Kanazawa says that his findings, published in
Evolution and Human Behavior, indicate that "there
is nothing asocial about watching television, or so the brain thinks.
Watching TV is our form of participating in civic groups, because we
don't truly know that we are not participating."
