You walk into an empty apartment, drop your keys, and grab the remote before you even take off your shoes. The TV turns on some familiar show, perhaps one you’ve seen before, and suddenly the silence isn’t quite so loud. If this sounds like you, you are not alone. And what you’re doing, psychologists say, is not just a quirky habit. It may be one of the most quietly humane things you do all day.
In a landmark study, ‘Social surrogacy: How favored television programs provide the experience of belonging,’ published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers Jaye L. Derrick, Shira Gabriel, and Kurt Hugenberg found that people actively seek out their favorite TV shows when they are lonely and, in turn, feel measurably less alone while they are watching. They called this the “social surrogacy hypothesis”: the idea that television can serve as a kind of emotional surrogate when no real human relationships are available.
Your brain might not always know the difference
In four studies with hundreds of participants, Derrick, Gabriel, and Hugenberg found that people whose sense of belonging had been experimentally threatened spent more time mentally ruminating on their favorite TV shows than on shows they passively watched. Just thinking about a favorite show helped people buffer against drops in self-esteem and mood even after social rejection. In other words, the comfort was not imaginary. It could be measured.
This goes much deeper, into the psychology of humans. According to ‘The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation,’ a foundational paper published in Psychological Bulletin by Roy F. Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University and Mark R. Leary of Wake Forest University, the need to belong is one of the most powerful and basic of human motivators. Baumeister and Leary argued that people are wired to seek frequent, positive social connections and that the psychological toll is real when those connections are missing. They discovered that social isolation is nearly incompatible with sustained well-being.
That’s the sweet spot for the TV. It is not just noise. It is a social world of alternatives.
