1.
Researchers built a smartwatch heartbeat monitor that relied on slime mold to operate, and over the course of caring for their living devices, the participants developed an emotional attachment to these.
This study’s main hypothesis was that requiring some degree of physical care in an interactive device would lead to users being more invested in its use. And would you look at that — the study found that, after having to take care of the slime mold to keep their heartbeat monitors ticking, users felt a sense of responsibility over the device, saw its use as a reciprocal relationship, and found the slime mold’s growth as a source of positive feelings. I love how humans care so easily.
Here’s an excerpt from the Twitter thread where I got the article link from, and the quotes from the participants are adorable:
Their little pet mold friends! “You’re my little slime” because look, they’re just both soft little entities who were being fed and watered! They felt happy enough about the slime’s growth to mention them in their diary entries several times!
This reminds me of that anecdote that’s made the rounds of the internet a few times, about how a broken bone was a sign of humanity — because our ability to care for others is essential to building the communities that have helped humanity thrive.
(Of course, there’s a lot that’s iffy about that anecdote, which this fact-checking article delves into. A post for another day, though I do appreciate that some of the points made there highlight (1) the insidious anthropocentrism of the anecdote; and (2) how it frames the concept of civilisation as inherently altruistic, when (cough) colonies the world over, for one thing, would say that hasn’t always been what the concept has been wielded as.)
But anyway. People have such a remarkable capacity to care; I wish the worlds we build for ourselves day to day reflected that better.
2.
Researchers examined the phenomenon of “friends to partners” to see how common it actually is as a starting point for relationships, versus the literature’s apparently skewed focus on dating as the main way such relationships start.
I didn’t know there was such an overriding lens in social science research, though it certainly feels like the case for pop culture and day-to-day conversations, so — not all that surprising. Dating culture (and, by extension, hookup culture) is a thing now, especially with dating apps popping up everywhere.
But, as the researchers and the Tumblr user they quoted in their paper1This is still hilarious to me. More chronically online references in scientific papers, please. point out, dating — i.e., “strangers striking up a conversation at a social function and then falling in love during a series of romantic excursions”, as the paper puts it — is not the only pathway for initiating relationships:
In fact, the paper argues that dating might not even be the most prevalent nor preferred way to start a relationship. Their analyses showed a startling disparity: despite only 18% of studies looking at friend-first initiation, two-thirds of participants in the studies they meta-analysed reported that this was how their relationships started, and 47% of respondents in another survey they conducted said that they saw friend-first initiation as the best way to start a relationship.
As someone who’s most likely somewhere on the aroace spectrum,2This is something I’m still figuring out, but hey, let’s see how it goes. I appreciate how this study tries to decouple (heh) the concepts of dating and relationships, when so much of the world seems to insist that one is an essential prerequisite to the other. I’ve gone on my fair share of dates3Which, as an aside, dating in college vs dating in your early twenties vs dating in your late twenties are so, so different and relationships4All of them, now that I think about it, having started from friendships (lol) and what I’m realising in retrospect is that I cannot stand casual dating. Being attracted to a total stranger is unfathomable to me, and the concept of going on — again, as the paper puts it — “romantic excursions” that are, on some level, explicitly constructed as such, with somebody whom I don’t know enough to even definitively have an opinion about, is often tedious at best.
Or, as one friend put it about another friend of ours, “They need to be friends with somebody first before the thought of even considering them as a romantic prospect occurs to them.” The literature says this is something like being demiromantic. I’ve not delved into the topic enough to have come to any sort of conclusion, personally, but the general sentiment feels deeply relatable to me, haha.
So, all this to say: it’s nice to know that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that there’s nothing clinically abnormal (heh) about my inability to put myself through the whole rigmarole of talking up strangers to find someone I’d like to jump into a long-term relationship with.
3.
I thought I would just be linking to these papers and this would be a short post.
We are all still learning about ourselves every day, I guess. Haha.
