From ancient time, Homo sapiens moved around in search of a better life.Although the development of agriculture and industrialization no longer necessitates frequently moving to find new food sources, people today still change their residences for a variety of reasons. This article highlights key findings from residential mobility, focusing on its implications for the self, social relationships, societies, and well-being. Generally, residential mobility shifts individual attention away from collective attributes toward personal attributes. It also changes people's relationship styles and preferences, leading individuals to favor wider social networks, more open communication, low-commitment groups, and egalitarian helpers. In addition, it increases tolerance for norm violations and moral deviations. Lastly, residential mobility can explain some cross-national and within-nation variations. This article reviews recent psychological research on residential mobility and then discusses limitations, paradoxical findings, and future directions.

The positivity of goal completion is reinforced through everyday experiences of social praise and instrumental reward. Here we investigated whether, in line with this self-regulatory emphasis, people value completion opportunities in and of themselves. Across six experiments we found that adding an arbitrary completion opportunity to a lower-reward task increased the likelihood that participants would choose to work on that task over a higher-reward alternative that did not offer a completion opportunity. This occurred for extrinsic reward tradeoffs (Experiments 1, 3, 4, and 5) and intrinsic reward tradeoffs (Experiments 2 and 6), and it persisted even when participants explicitly noted the rewards of each task (Experiment 3). We sought but did not find evidence that the tendency is moderated by participants’ stable or momentary level of concern with monitoring multiple responsibilities (Experiments 4 and 5, respectively). We did find that the opportunity to complete the final step in a sequence was particularly attractive: Setting the lower-reward task closer to completion (but with completion still out of reach) did increase its choice share, but setting the lower-reward task with completion distinctly in reach increased its choice share even more (Experiment 6). Together, the experiments imply that people sometimes behave as if they value completion itself. In everyday life, the allure of mere completion may influence the tradeoffs people make when prioritizing their goals.

People often match the emotion states of interaction partners, a process known as emotion contagion. Emotion contagion is considered both a by-product of shared goals and a tool for strengthening social bonds. Although cross-sectional evidence suggests emotion contagion is positively related to bond strength, few studies have investigated this relationship over the course of friendship formation. Perhaps emotion contagion increases as people become closer (a within-dyad effect), reflecting relationship closeness. Or perhaps some dyads have a stable mutual liking and a tendency towards emotion contagion that does not change over time (a between-dyad effect). Our study disentangled these two accounts. Pairs of unacquainted participants had conversations weekly for six weeks. Participants reported pre- and post-conversation emotion states, and closeness to their partner after each conversation. Emotion contagion, measured in three different ways, declined over time as dyads became interpersonally close (evidence for a within-dyad effect). This decline may indicate increased comfort with emotional divergence. Notably, dyads that reported greater average interpersonal closeness exhibited larger changes in emotion states during their conversations, aligning with previous between-dyad findings. Thus, the association between emotion contagion and friendship status depends on whether we consider change within a dyad or compare between dyads.

When you have the option to connect with someone, do you choose to meet up with a new friend or reconnect with an old friend? People often face this tradeoff between choosing a known option and trying an unknown one, known as the explore-exploit tradeoff. How and when an individual chooses to do either depends on individual and situational factors. Though this has been documented in other literature, such as how animals search for food, it has yet to be extensively applied to how humans search for social connections. In this paper, we draw connections between existing foraging contexts and foraging for social connections, posit why known principles would apply in this domain, and describe how characteristics of the individual and situation would lead to one behavior or another. This review can help social psychologists better understand the contexts of social exploration and generate new hypotheses.

During conversations, people face a tradeoff between establishing common ground (e.g., understanding each other) and making interesting and unique contributions. Making an unpredictable and semantically divergent topic change may be interesting but runs the risk of being incomprehensible. How do people balance this tradeoff when deciding which concepts to reference, and does it matter how well they know their conversation partner? In the present work, participants made stream-of-consciousness word associations either with a partner or alone—simplified versions of dialogue and monologue. Participants made semantically narrower and more predictable word associations with a stranger than alone (Study 1), suggesting that they constrain their associations to establish common ground. Increasing closeness (Study 2) or having a prior relationship (Study 3) did not moderate this effect. Thus, even during a task that does not depend on establishing common ground and mutual understanding, people sacrifice being interesting for the sake of being understood.