Ever wondered if your friends are bringing you down? Recently recognized in Time for his research on social connectivity and dehumanization, Kellogg professor Adam Waytz explains the effect social networks have on you.

Excerpts:

The Current: What led you to explore the link between social relationships and dehumanization?

Adam Waytz: When I was in graduate school, my advisers and I had been studying anthropomorphism, the process by which people treat nonhuman entities – pets, God, technological gadgets – as human. We developed a theory that identified loneliness as one of three primary causes of this. As we started to conduct these studies we thought these same principles might apply to the construct of dehumanization. So we had to invert our predictions and found that just as loneliness increases humanization, making people feel less lonely and highly socially connected increases their tendency to dehumanize people.

The Current: What makes your research unique?

AW: Our study was different because it looked at dehumanization in particular, which the past research hadn’t done as much, and also because it looked at not only the effects of groups but just at the effects of connection between two individuals.

The Current: Do you feel that the results of your study match up to your personal life?

AW: Not to the extent that I think I am dehumanizing others, but I think the part of our research that I relate to is the feeling of being overextended. There are so many social obligations and social circles we belong to as social animals that we end up spending our social resources to the point that they become depleted, and therefore, we cannot fully attend to everyone. That’s the experience that resonates with me.

The Current: What was it like to be interviewed by Time?

AW: The Kellogg PR department had prepared me for this. That’s something new to me, though, as a new professor. That was my first experience working with a PR department, but I was very well prepared for the interview.

The Current: Is there any publication that you would be especially excited to be featured in?

AW: An ideal publication, I’ve always loved to read, is Harper’s. When we had conducted our research on anthropomorphism, Harper’s included us in one sentence in a section called “Findings,” and that was very exciting. To appear in Harper’s is always sort of my goal.

The Current: As a new professor at Northwestern, do you plan on using this research as part of any upcoming course material?

AW: I will be teaching a course called “Values-Based Leadership,” which is a course on ethics and on how people can motivate and lead through values, and not merely through material incentives like money. I’m not sure yet if I’ll use the research as I am just familiarizing myself with the course, but it’s certainly an example of how people can behave unethically and treat others unethically.

The Current: What can we expect next on the research front?

AW: Broadly, I look at how people think about others’ minds. One entity that we’ve gotten very interested in is the group. Some people think groups have minds and some people say that groups have no minds at all, that they’re just collections. So, we’ve been looking at the conditions under which people will sort of humanize groups and think of them as persons versus when they fail to consider groups as having minds of their own.