Afterward, each foursome was led to a room and told, to quote Coffee Talk, to “talk amongst yourselves.” The researcher left the room, and he returned five minutes later.

He gave the subjects another survey, this one consisting of two questions: “How do you feel right now?” on the same 100-point scale, as well as “How did you feel during the interaction that took place?” on a scale of 100 between “excluded” and “included.”

Surprisingly, people who watched the “extraordinary” video felt worse than those who watched the “ordinary” one by about 10 points. They also felt more excluded by 30 points on average.

Participants' Predicted and Actual Feelings

Psychological Science

“Conversations thrive on ordinary topics,” Gus Cooney, a Harvard Ph.D. student and the study’s lead author, told me. “The guy who had the extraordinary experience had a harder time fitting in.”

So why, then, would we ever choose to go sky-diving or Icelandic volcano-spelunking? Why would anyone pursue unusual encounters if banal ones make for better chit-chat? The authors performed another experiment in which they asked a new group of participants to picture themselves going through the two different conditions—watching either the magician video or the cartoon one and then talking with others. They were asked to score how they thought they would feel during the conversation.

“Participants expected an extraordinary experience to leave them feeling better than an ordinary experience at all points in time,” the authors wrote. In other words, we think seeing or doing amazing things will make us feel better than people who haven't; it actually makes us feel worse.

The authors speculate that this might be because the joy from an unusual experience fades quickly, but the sting of not fitting in because we didn’t share an experience with our peers—even a crappy one—lingers.

“A hallmark of the nonsocial pleasures—whether the cool tingle of Dom Pérignon or the hot snarl of a new Maserati—is that people adapt to them quickly, which is why such experiences are typically best when they are novel or rare,” Cooney and his co-authors, Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert and University of Virginia’s Timothy Wilson, write. “The social pleasures have a different appeal. People crave acceptance, belonging, and camaraderie, and the hallmark of these pleasures is that they come more readily to those who fit in than to those who stand out.”

People who had extraordinary experiences, meanwhile, had “little in common” with those who had run-of-the-mill experiences, and the resulting combination of strangeness, jealousy, and abnormality caused the extraordinary people to feel left out. In other words, you had to be there. Apparently, though, we don’t anticipate the social rejection that might ensue when we try to regale our acquaintances with stories from our trek across New Zealand.