Nobody Wants To Hear About Your Vacation Your friends don’t want to hear about your excellent adventures.  By Jan Hoffman

While you may have gotten great pleasure from an epic event — sipping a rare wine in Burgundy, watching a Himalayan sunrise — that pleasure is all your own.

A recent study in Psychological Science says that despite the thrills people receive from an extraordinary experience, few anticipate its potential social cost: exclusion by friends who would really rather not hear about it.

Harvard researchers found that when people socialize, those who had the same experience, no matter how mundane, enjoyed chatting about it together. Those same people might well exclude the person who thought others couldn’t wait to hear all about his or her most unusual one.

“It’s a timely question, given how much people are sharing and bragging about their experiences through social media,” said Cassie Mogilner, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who looks at the happiness that people derive from ordinary and extraordinary events. “This suggests that people may be rolling their eyes at all those posts about amazing vacations.”

Reasonable people may disagree about what distinguishes an ordinary experience from an extraordinary one. Gus Cooney, a Harvard graduate student in psychology and the study’s lead author, defined an extraordinary experience as one that is “both enjoyable and unique.”

Before beginning the study, the researchers asked 76 participants to rate the quality of short movies. From that data, the researchers picked a high-rated film — one that left viewers feeling great — to serve as the proxy for an extraordinary experience. They picked a low-rated film, one that left viewers feeling “not very good,” as an ordinary experience.

To measure the social consequence of an extraordinary experience, the researchers then asked 68 new subjects to watch one of the movies. The researchers held 17 sessions, with four participants each. One person was shown the superior, four-star video, the “extraordinary” experience. The other three, each watching alone, saw the lackluster, two-star video, an “ordinary” experience. The group convened afterward to chat.

As it turned out, the people who had seen the best film didn’t enjoy the postfilm socializing.

“Our subjects thought they would be the star of the interaction, and they were surprised they were left out of it,” said a co-author, Daniel T. Gilbert, a Harvard social psychologist who writes about happiness. “They didn’t understand why everyone else wanted to commiserate” about the bad movie “rather than hear about their great one.”

In questionnaires filled out later, the participants who had watched the superior video felt considerably worse than those who had seen the ordinary one. In follow-up studies, people incorrectly predicted that seeing the better video would improve their social interactions, not make them worse.

In the paper’s discussion, the authors note that “pleasure” comes, loosely speaking, from both nonsocial or individual experiences and social or shared experiences. Nonsocial pleasures are especially sensational when they are unique or unusual — like a joy ride around town in a Lamborghini.

But the pleasure of a social encounter is built on commonality. People are more likely to enjoy talking about an ordinary experience they have all had rather than hearing about the fabulous one they didn’t. So sharing the details of your singular experience in a social setting can indeed backfire, leading to feelings of being excluded.

“We’re so attracted by extraordinary things that we don’t think about their cost — that they make you different from anyone else,” Mr. Cooney said.

George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, also looked at other potentially negative reactions when people hold forth about grand achievements, starring themselves. In his recent paper, “You Call It ‘Self-Exuberance,’ I Call It ‘Bragging,’?” Dr. Loewenstein and his co-authors note that people often misjudge that moment when their confident self-promotion is instead construed by listeners as distasteful bragging.

“Our study gave me pause about whether you should just keep your mouth shut,” Dr. Loewenstein said.

Do the findings mean you should decline an invitation to dine privately with Ben Affleck and instead go out with friends to see his film “Gone Girl”?

Not necessarily. Dr. Gilbert suggested that contact with celebrities, even though it counts as rare and extraordinary, might be its own kind of crowd-pleasing experience. “Certain experiences can make you the star of the party and make people want to know you more,” he speculated.

But when friends come over for dinner, he added, “You might want to think twice before you haul out your photo album of that recent trip to Paris.”