Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. Read previous columns here.
One of my greatest pleasures is to be what the French call a “flâneur”—someone who wanders randomly through a big city, stumbling on new scenes. The flâneur has a long and honored literary history. The surrealists used to choose a Paris streetcar at random, ride to the end of the line and then walk around. And think of Mrs. Dalloway in London, Leopold Bloom in Dublin or Holden Caulfield in New York. But is there any scientific evidence for the benefit of “street-haunting,” as Virginia Woolf called it?
Two new studies led by Catherine Hartley of New York University and colleagues suggest that being a flâneur is good for you. In both, they cleverly combined GPS data with happiness ratings. The first study appeared in the journal Nature Neuroscience in 2020. Over 100 people in New York and Miami agreed to share their phone’s GPS data for three months, and they regularly rated their mood on an app. The researchers analyzed the GPS data with a measure called “roaming entropy,” which captures how new, varied and unexpected your locations are, and compared it with the mood ratings. More roaming entropy predicted more well-being. What’s more, how much you wandered on a given day predicted how happy you were later on, but not vice versa. So it looks as if wandering makes you happy, not just that when you’re happy you wander more.
The researchers also analyzed census data and confirmed what the surrealists knew: that wandering led people into different kinds of neighborhoods, rich or poor, white or black or Hispanic—what the researchers dryly called “sociodemographic experiential variability.” This experience is one of the glories of urban life, and further analyses showed that this social wandering was what really predicted happiness, beyond just physical wandering.
In a second experiment, just published in the journal Psychological Science, Dr. Hartley and colleagues looked at how wandering changed with age. It seems intuitive that young people are especially driven to explore—Holden Caulfield is only 16 after all. My own passion for street-haunting began when I was a teenager, wandering the snowy streets of Montreal and excitedly murmuring, “What will happen next?”
The researchers got GPS results and mood ratings for 63 people from 13 to 27 years old over three months. They also analyzed how many people the participants called or texted. Wandering was associated with happiness and social connection for everybody. But roaming entropy increased from age 13 until it peaked for 18- to 20-year-olds and then declined as the participants got older. (At 67, I find myself murmuring “What will happen next?” with more dread than anticipation.)
The results suggest that late adolescence is peak wander time, but 18 to 20 is older than I expected, compared with Holden Caulfield and me. Another result may help explain why. It turns out that among the younger teenagers, roaming entropy correlated with risk-taking in other forms, good and bad, from bungee-jumping and rock climbing to trying drugs and getting into fights. In contemporary life we are notoriously unwilling to let adolescents take risks, so parents may be curtailing exploration for younger teenagers or just making sure they’re too busy doing homework and after-school activities to wander. By contrast, the 18- to 20-year-olds were freer to follow their roaming instincts.
But the second Hartley paper is one of many studies suggesting that for young people, exploration, social connection and risk-taking all go together and link to exuberance and joy. Exploring lets you learn more about the physical and social world, even if that can be risky when you’re young. More street-haunting might be good for us all, but especially for our teenagers.