locked position, just waiting to land. You can’t dance, or pace
much, it’s difficult to scratch your back; you can hardly squirm. In
the absence of electronic entertainment, the only potential for
experiences, the only source of escape, is roughly one inch away
from you – the passenger beside you. After all, they could be an
astronaut, or a rodeo clown, or maybe they’d love to hear your story
about the time you saw a snake in the road, or your ideas about
single-stream recycling, or give you advice about your boss.
Flying in an airplane is only slightly more stimulating than
Zuckerman’s original Ganzfeld sensory deprivation experiments
(and you know how high sensation-seekers loved those). After
those experiments Zuckerman began to wonder how high or low
sensation-seeking people might respond when they were with
another person either similar or different from them in sensation-
seeking.^1 To determine this, he repeated the sensory deprivation
experiments but this time with roommates. The experimenters
were curious to what extent social isolation was a factor as opposed
to the absence of sensory stimulation. When they paired high and
low sensation-seeking people in rooms together they discovered
that the low sensation-seekers preferred to be alone. Not only
because the high sensation-seeking individual was a source of addi-
tional sensations, but also because the high sensation-seeker
tended to dominate the social situation by talking more, disclosing
more private information, and trying to convince the low sensa-
tion-seeker to disclose private information or even push hot button
topics.^2 Zuckerman’s follow-up study was one of the first early
indicators that high sensation-seeking can impact a person’s day-
to-day interactions with others. They stand closer when they talk,
make longer eye contact, and are more emotionally expressive
during conversations.^3 For the high sensation-seeker, other people
are a source of novel experiences. And they engage in higher rates
of self-disclosure and initiate more disclosure from other people,
including strangers.
In 1990, Robert Franken and his colleagues at the University
of Calgary measured sensation-seeking in 413 people (158 men and
255 women) and asked them how likely they were to discuss perso-
nal information with casual and close friends. The researchers
discovered that high sensation-seekers disclose both to casual and
to close friends at a higher rate than low sensation-seekers. High
sensation-seeking women in particular found it easy to disclose
with close and casual friends. Both high sensation-seeking men95 / The Relationships of High Sensation-SeekersDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:21:35, subject to the Cambridge