Why Modern Life Feels So Empty | Nicholas Epley

No longer Thank you. Or dead weight. My first day of work and I need to make a big impression. Were you just checking me out? No. It's too bad. Coworkers? Don't take me seriously. It's not a human. It's just a piece of meat. Someone bring a gurney. Nobody gets along in life. On their own. We all need help from other people at times. And it turns out when we are providing help to other people, it tends to lift us up.

If I wanna make somebody feel good on any given day, I should ask them to do an act of kindness as a researcher, as a scientist, ask them to do an act of kindness. That's gonna make you feel better on any given day. And when you ask for help from somebody, you are giving them an opportunity to be kind. To you.

All right, let's kick off today's show. Today we're talking with Nick Epley, University of Chicago professor and author of A Little More Social, how small choices create unexpected happiness, health, and connection. Nick studies social cognition and why people routinely misunderstand each other. And today he shares why introverts actually don't prefer being alone, how others judge your warmth and intent, not your performance or fluency.

why hard honesty doesn't ruin rapport, and how asking for help from others creates an opportunity and a real gift for warmth and connection. Welcome to the show, Nick. It's great to have you. Thank you, AJ. It's great to be here again. What I have to say about your research is it's so exciting for me and Johnny to see validation in the work that we do with our clients and why our career has been so fulfilling over the last nineteen years.

Helping these small social habits transform the lives of our clients and see the impact on their relationships, their health and just how they show up in the world has been so gratifying. And the work you do in the lab really reinforces just the importance and the impact that these small social habits have on our life and well being. I'd love to hear how it's personally impacted you because I I love those personal anecdotes.

Yeah, so uh I think to even sharpen that point just a little bit more, I think what our research really highlights. is the surprising impact of these things, which of course is why the work that you do and the research uh is important, why the research that we do I think is interesting, is because these things are not obvious to us.

it is not obvious to us that doing, you know, passing along a small compliment or expressing gratitude or having a small conversation with someone or reaching out to express support when someone's in need that it'll matter that much. And we find over and over again that people underestimate how much these things will matter. And so that's that's I think the really um uh interesting thing to me about our work is about that gap.

And for me it has changed um the way I live my life in so many in so many different ways. What it's done is it it is highlighted the ways in which doubts or indifference about how other people will respond when I reach out to connect to them. Um

how pessimistic I can be about those, how overly pessimistic I can be. And it gives me opportunities to reach out that I wouldn't take otherwise. So one one very simple example. So I go into the office every day. I take the train on the way into the University of Chicago. I work as a professor of behavioral science. I'm often talking to people on the train, so that's one that's one simple thing. When I get on, I've got kind of an army of of of people I can talk with.

And one thing I do to help me maintain some of those relationships and connections with people to bring people closer to me is on my otherwise tool of disconnection here, my iPhone, I keep a note page. that has people's names on it. People I've met. So I've got a I have a neighbor's note and I have a on the train note and I have an at-work note where I write down the names of folks who I've had conversation with so that when I see them again

I can use their names because who uses our names? Our friends do. Right? Then then when I get to the office, I got a four block walk to uh to the booth school of business where I work. I often have a conversation with somebody along those four four blocks. And then when I get to my office, I open the door. And I realized at one point I was walking up to my office

Just kind of with my head down, trying to get there as, you know, kind of as efficiently as I can. And I had about a 200-yard walk. Uh, and I realized I was walking by people without really engaging with them. And it'd be really easy to do that. And so I've now purposefully, when I walk into the office, um, I walk in with my head up.

Sma you know, saying hi uh and hello to people um as I go by and I've met, you know, lots more students that way, many of our staff that way. Um and that's just that's just on my way into work in the morning. It ripples throughout the rest of the day too in ways small and big for me. Well, one of the reasons that people don't recognize this or or understand the power of what we've all been studying for for how many decades now?

communication takes place subconsciously. So you're having your little experiments on the train. For me, I got started because I was a bartender and I was bored. And so I had a laboratory of uh of sorts every uh of rats every night to to work with. So for me, it was how do I make this job more interesting? And and if I was going to make it more interesting, why wouldn't I make it more profitable?

So that's when I got into an an understanding the communication of it. And I would read about a concept and then the next night at work, I would run that concept and I would measure my effectiveness in my tip. And so d and and then I I would watch then as these concepts then became part of my conversational repertoire, the ones that became very powerful. But what I saw Sh did these tiny little habits and experiments uh make me more sociable? Yes.

What but it also made people more delighted to see me. They t my tips ex exploded three times to five times. And For me, it was it was about the the power now that I now wielded and that I used deliberately to to get the desired result.

So now in walking into a room, there are frameworks and strategies that I will use, whether it's going to be, is this a an opportunity for connection, leading, or influence? And the those tiny uh communication social habits need to be put in place. For those results to be actual. Yeah. Can I comment on two things in that wonderful comment there?

Uh maybe maybe three. First let me start with a a comment that Bob Cialdini, who's a famous psychologist who studied persuasion, once uh once made, which is that he never told a used car salesman anything he didn't already know. Right. So, you know, in our res you know, we there are different laboratories in the world.

You know, as researchers we have a particular particularly careful ways we do this, but of course you learn from experience out in the world as long as you test repeatedly over and over and over again, not just one time. So that's beautiful. We've got the basement of the business school building uh in in in Hyde Park. You've got your bar. I know where it's more fun to run experiments, but yeah Yeah. Second thing uh is you mentioned the subconscious part.

In my mind, the subconscious part for me is often how easily we let these opportunities slip by without even noticing. Right. You get into these habits, these routines, these you know, y you you get on onto a train or into a cab or walk through the office or head home at night and sit down in front of T V. All of these things we do kind of automatically or mindlessly without noticing

that we've missed an opportunity to engage with somebody, to to take a dull moment and make it a little brighter. Um and when you start looking for those things, we recommend, for instance, that people um uh Take a uh well, we often we we recommend that people do a choice journal, which is to look over their past day and just for each hour, look at the opportunities where they could have made a choice to reach out and engage with somebody but didn't.

Right. A lot of those will escape your attention. And once you notice them, you can find opportunities to engage a little more. And the third thing you mentioned was power. I think that's really, really important. If there is one thing that I have felt in our work. And one thing that I have learned over and over again from talking with people like you guys who talk to people a lot.

Is that they will tell me that they feel like they have a superpower. Yes. In our work, I feel like the main message is empowering because what what our work suggests. are that at least there are times, many times, I think, where we could reach out and engage with other people, but our beliefs, overly pessimistic beliefs about how other people will respond to us when we reach out to them, hold us back.

And those are mistakes. Those are prison bars essentially we are keeping ourselves in that are misplaced. And if we don't test them, we're gonna think they're steel, when in fact they're more like wet pasta noodles. And when you do then push on them, you realize that this anxiety you have about engaging with other people or the ways in which you're holding yourself back.

Are just making you weaker than you could be. You you could be lifting up a lot of people in ways you're not. You could be making dull moments better in ways perhaps you're not. And once you see those, It starts to feel like a superpower. Well, I think the one thing that stands out in this habit stack that we're talking about here is how much modern life

has influenced us in ways that we don't even realize. The habit of putting in our AirPods, the habit of staring at our phone on the train, the habit of building parasocial relationships with people digitally that we follow that are showing their life, that are influencers. And we've used that as a substitute for all of these micro interactions we're talking about here that you have opportunity for every single day.

And then on top of it, it's stressful at work. So the modern convenience of having stuff delivered to you, but not even opening the door to talk to the delivery person, not even having a conversation with the Uber driver. But instead turning inward and then over time building this this weakness towards socialization. And this loneliness that can feel like a prison, that can feel completely helpless as we're going about our day, missing all of these opportunities out there. Yeah.

So just a couple of comments on this. That's an that's an excellent observation. For most of human history, social connection wasn't really a choice that we m we had to make. We it was kind of made for us. You you had to be interacting with other people in order to get along and get ahead and basically survive. And modern life though has enabled uh to a greater I mean, it was all you always had some choice in in connecting with other people, but modern life has given us the opportunity.

to do lots of things more efficiently that don't involve other people at all. And now we can make make a lot of choices. We can we can we could choose on any given day, for instance, To spend the entire day completely to ourselves in ways that humans have never before been able to do. You can get up in the morning, get your food delivered to you, uh w without, you know, seeing anybody, spend your day working from home, right? Go down and make lunch that you order through Instacart.

Uh, get your dinner delivered the same way. Sit down and Netflix and chill in the evening, right? And you know, there there was and and and never see anybody. There was a a woman in um in Italy I write about in in in my book in a little more social. There's a woman in Italy who who passed away. Um and was not found for two years until firefighters came to her house after a storm and found her sitting there

Long since deceased for two years. And the mayor of the town said Um the tragedy of this of this person's life wasn't that she died alone. Nobody knew that she had died. It was that nobody knew that she was alive. Right? That is a distinctly modern a distinctly modern phenomenon. Um d at least to s to some extent. Um the other thing though is to note how much of this becomes just kind of again automatic and routine in a way you you you you might even miss.

So and and the data supports this kind of steady decay uh towards isolation. uh Matthias Meal, who's a psychologist at at the University of Arizona, just published a paper where she or sorry, just published a paper where he, uh Matthias and his uh co author, um had been tracking essentially how much people are speaking.

Over a 12 year period from 2007 to 2019. This was almost incidental. They were running experiments where people wear a little microphone. uh on their shirt that just captures conversation over the course of the day. And they found that between 2007 and 2019 that we were speaking on average 338 words a day. A las

over those over those those years. That's about 120,000 words a year lost, right? And those are all, some of those are big conversations, but a lot of those are are just little interactions that we have that we now no longer are. Um and and that's gonna matter a lot for our well being. I wasn't sleeping well at night. I tried everything. Turns out my air quality was messing with my sleep quality. Indoor air. It's the thing you don't think about until it's the problem.

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Isolation. But that isolation is also a bit of a it's a we can call it a sleep social. Because our brain is somewhere else. And what our clients notice is now that they're taking action in the social realm, their first acknowledgement is everybody is asleep around me. I now have these tools that that that makes me uh proactive in this social realm and everyone is just getting out of my way because because they want to r remain asleep. So I just go and do what I need to do.

And get the results that I want. And I'm surprised no one no one is stepping in. No one is falling. No one is waking up. So that the add to that idea of the that you're gaining this superpower, it's also this unfair advantage because everyone is isolated and asleep in their own world.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. One thing that I would um that I would add to that comment, which is a good one, is that this technology can send send us signals that other people don't want to engage or talk with us. And that is in fact what we find is the real barrier to reaching out and engaging with other people, which is thinking that other people won't

won't want to reach back to us if we reach out to them. And that cuts across all kinds of things from, you know, whether you're having a conversation with a stranger or passing along a compliment to someone or having a deeper conversation with someone or expressing gratitude or doing an act of kindness, the belief that other people aren't gonna reciprocate that is what really creates the powerful barrier. And our headphones and our and our iPhones and things that we carry with us, those are all

Signals we take that other people aren't aren't interested. But I would caution listeners to notice that those are imperfect signals. You might sit there and look at your phone, not because you are not interested in engaging with somebody, but but because nobody else is, and you'd be happy to talk if somebody engaged with you.

But because nobody is, you're sitting there staring at your phone. And so, I mean, one thing that I like to do is, you know, is to, is to think about conversation as an as an invitation. Think about hello. as an invitation to someone to join you in a conversation. And it might be, so John, uh, you know, I might have you sitting down next to me on a on a plane, like I, you know, was flying home last night.

on you might have your earbuds in, right? And I could take that as a sign that you don't want to talk to to anybody. And so then maybe I wouldn't try, but I could also turn to you and say, hi, I'm Nick. Are you heading home or are you leaving home?

And if you take out your earbuds, then you know, then then I've invited you into conversation and then you're choosing to continue. But if you keep'em in or put'em back in, then you're telling me that, you know, you you you got music to listen to in our audio book, and that's okay, right?

But you can test these things too and find out sometimes that people, in fact, are happy to talk if you say hello to them. One part to add to that, how many people I mean, I do this all the time, so I'm gonna only assume that other people do it as well, which is A lot of times if I'm in a if I'm on a train or uh I'm I'm in a place very social and there's a lot of people and it's lively

And I have my I have my earphones or my ear pods in, but there there's no music playing. I'm I'm see I'm I'm now Uh I'm the person they don't think is listening, but I'm listening. Mm. Okay. You're also communicating that you don't you don't want to be listening. Well I don't want them to think that's a good thing. You're not open. Right. So it's it's it's all going in. So how many other people are around who you think are zoned out who are actually tuned in?

Could be. Uh I don't do that, but I perhaps other people do, yes. Well I wanna double click on the the voice part because losing our voice I don't think the listeners really understand how much impact that has. I think modern technology has allowed us to communicate asynchronously and think, oh, a text message and an email is enough, a resume is enough.

But there's strong research that you losing your voice has serious implications on your career, your relationship satisfaction, your ability to connect with people. And it might feel easier to send the text. to send the emoji, to like a person's Facebook or Instagram post, but not having that actual conversation that we're talking about here is really detrimental. Yes. I mean we find in our work um that the voice really communicates

a lot of what's on our mind and therefore does three things. One is it makes it clearer what we're saying. So you can detect things like sincerity and sarcasm, for instance. you know, much better when you hear what somebody has to say than when you read what they have to say. But in our experiments, people who are who are trying to be sincere or sarcastic don't anticipate They think that they'll be communicating equally well regardless of how the context they're communicating.

In because it's clear to us, right, what we're trying to communicate. It can be hard to tell how this information is being received. Your voice conveys a lot of information. Second, the voice also communicates not just what's on your mind. We also find, perhaps even more important, that it communicates that you have a mind. So I can't I can't tell necessarily that you are

thinking or feeling something. I don't have access to your mind, right? I can't I can't see your mind. I can't see a want or a belief or a or a thought or reasoning or rationality. But our data suggest you can hear it. And you can hear it in the voice and the cues that the voice gives beyond the spoken semantic content itself. So you can hear my voice, for instance. Rise up and down, Right? That's intonation. And I speed up and slow down.

That's a variance in pace, right? And your voice then has movement. It has life in it that communicates the presence of a mind. Just like I can tell if that you're alive physically by watching you move. You can tell that I'm alive mentally when you hear that movement in my voice. How do you make somebody seem mindless? You strip that life away and you make it completely monotone, which is not how real people actually speak usually. Or you turn it into tech.

Which is dead essentially, right? Text does not have those same cues, or at least it doesn't have it as easily. So we find that people seem less mindful, less thoughtful, intelligent, rational. when you read what they have to say than when you hear what they have to say. And this includes job applicants as well.

Interestingly though, job applicants think that if they want to be seen as intelligent, they would prefer to write rather than to speak. And they're just, I think, often wrong about that. If you get a chance to talk to somebody, take it Uh and the third thing that the voice does is it connects us. So all of that life that we hear in a person's voice.

Uh and and in conversation beyond our semantic content, we're communicating a bunch of things behind the scenes, right? You're back channeling. Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, as I'm speaking, you're making noises in the background that tell me that you're listening. And those noises connect us with other people. But again, we find in people's expectations when we ask people to reach out to an old friend, for instance.

They thought it would be more awkward to call them than to type to them, even though they thought they would be more connected if they talked than if they typed. But most people then said if I had a choice, I would actually type to my old friend rather than talk to them. When we actually had people do this though,

Talking was not, in fact, any more awkward than typing, and people enjoyed their conversation and felt more connected when they talked than when they typed. And so once again, our misunderstanding about these things would have led uh would have led lots of people to make What I think they would have considered to be the wrong choice. When it comes to communication, the voice really hasn't.

And I think going along with this, what we're talking about by losing our voice and losing this social muscle by making these choices, whether conscious or unconscious, around our environment and how we're choosing to interact with it. that the social uncertainty we're feeling gets greater and greater over time. So for my dad growing up, he wasn't living on a laptop. He wasn't using digital communication at all. If he wanted or needed something, he would pick up the phone.

Or most likely just go have the conversation. Just go ask for it. Just go talk to the butcher about what the best cut of meat is. And now we default to. Well, it's less uncertain that I'll get a wrong answer or I'll get into conflict or I'll get rejected. So let me just Google it. Let me just type it. Let me just remove my voice from the equation. And as that uncertainty gets greater and greater, we build those walls around us.

And getting comfortable with managing the social uncertainty of not listening to your favorite music on the train, which makes you feel good and there's certainty you're gonna enjoy it, but stepping into that zone of uncertainty is where life really is. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that we find in our work over and over again is that people are overly uncertain.

about how social interactions will turn out. They tend to see it as a much bigger, a much ri much riskier thing than it actually is. Like if I try to have a deep conversation with you, AJ, I ask you, you know, look, tell me what your story is. Like how did you get to where you are right now in People when we ask them to predict how this conversation could go, they tend to predict it could it it could go the entire range of pretty terrible to really great, right?

The truth though is that when you reach out to other people, you know, in in these in these dynamic face-to-face, or at least using your voice context. Uh because of reciprocity, the actual range of outcomes is actually much, much narrow. much narrower. So that mostly they turn out on the positive side of the spectrum because of reciprocity. If I take an interest in you, you tend to take an interest in me. But To your point, if we are pessimistic about this and if we are overly pessimistic,

Then we might not reach out and try to have that conversation, or try to go a little deeper than we might otherwise, or express our gratitude, or ask for help when we need it, or be honest when we have to in our relationships, and then we don't find out that we might be wrong. And so pessimism, our anxiety, our cynicism, our doubt, our beliefs about indifference, pessimistic expectations are self-fulfilling.

because they create avoidance where you don't reach out and find out you'd be mistaken. Your dad though, who was more optimistic, uh, those calibr those expectations get calibrated. Right. Because you try, you you reach out, you have the interaction, and then you find out what it's really like. And you you get more calibrated as a result, you get more accurate. But I I know a lot of people listening would not label themselves as pessimists.

So when we hear that, you know, we go, that's the other person. I get the loner. I get the the person who isolates themselves. But I'm an optimistic person. Yeah. And what I'm sharing is, you know, I have a buddy who lives in London and we were planning a group trip. in Europe and I was like, Hey, can you get the rental car and and just we'll coordinate from there? And he called me and was like, AJ, I have to be honest with you, I I haven't driven a car in seven years.

Now, his uncertainty around how getting around driving a car is at an all time high because he hasn't done it in seven years. Me living in LA, I do it every single day. So I'm like, what are you talking about? Uncertainty. So that's the the difference here. When we're not using our muscle, our social muscle on a daily basis, that uncertainty just gets greater and greater and greater subconsciously without us realizing that we have turned into a pessimist around these things.

we have allowed that subconscious to create a pessimism that might be invisible to us if we're like, Hey, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm optimistic, hey, I believe in AI, I'm optimistic, I'm a futurist, I think everything's getting better. But we don't recognize the social uncertainty has turned us as it's ramped up over time by not using this muscle into being more pessimistic about reaching out to that long lost friend.

asking that person out at the bar that we're attracted to, asking for a raise at work or stepping into the conflict that we're having with the coworker that we think is gonna blow up in our face. Mm. Yeah, that could be. I as a psychologist, I'm always a little leery about conscious and subconscious or unconscious kind of language.

Um because most of the things that we're talking about are things that people can recognize if you ask them. I think though often, and this is I I think the phenomena that you're you're describing is that we're just not thinking about these things. It's not it's not occurring to us. perhaps. And so we're passing through not um not uh taking opportunities to do things that we might otherwise be able to. But the the other thing that that I think might resonate with listeners

a little bit too is is our our our data suggests people are overly pessimistic in that our expectations are more pessimistic than they ought to be. But if you actually look at where they exist uh uh at an absolute level. Really, I think in many of these phenomena the better description is that we're not optimistic enough.

So people, for instance, in in so I've done this now with with several thousand people in my classes at the University of Chicago, I have them reach out to express gratitude. To someone who they, you know, they really appreciate, but who they've never expressed their gratitude to before for whatever reason. My students, these folks, are not confused that the recipient of their gratitude letter will feel good. They think that they will be considerably happier than normal.

What they don't anticipate is that their recipient will feel even better than that, that they will be delighted, three emojis, multiple crying faces, actual tears when they call. That you know, that they will be maxing out uh their their positive move. That's what they don't get. So you're right, the pessimism language.

is relative. I think the way this shows up in experience often is that, you know, people are somewhat optimistic, but not optimistic enough about the power they have to lift people. Yeah, and I think in general, when you've been on the receiving end of it, it feels far more obvious to us. Like when we get that message.

And we're overwhelmed with joy of being seen in that way, validated for what we have taken in our mind as steps to really nurture the relationship, to care about the other person, to invest in them, and we're recognized for that. Yeah, it it feels incredible. But then when we're sitting there writing it or s talking it into existence, it just doesn't feel like it's gonna land that way and that awkwardness comes up.

And a lot of what we're talking about here and you touched on earlier is is the labeling and the self identity that we then lean into around that labeling. Small talk is awkward. I'm an introvert. I have these beliefs about myself. that color my expectations of how the world will react to these behaviors.

Yep. And keep me stuck, you know, missing opportunities I could have to lift myself up and other people up uh as well. Yeah, that's very uh that is very powerful. Um and this this shift in perspective. is also really important. It is one of the reasons why we consistently underestimate how well reaching out will go. When we think about ourselves, we view ourselves through a different lens than we view other people and that other people view us through.

When we're thinking about ourselves, we tend to think about ourselves in terms of our competency. So you sit down to write a gratitude letter to somebody you love but who you just haven't shared this with before. What's on the top of your mind is, what on earth am I gonna say?

Right. How how am I going to do this? You sit down next to somebody and think about having a conversation or a meaningful conversation with somebody. You think about how am I going to carry on this conversation? Right. You're thinking about your competency. Other people, though, when they're evaluating us, they're not thinking as much about our competency. They're caring a lot more about our warmth. Is this somebody who is kind?

is trustworthy, seems like somebody I should approach versus reach out, you know, avoid and stay away from. And so when we're reaching out to other people in these social, these pro-social ways that connect us with other people, those are inherently warm activities. Inherently warm actions that other people tend to evaluate fairly highly. But if we're worried about our competence,

Right. That's where we're that's what's gonna lead us to underestimate how well these are gonna gonna turn out. And you can feel that if you just flip the lens on it, right? So think about a grant a gratitude letter you receive. Were you really spell checking it? Like were you really

checking the grammar to make sure they got that exactly right. I mean really? I no, you weren't. You just knew that was lovely and nice, but it can be hard for us to see when we're when we're in a different perspective. Well with that label, we see this all the time with our clients who self-identify as introverts.

they then follow along, saying, Well, introverts enjoy being alone. So therefore I'm taking rational behaviors of being alone. I'm these choices of wearing headphones and and not interacting and reaching out like, well that that's the label. I I'm an introvert. And it's actually not true. And we find this again and again in our clients who then step outside of that label.

and just take a little action towards connection and then the way they feel after receiving that connection back is far better than sitting in solitude. It's far better than making the choice to watch another Netflix show. Yeah, this is one this so this is where I think I get the most pushback from from research in the field and from how I write about it in the in the book as well. And and I wanna be gentle here. I mean,'cause it's a little i I think the way to think about this

um is in terms of of exercise where we don't quite have these these reactions. But when it comes to things like introversion and extroversion or our personality, we often think of these things as describing the type of people that we are. that extroverts, you know, like connecting with other people, introverts prefer keeping to themselves. That just sh doesn't show up in the data. Um in fact what shows up in the data is that people across that spectrum

over the course of their day or in a given interaction, are actually reporting feeling more positive when they're connecting with other people than when they're keeping to themselves. But what differs are, as you point out, people's beliefs about And so personality like extroversion or introversion

describes less the type of person you are than it does the types of beliefs you hold and therefore the types of choices you make and therefore the types of habits you develop. Right. And we can think about this uh like we would think about uh analogously to physical exercise, right? So some of us exercise a lot, some of us exercise not at uh not at all.

We'd all be a little healthier if we exercised a little bit more. I mean i in varying degrees. If you're already exercising a ton, exercising more is not gonna matter that much. But you know, if we were exercising more, you'd you'd increase how healthy you were, including Especially perhaps if you're not exercising at all. And that's true in terms of our social exercise as well. We've known since the nineteen eighties that extroversion is is strongly correlated with how much

positive affect, how much happiness people report feeling over the course of a day, how satisfied they are with their lives. Um, and that you can also increase well-being by encouraging or prompting people to be a little more social. uh in their days to act a little more extroverted. And you can take that on gently, just like you would exercise. So if you're not somebody who exercises a lot, you wouldn't go out and run a marathon today.

Right. You you'd maybe choose to walk or take the stairs and and then you know take those take those steps where you have an opportunity to do it and try and try it, see how it feels. Maybe there are activities that are easier for you than others. Try those. See how they feel, and then just take note of them.

And see, can you do this again? That's that's all. Same thing like physical exercise. We can do that in our social lives too. And if you would like to have a little more positive mood over the course of your day The day to suggest, saying hello every now and then, giving somebody a smile, patting a back when you have a chance to, walking with somebody to get coffee together rather than alone, are good ways to try doing.

And oftentimes that labeling we might not have even thought about. And this is something that my wife and I are really thinking a lot about with our young daughter. We encounter parents who will say, Oh, my child's just shy. And it's like, well, they're a toddler. Like, are they really shy or are they just really connected to mom? Do do they really feel comfortable around strangers or is it stranger danger?

So this labeling, oftentimes I'm shy, may have come from a a family member or a friend who just labeled you as that and then you held on to that. And now you're making choices that go along with this identity and belief you have about how a shy person interacts. A shy person can't talk to people on the train. It can't do your morning routine, Nick, I'm shy.

Right, right. There's another there's another challenge to this kind of labeling when it comes to sociality extroversion and introversion too. We find that people tend to overestimate how introverted they are. That is if you ask people to put themselves on the on a percentile scale for most dimensions

people tend to think of themselves as above average on the on the traits that are are desirable on the desirable end of the spectrum. But when it comes to extroversion and introversion, people actually tend to think that they are more introverted. on these scales than they actually are. They tend to think, for instance, they're in the seventieth percentile of introversion on average when they're actually in the fiftieth percentile, say.

And uh the reason for that is that there's an asymmetry in the information that we have about ourselves and other people. So you, for instance, notice that after you spend a lot of time talking with people, you go home and you're tired.

It turns out that doesn't make you introverted. That makes you human being. Other people are going home and feeling the same way. You are not seeing that, right? You also see other people's extroverted behavior, right? You are around other people when they are around you, right? When you are talking with each other. You don't see them when they are alone by themselves on a Friday night.

Just wanting to have some time to themselves watching Netflix, right? And so there's an asymmetry in the information we have about ourselves. We see our own. quote unquote introverted behavior, but we tend to only see other people's extroverted behavior. And that makes us think that we are more introverted than we

actually are. The other thing that is I think is important to recognize is that there are a lot of myths about extroversion and introversion that can then come from this. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about this. um about people's experience. A big one is that people get their happiness from different places. That doesn't look to be, that doesn't look to be true.

And that also there are differences in how fatigued or tired, for instance, people get, that extroverts are energized by interacting with other people, introverts are fatigued by it. It turns out when scientists actually look at this across the spectrum, people are more energized when they're engaging with other people. And then afterwards, just like if you do physical exercise, you get tired because you're it's tiring. You're doing stuff, right? And and so you get this this draw.

in uh in how much energy you feel. You get tired afterwards. But that drop research suggests comes at the same point, whether you report being extroverted or introverted, you know, a few hours after you've engaged in some social activity, just like we all get fatigued after uh after we exercise too. So So there's a there's often a disconnect between our beliefs about these labels and reality, and those beliefs can keep us in places we don't necessarily want to be.

it's some people are more of an effort to hang out with than other people. Some people fit your personality or very easy. And imagine Being the person who has to deal with an extreme introverted person. And I'm like, I have to go home because dealing with your introverted ass has made me exhausted. That that is true. I'm I would be a little gentler with that, John. Um known for that. So

What we find though is that a is that across our differences, this tendency to be not optimistic enough, as AJ might put it, seems to be quite robust. And they and they just suggest, you know, our data don't suggest you should be reaching out all the time or that it's always gonna turn out well or I mean that's not at all what it suggests. It suggests that we get the odds that it will turn out well wrong. That we get the odds that somebody will reach back well to us.

in a way that feels good to both of us if we reach out to connect with him first. We get the odds wrong and as a result we're just we're a little overly reluctant to reach out and engage. And so it suggests when you have those red flags come you know, go off in your in your in your mind.

Uh maybe this person doesn't want to engage, even even though I'd be happy to talk, or maybe they I won't get the words right in this gratitude letter, or maybe they won't want to help me if I if I ask for this thing that I really need and that they can help me with. That you should just test. Just test that flag. We find in our data over and over again in our research that when we test those flags, people aren't optimistic enough.

And I find in my own life that when I test those flags, these interactions often turn out notably better than I would expect that they expect they would. I've kind of worked that out of my system after years of doing it, but that was certainly the place that I started from. What's interesting to me is because of this need for social connectedness, those failures tend to stand out more. Those rejections, those parts where we put ourselves out there and we didn't get the response we had hoped.

We can hold on to those for years. And we see this with our clients where even after that event, you can have tons and tons and tons of data, if I was a scientist collecting, where it did go well, where they did respond well. that one negative uh experience we can hold on to to not only self label, but then to adjust our behavior to avoid the pain of feeling that way. Vulnerability and authenticity open us up to pain.

And if you've had the the pain, the challenge, the difficulty of of not getting the result you want or not feeling connected in that moment or feeling rejected. That can feel emotionally very traumatizing for you and then create a pattern of behavior to avoid that in the future. Yeah. So psychologists refer to that as negativity dominance. We actually came into this research thinking that that would be a really, really powerful mechanism.

Um, we've I've uh interestingly, and this is surprising to me, we've had a harder time finding support for that in our in our data than I would have guessed. Um That's the

That the the negative moments don't stand out quite as much as I might have imagined, at least when people have lots of experience to learn from. But I think what you are what you are seeing in your clients and what, you know, we were imagining in our data and what I think happens out in the world a lot is that these bad experiences They can stand out for you and often they can stop you from trying to continue learning.

They change your behavior, right? So uh we don't then get the same kind of data after a rejection that we might have before one because you you stop trying as much. Oh, I won't do that again. you learn when you have a bad conversation on a on a plane. And then people will maybe talk to you. So maybe you'll get more data like that.

But you might be reluctant to reach out and engage again in the same way you once, uh once were. And so I I think, you know, cont just treating those as single data points, continuing to be a good scientist or a good experimentalist in your own life.

then continue testing those those beliefs is the way is the way to go. You know, maybe one out of a hundred will turn out poorly, maybe not that maybe even not that poorly. But if you get that one early, it doesn't mean that you should stop running the experiment and testing testing yourself.

I think another belief that a lot of people have is the sequencing of communication. So I have to do small talk first, I have to exchange pleasantries, and then I can get to the deeper talk. But actuality, I just enjoy the deeper talk, and that's why I only want to be with my friends and not with strangers. Yeah, yeah. So in fact psychologists thought this. Art and Elaine Aron, two famous social psychologists, married couple, they study relationships, wonderful people.

developed this procedure known as the Fast Friends procedure. Nineteen uh early nineteen nineties this became famous thanks to Mandy Lee Canton's uh New York Times piece about the thirty six questions that will lead you to fall in love with anyone. Essentially. And Ard and Elaine Aaron designed this procedure where you ask a series 36 different questions that are that are increasingly deep or they remain kind of shallow.

And they thought you needed a long runway in order to really get deep with someone. You needed all of these questions. They thought lots of other things too that turn out not to be true in these conversations. They thought that You had to want to become friends with somebody, that you had to be similar with someone in order for these deeper conversations to really connect you. Those things turned out not to be true. All you needed was talking about the deep stuff.

Um and we find in our work that you can get to those deep questions very quickly if you want, and that they those conversations then tend to go not just well, but surprisingly well. I've run deep conversations now or through the people through these experiments thousands of times, over 5,000 times, in fact, by by this point.

Where we have people talk about things like, what are you most grateful for in your life? Can you tell me about it? Or can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? Those are taken right from Art and Elaine Aaron's fast friends. procedure and they're asking those questions right away in these conversations. And what folks find is that when they reach out and take an interest in another person through these questions.

In a context that allows the other person to take an interest in them too, these conversations go much better than they expect them to. You don't have to, you don't have to beat around the bush forever in order to ask somebody. Tell me what's your story? How'd you get here today? Right? What do you do? Fine. Do you love what you do? Right? Who's a great friend of yours? Tell me about a friend you love, right? What's an activity you love doing?

What would you what would your dream job be? You don't have to wait 36 questions to get to that. That can be question number two, if you'd like to. Yeah, and what I love about all those examples is it really touches on their core values, positive emotions that they feel, their their passions, things that drive them. And it cuts through a lot of the stuff that we put in front of ourselves, like we have to talk about the weather. We have to talk about how we got here on the train.

Yep, yep. It gets it it gets from outside conversation, conversation outside to the person, to stuff that's really inside a person, right? So why? Right, gets to motivations and goals and desires or how are you feeling? Right. Um, it gets to focusing on the future. What would you hope to do uh in in the future? It gets outside of the

kind of the mundane small talk which is which is outside the person to stuff that's more meaningful. What do you what do you actually care about? What's important to you? That's what we that's what we mean by deeper conversation. Another belief we find a lot of our clients have is that honesty kills rapport.

So once you've started to create a connection, you you got momentum working, you really feel good about the potential here, then I have to soften things. I I can't be quite so honest. I can't share what I'm really feeling. I can't be authentic. And they remove the authenticity that's actually needed for that deeper connection. I know the science is really interesting here too.

Yeah, no, this is this has surprised me some too, and surprises our participants as well. So some of this research comes from my colleague Emma Levine here at the University of Chicago. And what she asks people to do, for instance, is to spend their entire day Um either being as kind as they possibly can in all of their relationships.

Or being as honest as they possibly can in all of their relationships. And then there's a third condition where people are just asked to be more mindful about their relationships, which is their is their control condition. And going into this day, right? So before the day.

People think that being kind is is gonna be a happy day and is gonna strengthen their relationships. Uh and being mindful is also gonna be okay, but being honest is gonna be bad for it, right? It's gonna harm my relationships and not gonna be a nice day. When they actually go through the day, they find that being honest.

is just as good an experience as being kind and in some ways better because they feel more authentic in their relationships. And that part is uplifting. And what Emma finds that people miss. uh in i is that people tend to think that they tend to think about the content of what they're they're conveying, whether it is kind or unkind, positive or negative, the content of what I'm saying. And they don't quite fully appreciate what the act of being honest with someone.

is also conveying beyond just the words. So when I am honest with a friend or with a colleague or with someone I love or even with a with a stranger

I am conveying content in my words, right, about whatever it is I'm talking about, but I'm also signaling to them that I trust them because I'm being honest with them. And I'm being authentic with them. And that is a warm characteristic. And that kind of honesty, like to my to my PhD students or postdocs, or to me even. Like if I give a talk and it goes and it and and and I wasn't doing a very good job. It is unkind to lie to me about that. Giving honest feedback.

is kind or it can be kind when it is well intended and it is something that somebody can do something about and it is then also interpreted by the people who receive it in those cases as also being kind. When you tell me This talk didn't go very well you just gave, Nick, or this lecture wasn't very good if you're a student of mine in these ways. These are the ways you can make it better.

That's kindness to me, right? And that's what that's what Emma and and we find as well that people misunderstand is how honesty can also be kind to people and interpret it as kind. What's interesting is this warmth factor. So our warmth is well received, but giving people an opportunity to be warm to us is also well received.

And this is a roadblock to many of our high performers who join the course because They feel like asking for help is a burden, shows weakness in areas where they are already judging themselves, and they withhold these opportunities to give someone else in their life an opportunity to be warm to them, to help support them.

Right, right. So these barriers to reaching out and engaging with other people that will create relationships should show up all over the place. So what you're describing here are barriers to asking for help when you need it. Right. Nobody gets along in life. On their own. We all need help from other people at times. And it turns out when we are providing help to other people, it tends to lift us up.

If I wanna make somebody feel good on any given day, I should ask them to do an act of kindness as a researcher, as a scientist, ask them to do an act of kindness. That's gonna make you feel better on any given day. And when you ask for help from somebody, you are giving them an opportunity to be kind. To you.

And so what we find in our work is that people who are asked for help do in fact feel a little better after they after they're helping, things that they can do that are pretty easy to do, but that those who are asking for help from these people tend to underestimate how willing they'll be to help, how happy they'll feel to help. They tend to perceive this as uh in terms of the content that they're asking for. I'm asking you to do something

for me without thinking about the meaning of that act, which is an act of kindness for that other person that's gonna make them feel better about themselves. This has really changed the way I think about asking for help. I am not A person, maybe like many, many men or you know, many people uh who are who are worried about seeming maybe weak if they ask for help or incompetent if they ask for help. This has changed the way I think about asking for help. I now think of it as being unkind.

If I don't ask somebody for help that they could give to me, because I would create a stronger relationship there and I would give them a chance to feel better for for giving me a help helping hand. Um and and makes me be more open to to asking for help when I need it. Part of this is this attempt to hide our flaws.

our analytical clients want to appear as super competent because they feel they get a lot of value through their competence in their information, work, knowledge, job in their career. They've seen this loop play out again and again. And therefore the asking of help or showing that things are messy or flawed in their mind may lose status, may lose the connection they have with people that matter.

Mm-hmm. That might be true in the moment, just kind of a glimmer of the moment, but not as much as people expect. But over time, notice that asking somebody for help encourages them to help you, to do something for you. And makes that person feel more connected to you. Ben Franklin knew of it. He knew of this years and years ago. He said he had this famous uh famous story he told about wanting to to to

to make or to encourage this this other person who was somewhat antagonistic towards him, kinda shift his mood and and break the ice between them. And so he went and he asked if he could borrow a book from this person. He He he didn't really need it, but wanted to ask for help from him because he knew that if the other person helped by lending him the book.

The other person would like him a little more and feel a little more positive about him. This has come to be known as the Ben Franklin effect. In fact, in psychology, that asking for help actually connects other people to you more, makes them like you more, not less. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Nick. Appreciate it, especially with the quick turnaround. Where can our audience find out about your latest book?

So uh if you if you search for a little more social online, you will find it. It's available everywhere you look for your books. Uh if you happen to like my voice in this podcast, I did the audio recording for it as well.

Which is pretty fun. I've also been doing LinkedIn a little bit. I don't do a lot of social media because it makes me unhappy and miserable. Um, but I have started doing LinkedIn and and there I tell some stories about folks who are living a little more social in their own lives and that's kinda fun. Those are the places. Thank you again. झाल झाल झाल