Skydiving, winning a sexy sports car or scaling Mt. Everest sure sound like extraordinary experiences that would fill us with boundless joy to last a lifetime. But a new study finds that's not always so: extraordinary experiences can actually generate unhappy feelings as well, because others in your ordinary social group are unable to relate to your stories.
To test the effect of extraordinary experiences on social dynamics, researchers set up a simple experiment. They recruited 68 men and women for the study, and subdivided them into four-person groups. Within each group, one person — the extraordinary experiencer — saw a 10-minute movie of a captivating street performer, while the other three people — ordinary experiencers — watched a low-budget, boring animation of the same length. After the movies were completed, the group reconvened in a room and researchers told them to have an unstructured conversation. Predictably, people talked about ...
