Attention mechanisms do not exist in isolation but in a world rich in context. With evidence from the joint picture word interference (PWI) paradigm, I demonstrate how meaningful social contexts have the power to facilitate distractor suppression in ways that are sensitive to the social dynamics of dyadic interactions. In the PWI paradigm, participants respond to target pictures while ignoring distractor words. If pictures and words are semantically related, then interference slows responses. Our findings consistently demonstrate that this distractor interference is removed when participants believe they are working with another person, but only when that person engages with the distractor word, and is perceived as having particular social traits, such as high status or competency. I conclude that social environments afford the offloading of task-irrelevant distraction in a socially sophisticated manner (social offloading), and I highlight the importance of re-worlding participants in meaningful contexts to reveal the embeddedness of behaviour.