My research focuses on entitativity: a person’s cognitive assessment that they are in a group. The classic example compares a “group” of people waiting for a bus stop compared to the same group of people at a cafe sharing coffee and conversations (pre-COVID, of course). The cafe is “groupier” than the bus stop.
Way back in the day (like, seriously, the 1950s) when Don Campbell identified entitativity as a fundamental component of groups (i.e., you need to perceive you are in a group before you enact group processes or experience group outcomes), he focused on a couple of important antecedents to entitativity: similarity, interactivity, history, and “pregnance.” Must like “entitativity” is an ostentatious name for a simple concept (how groupy a group is), pregnance is a BS word meaning that when you look at a group you can see its form/shape. It’s been called the boundary separating the group for the not-group, but I currently think pregnance in today’s psychological concepts relates more to environmental psychology (especially my training in behavior settings and/or sociomaterialty). Think of the people sitting around a table at the cafe: you can see them forming a group much easier than the folks dispersed in an unidentifiable pattern around the bus stop.
What does this have to do with social distancing? I believe a heckuva lot.
Humans are born with a need for belonging, a psychological need to belong to a group that’s as important as the biological need for eating. When people are together face-to-face, they want to form and be part of a group. I simply do not believe that we can create “pregnance”–an easily identifiable grouping–from 6′ feet apart. I think that’s why even when we believe strongly is social distancing, when we are interacting with people that we like, it is nearly impossible to stay 6′ feet apart from them. We want to be closer to form a boundary between our group and the not-group.
I think it’s easier to socially distance around others when you have your own “pod” of people you can be closer to, like going on a picnic with others and staying on the blanket with your family 6′ from another family.
But at work, when we are trying to belong to a group with our co-workers? At school, when we are trying to belong to our group of friends? At any religious gathering, when we are trying to belong to our faith community? I believe it goes against our innate human development to stay 6′ away from other people in these settings, and it links directly back to entitativity–our perception that our coworkers and friends are more like a cafe than a bus stop.
This is obviously, a testable hypothesis. However, it is a hypothesis the IRB will not allow me to test until we are out of this pandemic. Although, if you have skills at drawing or drafting pictures of anything to scale, hit me up: I have an idea of how to test this.
Until then, interacting FtF with meaningful others outside of our pod is going to be extremely difficult at 6′ apart.