Kindly Doomed: Your Assigned Date is monitored, and four minutes of silence counts as a refusal. Day 4 of Single Nation, an animated dystopian comedy about dating, loneliness and a government that has run out of patience. Saturday, seven o'clock, Romano's, table twelve. The woman from across the road sits down without taking her coat off, and the little pink card between you lights up. It has a speaker. And a lens. You have ninety minutes, you are not allowed to stop talking, and you have forty-six pounds until payday. So you make a deal: no names, no jobs, no families, nothing true. Then the card rates the conversation, and the deal has to change.
Single Nation is a fictional series. The Partnership Act, the Department and every character are invented. The real research woven into the story is listed below. Sources (the real facts in this episode)
- Koudenburg, Postmes & Gordijn (2011), "Disrupting the flow: How brief silences in group conversations affect social needs", Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (University of Groningen): a 4-second silence left viewers feeling more rejected and anxious.
- Bond & DePaulo (2006), "Accuracy of Deception Judgments", Personality and Social Psychology Review: people tell lies from truth about 54% of the time.
- Étienne Lombard (1911): the Lombard effect, raising our voices in noise without deciding to.
- Chartrand & Bargh (1999), "The Chameleon Effect", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Victorian floriography: in many flower dictionaries red carnations meant admiration and striped ones refusal (the dictionaries did not always agree).
- Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023, in force 1 October 2024 in England, Scotland and Wales: tips must go to the staff.
- Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom & Clark (2018), "The Liking Gap in Conversations", Psychological Science.
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