Cheryl Quimba: Shira Gabriel went to graduate school to study social psychology, planning to specialize in the areas of prejudice and discrimination.

Shira Gabriel: Then I read research about the fundamental need for human beings to feel connected to others, and that really spoke to me as a young researcher.

Cheryl Quimba: Now, as a professor of psychology focused on the social nature of the self, Gabriel conducts research on human connection in all its forms, including the ways relationships shape our feelings about ourselves and the psychological benefits of spending time in large anonymous crowds. She has examined how technology influences our self-conception, and the many different and surprising ways we can fulfill our basic need to belong. 

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. I'm Cheryl Quimba, and in this episode, I'll be speaking with Professor Gabriel about the social self and how to cultivate more joy and connection in our lives

Professor Gabriel, thank you for joining us.

Shira Gabriel: Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited.

Cheryl Quimba: So, as a young graduate student, you planned to study prejudice and discrimination. What led you to switch your focus to belonging?

Shira Gabriel: Well, I started grad school really passionate about contributing to our understanding of prejudice and discrimination. I was really excited to be a part of a field that examines such an important issue. But I had a really hard time sort of finding, like, a foothold in it, like figuring out what I was going to study and how I could contribute. And then I read some research on the fundamental need to belong, and on how social relationships affect the self and how we think and feel about ourselves, and that was just a really natural fit for me as a researcher. I just found it was an area where I could think of, like, 30 things I wanted to study right away. So, yeah, so that was really exciting for me.

Cheryl Quimba: So you're an expert in social psychology. How does social psychology differ from psychology more broadly?

Shira Gabriel: So psychology is a broader field than a lot of people realize. When many people think about psychology, they think about clinical psychology, which is the understanding and treatment of mental disorders, and that is a really important part of psychology. But sometimes I'll liken it to the way that, like, if you took a class on human biology, you wouldn't spend an entire semester just learning about diseases of the body and how we would treat them. You would spend most of your time learning about how a healthy body functions and what all the different parts of the body do. And that's the same with psychology.

So there's a portion of psychology that's interested in mental disorders and their treatment, but then there are many areas of psychology that are interested more in how people function on a day-to-day basis. And social psychology is focused on human beings as a social species—how our behavior and our thoughts and our emotions are influenced by either the actual, imagined or implied presence of other people.

Cheryl Quimba: So here at UB, you lead the Social Self Lab, which researches how individuals fulfill interpersonal needs and navigate a social world. Much of that research, as you said, is grounded on the premise that humans are a fundamentally social species. So is our sociability tied to a basic need to survive?

Shira Gabriel: Yeah, so, that's a great question. I think that it's very likely that at the deep core root of our need for social relationships are evolutionary reasons. So if you compare human beings to other apex predators, you'll see that we're kind of pathetic and sad. So other apex predators can, like, rip others open with their claws, and they can bite open flesh with their mouths, and they can lift cars in the air. Whereas, like, I broke a nail yesterday changing my sheets, and I've broken teeth on popcorn.

So physically, we weren't going to survive. What we really needed was other people. We needed to live in collectives and to be able to communicate with those other people in our collectives and cooperate with them in order to pool our resources. And that's what made humans survive. The reason that we are so intelligent as a species is that you have to be really intelligent to live and survive in collectives. The reason we have more complex languages is because we live with other people, and we need to be able to communicate complex thoughts. So all the things about us that we feel, like, really set us apart as human are actually really social things.

Cheryl Quimba: Let's talk about collective effervescence. This is a major focus of your research. First, did you coin this term? And then can you define it for us and then tell us a little bit about why this matters so much.

Shira Gabriel: Sure. So I wish I coined it, but I did not. Emile Durkheim, the famous sociologist, coined the term collective effervescence over 100 years ago to describe what he read about in descriptions of prayer rituals from other cultures. But in terms of defining it, that's something we've been really interested in in our lab. So my students and I have collected data from thousands of people across scores of different collective events, and then we were able to use statistical techniques in order to really drill down as to what is happening when we're with a collective and things feel psychologically meaningful for us.

The data strongly suggested that there are two intertwining things that happen. One is that we feel a sense of connection. So we might, in fact we usually do, feel connection to the other people we're with, but we might also feel connection to people throughout time and history who've experienced that same thing, sung that same kind of music, or watched those same kinds of games. And then we also feel a sensation of sacredness, and what that means is that we feel as if the moment goes beyond the day-to-day. One thing humans deeply want is to feel as if life is special, to feel as if we transcend the day-to-day and have moments that are elevated. So when we feel collective effervescence, we have an emotional experience, which is the intertwining of a feeling of connection to the other people that are there, and a feeling that there is something special or sacred in what's happening.

And our research suggests that these moments can bring not only that feeling of connection and sacredness, but that they bring a feeling of meaning to our lives. They can tear down walls between different kinds of people, they decrease the likelihood of anxiety and depression. What these moments really are are a window, a lens through which we can see the world that reminds us that we're all connected to each other, that the separateness that we feel is actually the illusion.

Cheryl Quimba: I just got tingles listening to you describe that, and it makes me think of times that I have felt collective effervescence myself.

Shira Gabriel: Yeah.

Cheryl Quimba: Yeah, and those are the kinds of memories that stay with you for the rest of your life, really.

Shira Gabriel: Yeah. So we have research that suggests that those are the kinds of events that, when we feel nostalgic and we bring a memory back into our mind and relive it, those tend to be for those collective effervescence moments. And as human beings, we have this amazing ability to store them in our little mental toolkits. And then whenever we are starting to feel sad or lonely, or as if life isn't special, we can bring them forward and relive them and rethink about them, and our research suggests that that can increase our day-to-day joy, even when we aren't engaging with those events.

Cheryl Quimba: Now is collective effervescence always or usually felt in these large group situations?

Shira Gabriel: Yeah, that's a really good question. I started this research because I was really moved watching a video of 50,000 people praying in a Pentecostal gathering in Africa, and I was like, "Oh my gosh! Like, why aren't we studying this? We need to understand the psychology behind that and the implications of that for psychology.”

So I was really thinking about those big events, and my students were too, but our participants weren't always. So we were finding that even though we expected people to list those giant events when we talked to them, people would, but people would also say, "Yeah, I felt this at the coffee shop the other day. I was drinking my coffee and working, and I looked around, and other people were drinking coffee and working, and I felt this sense of connection and specialness.” Or on a bus. “I was on a bus,” one participant said, “and something funny happened, and we all kind of looked at each other, and it felt really special.” People described waiting in line at a store or being in an elevator, and that really shifted what we were thinking. It was sort of like a recalibration for us for the research, and at first, it was a little intimidating to be like, maybe we were wrong.

And then it was exciting to think like, okay, let's figure out what this is, and that's something that we call everyday effervescence. So people sometimes feel a sense of connection and a sense of transcendence in everyday sorts of events, and those events are just as impactful for well-being in the long term, and they're more accessible in particular to some people. So there are folks out there who really don't like the idea of being in giant crowds, and so being able to cultivate and experience them more in their day-to-day lives is a real pathway to a richer life for all different kinds of people.

Cheryl Quimba: I love that, and I think what that means too is we have more opportunities on a day-to-day basis to experience these moments of collective effervescence, if we're receptive and open and attuned to it?

Shira Gabriel: Yeah, that's 100% true. So we can make ourselves attuned to it and receptive to it, and thus we’re able to see it in more places, and we’re able to experience it more.

Cheryl Quimba: So let's extend this a little further. When I think of belonging, I think of being part of a family or a friend group or say a workplace or a club. But in your research, you've also looked into more surprising ways that people can find connection, like through watching TV, for example, or reading novels. So can you explain how these activities, which aren't typically seen as social, can actually hold a lot of social value for people?

Shira Gabriel: Yeah, so one important thing to think about is that we evolved to be social at a time when there weren't novels and there weren't TV shows and there weren't celebrities to follow, and so there would have been no reason for us to evolve a system to distinguish those from the actual relationships that we have in our lives. And so what we've found in our lab is that one of the reasons that narratives are so appealing is because we get pulled inside the world of the narrative, and we feel as if we're a part of that collective. So when you watch the Harry Potter movies or read the books, for example, it's not so much that you feel like Harry and Hermione are your friends. You know that they're not, like, you're a rational human being. But when you read it, you get pulled into the world. That's why we get that feeling like when you leave a movie theater and everything feels a little surreal. It's because you've been in that world, and now all of a sudden, you were pulled out of it, and everything is weird.

And it feels incredibly good to be pulled into that world. It feels incredibly good to be a part of that collective, because it makes us feel connected. It gives us what I call a feeling of social embeddedness.

So yes, we need close relationships and partners and people to be within our lives in lots of different ways, and there are things that they give us that are important. But we also need a sense of social embeddedness, which is this broader feeling that we belong to a society or a world around us, and we get that from collective effervescence, and we also get that from reading novels and watching TV and catching up on our favorite celebrities and knowing the same sort of memes that everyone else knows. Those give us a feeling of being embedded in society, and that's healthy and good. And in fact, when we have compared those to what we call the more traditional kinds of relationships, what we've found is that they both contribute to well-being, and the people who tend to be happiest are the people who have both.

And in fact, one of the things that I always try and emphasize when I talk to people about this is that what matters is what works for you. There is no right way to do this. Our society puts a lot of pressure on people, I think, to find a romantic partner and to have kids and a certain number of kids, and people sometimes feel like they're failing when they don't do those things, even though they're happy. Really, it's like the feeling that they should be doing something else, rather than that they're unhappy with what they're doing, and I would love it if people could get rid of that feeling because there's just no data to support that.

Cheryl Quimba: So some might say we're more connected now than ever through the use of digital technology and social media. Others say we're lonelier than ever. What's your view on the role social media plays on our sense of connectedness, is it more of a help or a hindrance?

Shira Gabriel: I think it can be both, and it really depends on how people use it. So, there are ways we can use social media that give us a feeling of collective effervescence. So the World Cup, for example, I was obsessed with videos of Europeans discovering Walmart or discovering like the refills that we can get on soda, and that gave me this really cool sense of connection to the whole world and to America, which felt good, especially with us being so divided. So sometimes social media can spark feelings of collective effervescence. It can spark feelings of connection. We can see people doing kind things for one another or helping one another. And then it can give us a feeling of connection because we know the same things. Like my kids send me reels, and they share reels with their friends, and so there's like this little language that they have, sort of inside jokes, and that can make them feel more connected to the world generally.

But the problem is that, you know, social media benefits from us being on social media. That's how they make money, and so they use human psychology to keep us on there. And that means that they don't give us just great content. They intersperse the great content with content that isn't quite as good for us, and part of the reason they do that is that we're more likely to engage with something when we have to keep searching, and we know that eventually I'm going to get this thing that's really great. But that means you get a lot of things that aren't elevating you in between, and so people can waste hours and hours and hours on it, and then end up feeling bad about what they're missing in their life because they were doing that instead of doing other things.

So I think the key to using social media, or at least one key to using social media in a smart way, is knowing when to stop, to get sort of what you want out of it and then move on to something else. Sometimes that might mean that you have to force yourself to stop by, you know, setting timers or using programs that keep you off of there.

Cheryl Quimba: Good advice. We’re living in a time that can sometimes feel turbulent or especially challenging. How do the concepts of belonging and social embeddedness fit into our current circumstances? Has your research revealed anything to you that’s given you a sense of optimism or hope?

Shira Gabriel: Yeah, I think that the thing that has made me most optimistic and most hopeful is that people have such a strong desire to feel a sense of connection, that it's such a driving force for us, and I think that there's hope just in that. I do strongly believe that we're living through a loneliness epidemic. I think that COVID was very difficult for people because we missed all of these collective effervescence experiences. There was a reason why the first thing that happened was every concert sold out when we were able to leave our houses. Instead of being like, "Oh, I'm never going to be in a crowd again,” which would have been kind of a logical reaction, people were like, "Get me in a crowd!” Like, I'm desperate to be immersed with other folks, and that's because we need that so much.

But having that happen, and then on top of that, having the kinds of divisions that we're living through right now, and having media and powerful people that push us to see other people as fundamentally different from us, I think has increased the degree to which we feel lonely. And I think part of it is because people don't understand that loneliness doesn't only come from not having enough friends, or not having a romantic partner, or not having a family. People think like, "Well, I have my friends and I have my life. Why do I still feel like I'm not connected enough?” You still feel that way because you don't feel as if you're embedded in a larger society. There are very easy and wonderful ways to do that, but we are pushed in many ways to not do that. And so, my hope comes from the fact that I feel like what I've discovered is that the natural thing for human beings is good, and is connected, and we just need to find a way to not listen to the forces that are trying to push us to divide and feel hopeless, and to instead embrace the connection that is there waiting for us.

Cheryl Quimba: It's a great note to end on, and something I'm going to keep in my mind going forward. But before we wrap up, can you tell me what's on the horizon for your research?

Shira Gabriel: Yeah, so I'm writing a book that will be published in May of 2027 by Harper Collins, and it's on collective effervescence, and it also talks about the guilty pleasures in our lives and how to not feel guilty about those, and it comes with personalized plans for finding collective effervescence in our lives. So I'm really excited about that. And then I've also been writing a Substack, which is called “Many Ways to Belong.” I try and post things there that give people ideas about different kinds of connection and ways of understanding different things that are happening in the world through a lens of connection. And I have great students here at the University at Buffalo who I work with on all kinds of fun projects. So, I have a team of undergraduates and a team of grad students, and we've looked at things this year like the UB marching band and the kind of collective effervescence that they feel when they're performing, and protests here in Buffalo and the kind of effervescence that people felt at those protests. So yeah, I have a lot of research that I've been involved with in our wonderful community that I'll be doing more with in the coming years.

Cheryl Quimba: That's great. Well, I'm going to be one of your first readers of your book.

Shira Gabriel: Oh, yay!

Cheryl Quimba: And thank you so much for this conversation. It was really wonderful. I feel like I've learned so much. Thank you, Professor Gabriel.

Shira Gabriel: Thanks for having me. This was very fun.