My friend Bob is a couchsurfer. Yes, this is what you think it is. When he travels, he doesn't pay for a hotel room, but instead contacts strangers before he arrives and asks to stay on their couches or spare beds. And, he invites strangers to stay with him when they will be in his city. Last week, Bob hosted a dinner for about 15 couch surfers he had never met to a nice Thai dinner in Southern California and invited me and some of my graduate students to attend.
Bob is not a nut. He runs a successful medium sized business. He's been married for twenty-some years, has two kids in college. Stand up guy all around. He is in no sense cheap, and has no obvious psychopathologies. Oh, he's very social. He is exceptionally interested in what people think, feel, believe, do, and want. But still, why stay on a stranger's couch?
For people interested in why strangers cooperate with each other (like me), couchsurfing is a fabulous laboratory. You can see how it works here , but briefly one creates a profile and then this is verified by, for example, by a small credit card charge that confirms one's address. You then can have other couchsurfers who have met you face-to-face vouch for you. Lastly, whenever you stay on someone's couch, they rate you as a guest. All this information is available to prospective hosts. Trustworthiness is engendered by the social network one is embedded in. The internet allows this web of information to be updated nearly instantly, making it difficult for couchsurfers to scam, steal from, or generally misbehave.
Some stats. Couch surfing has occurred informally for millennia, but the modern internet incarnation is due to Casey Fenton who started the site in 2003 after getting a cheap ticket to Reykjavik, Iceland but being unable to afford a hotel. So, he stayed on a friend of a friend's couch and found it was fun. Today there are 800,000 couchsurfers in 50,000 cities worldwide. Fully 85% of these are under 35 years old with half of couchsurfers living in Europe and nearly the other half coming from the U.S. About 10,000 new members sign up per month for this free service.
So what's going on here? At the couchsurfing dinner I attended, I met a 50-ish school teacher who had hosted over 40 guests in her home in the last year. I met several people who had only hosted one person. Later in the evening I met "Rhythm" who described herself as "a traveler." She had a degree in art, had worked briefly but preferred to "camp out" around the country. There was also a writer who had couchsurfed through Brazil, and several students.
They all seemed to be looking for connections, and to enhance their lives with new social experiences. These couchsurfers told me stories of extraordinary kindnesses of strangers on their couches, and the occasional bore and boor. Mostly they related to me the amazing people they had let into their homes, and how these people immediately integrated themselves into their families-chopping vegetables for dinner and washing the dishes afterwards. They told of taking Estonians to Hollywood and Vine, keeping photo albums of their new friends, and tracking their former guests' travels on couchsurfing.com. Bob called couchsurfing a movement toward a kinder and more connected planet.
I'm a bit shy and I cannot imagine staying on a stranger's couch. Yet even we introverts crave human contact. Humans are hypersocial apes and our oxytocin systems evolved to make us care about others, including complete strangers as studies from my lab have shown. The oxytocin system in the brain does this by making it pleasurable to engage with people. Think about how we punish the worst of the worst in society who misbehave, prisoners. They are put into isolation. For nearly all of us, isolation is psychologically and physiologically stressful. Although we may fight this in the American individualist culture, humans are really herd creatures.
Couchsurfing is a way to ease isolation and build social networks. Research consistently shows that those with larger social networks are healthier, happier, and live longer. Those who attend church regularly also get these benefits, and this may be due the sociality and fellowship that follows worship.
Importantly, trusting a stranger must always be conditional. That is, we are constantly balancing appropriate levels of trust and distrust depending on the physical environment, the people around us, and our own physiologic state. Both unconditional trust and unconditional distrust are pathological-the former is gullibility that makes us targets for predation while the latter is paranoia. Either one is maladaptive when navigating through the sea of strangers in modern societies.
There is an old Russian proverb "doveryai, no proveryai" that translates as "trust, but verify." We dole out trust in bits and see if others reciprocate. My research on oxytocin shows that 98% of people do reciprocate and a cycle of cooperation begins. When we are trusted, our brains synthesize and release oxytocin to tip the appropriate balance of trust and distrust toward the trust side.
The couchsurfers I met were sociable, relaxed, respectful and engaged with those around them. Nearly all switched seats to talk to new people throughout the evening. The couchsurfing phenomenon is a natural outgrowth of a hungry oxytocin system that lives in an increasingly socially fragmented world. Having a dense social network is what most of us want, and couchsurfing builds new acquaintances in a fun and controlled way.
So, does anyone have a couch I can crash on?
