Understanding the social biome and how everyday communication adds up

Andy Merolla is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jeffrey Hall is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kanas.

What’s the big idea?

Individually, most day-to-day interactions may seem trivial, but they add up to an important personal and societal opportunity. We all engage in our own unique ecosystem of everyday communication—our very own social biome. Meaningful engagement with others is critical to health and wellbeing, but we live in a time when any kind of engagement is dwindling. So, even if we don’t get every moment “just right,” it’s worth prioritizing human contact and kindness so that we can cultivate happiness within and around us.

Below, coauthors Andy Merolla and Jeffrey Hall share five key insights from their new book, The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us. Listen to the audio version—read by Merolla—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. We all inhabit unique communication ecosystems that define us.

We come to know ourselves and others through communication. This includes the full range of daily face-to-face and mediated interactions, from passing hellos and office chit-chat to heated conflicts and heart-to-hearts.

But it’s hard to conceptualize all this interaction. We coined the term social biome to help people understand how our lives are lived out in everyday communication. A social biome is our ecosystem of day-to-day talk. It’s the totality of our moments of communication—in-person and digital—with loved ones, acquaintances, coworkers, neighbors, customers, clerks, and complete strangers. Our biomes include interactions we choose to engage in, those thrust upon us, and those we just happen to bounce in and out of.

The term “biome” comes from biology and ecology to describe what life is like in specific regions, including its plants, wildlife, and climate. Every human has their own unique microbiome, composed of the trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses living in and on our bodies. These microbes shape our health and well-being in fascinating ways, and although our microbiome is subject to the choices we make, such as the foods we eat, it’s also shaped by innumerable factors beyond our control. This includes where we happen to be born and the spaces we live and work in.

Our social biomes, too, are products of choices we make and many factors beyond our control. You can choose to be as kind as you can to those around you, but in many situations, you simply don’t get to choose who’s around you, nor how they communicate with you. When we start viewing our lives as lived out in social biomes, we recognize how consequential our moments of everyday interaction are for shaping our self-concept and worldview. We also understand the limits of what we can do.

Any individual moment of interaction can seem inconsequential, but at scale, our habits of interaction are anything but. Respect, dignity, and trust, as well as hate, indifference, and disdain all play out in small moments of communication—small moments that, over time, accumulate, crystallize, and calcify into our view of the world around us as a generally welcoming or inherently intolerant place.

Ultimately, a social biome perspective compels us to scrutinize how we spend our time and why, how we choose to treat others, and what adjustments we can make to social habits to make our lives—and the lives of those in our social biomes—healthier and happier. Moves as small as a text to let a friend know you were thinking about them, or pausing an extra beat to acknowledge a coworker you might usually ignore, can initiate new and, hopefully, enduring, routines of connection that can scale up and reverberate across people.

2. There is no such thing as “just right” when it comes to communication.

It’s incredible how much people value good communication skills. In one survey, over 90% of parents said that good communication skills are essential for their kids to thrive. Compare that to the percentage citing math skills (79%) or science skills (just 58%). It’s not just parents. Corporations prize communication abilities in hiring. This makes sense, as research indicates that communication problems are at the root of billions in corporate losses each year.

People instinctively know that if they could just communicate better, it would help to address a lot of problems they face. But what exactly is “better” when it comes to communication? It is a harder question to answer than you might think. Despite decades of research, simple definitions of good communication are hard to find.

First off, consider how messy everyday communication is. Of the thousands of words we typically speak each day, we tend to communicate in six-word chunks that are chock full of vocal fillers like um and ah, hesitations, starts, stops, interruptions, and trail offs. Add to that the constant digital distractions that tax the cognitive processing abilities of even the most Zen among us, and you get a good sense of what everyday communication is like. It bears little resemblance to the polished turns of talk we see in a typical Netflix series.

Further, many of us think about communication in the wrong way. We use the word “communication” as if it’s a singular entity. But it’s not. We all operate from different sets of assumptions about what good communication entails. We even differ in our view of what communication is for. The meaning of communication is always co-constructed between people, and those people might be operating from very different understandings of what demarcates the communicative good from the communicative bad.

Many communication challenges result from our tendency to put too much pressure on ourselves (and others) to get communication “just right.” But “just right” is always dependent on the unique standards people apply, and those standards don’t always align between communicators. When we fully appreciate that there is no such thing as “just right,” we can feel freer to connect with others in ways that feel authentic, knowing there are many paths to good communication.

3. We’re living in an Age of Interiority.

Time-use data, which tracks how people spend their daily lives, has shown that we spend less and less time socializing. This trend started long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Time spent alone has been increasing for at least three decades. Social changes, such as food delivery apps, online shopping, and self-checkout lines, make it possible to avoid human interaction for tasks that once required it. It’s becoming increasingly possible for people, especially highly resourced folks in the Global North, to live in ways that circumvent face-to-face interactions.

We’re not just hanging out with friends less often; we’re able to orchestrate a more disconnected life that’s finely tailored to our own needs. If we remember that people within social biomes are interdependent, then we see that each person’s shift toward a more interior life limits opportunities for social connections. When it comes to belonging, we are all in it together.

Disconnection, moreover, is self-reinforcing. When we become less comfortable interacting with people, even in mundane moments of everyday life, our social skills can atrophy. Social inertia sets in, making it increasingly energy-intensive to re-engage and build new relationships.

The reason for this interior shift across society is not solely due to personal choices. The social world controls us as much as we control it, and innumerable structural factors are pulling and keeping people apart. Long work hours. Precarious economic conditions. Lacking access to reliable and high-quality child and eldercare. These factors deplete people and lead them to want nothing more than to retreat from the social world—often toward a screen where they get some semblance of control. On top of it, ongoing segregation and political sorting intensify divisions, so even when we connect with others, it’s most likely with like-minded others.

There are both personal and societal costs when we live more interior lives.

4. Connection and restorative solitude are linked.

Alone time is important. A well-connected and socially satisfying life requires contented solitude. Research shows that communicating with others, including highly enjoyable conversations, requires a lot of energy. To replenish that energy, we need to recharge, often in solitude. Importantly, though, satisfying interactions make our time alone feel better.

In a study Jeff and I conducted a few years ago, we found that people’s overall satisfaction with their life was associated with their daily survey reports of how content they felt when alone—feeling contented while alone is most likely to occur following positive social interaction experiences.

For many people, though, solitude isn’t contented or chosen. Instead, it’s inescapable. When we find ourselves alone but don’t want to be, it reflects the kind of disconnection and loneliness that former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and many others have so admirably called attention to in recent years.

Social connection is highly uneven. Some people are doing great—their days are full of enjoyable interaction, and their calendars are packed with fun social events. Meanwhile, many others don’t have reliable access to the rewarding interactions that facilitate vital feelings of belonging.

This is again where a social biome perspective can be helpful because it reminds us that we can do our best to look out for other people around us, particularly folks who don’t have as many opportunities for social interaction and support. This includes acquaintances, neighbors, and people we work with. Our efforts to reach out can rekindle connections for people badly needing them.

5. Hope is an interpersonal phenomenon.

If we’re in an Age of Interiority, we could just as easily contend that we’re in an Age of Hopelessness. People have lost faith in institutions and feel less trust in the people around them. People with marginalized identities feel under attack by people in positions of great power. Fears of climate change. The existential dread of AI. Pick your poison.

But what exactly does it mean to feel hopeless or hopeful? In day-to-day conversation, we say things like we’re “holding out hope” or “trying not to get our hopes up.” Such comments suggest that hope is, at best, an intentional suspension of disbelief or, at worst, willful ignorance of the cold, hard reality of life. This view of hope—as a foolish illusion or dangerous obliviousness to the way things really are—is one held by some of history’s most famous philosophers. Hope was among the evils inside Pandora’s box.

Over the past 70 years, however, social psychologists have offered a radically different view of hope tied to the way we think about and pursue goals. The late psychologist C. R. Snyder and his collaborators helped us see that many of our most important goals are linked to other people. These goals can be both big and small. When we see friends giving their full attention to one another or small acts of kindness between strangers, that is hope in action. People are choosing to prioritize their finite attention and energy on others. These are building blocks of connection and, over time, give us a sense of hope to pursue larger, more challenging goals.

When we accept the idea that hope is communal and not just personal, we better appreciate how much is riding on our treatment of one another in everyday moments of talk. Small moments of acknowledgement and compassion aren’t the antidote to all the world’s ills, but it’s hard to envision a world of rebuilt trust and a better future for our kids if we don’t try to spread kindness and dignity, moment by moment, across our social biomes.

This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

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