Eric Barker || Plays Well With Others

even the subject of a question on Jeopardy. Eric is also a sought after speaker, having given talks at MIT, the Aspen Ideas Festival, Google, the United States Military Central Command, and the Olympic Training Center. His news book is called Please Well with Others. In this episode, I talked to Eric about relationships. We tackle the misconceptions on loneliness, marriage and body language. Eric shares practical tips that we can apply in our own relationships, such as how to keep

passionate love alive and how to catch liars. We also touch on the topics of communication, vulnerability, community, and health. It's always a great time chatting with Eric. He's a very thoughtful guy who knows a lot about psycho So it's my great pleasure to bring you Eric Barker. Eric, how you doing, man, I'm okay, I'm okay. You and I haven't had the next ended the conversation maybe since the last podcast. How many years ago was that five years?

My first book was twenty seventeen. Well, how much have you changed since five years ago? Like, how is your thinking about human nature changed? It's an interesting five years

to pick because of the pandemic. But the funny thing is that, like, well funny but sad is like I decided my second book was going to be on relationships, and you know, put everything together, and then literally two weeks after we closed the deal, California locked down for the pandemic, and all of a sudden, the issue of relationships, connection, All of a sudden, it went from this project I was working on to something I was very serious that was going to be a big deal in people's lives.

So if any of my thoughts have changed on human nature and stuff, it's it's you know, only reinforced the issue of connection and relationships because you know, it's and it's availability bias. I don't know, but just just like seeing all of this and also seeing the reaction of the world and life in terms of the pandemic, I've just realized just even more so how important people are when did you decide that you wanted to write this book? Was it a pre pandemic or was it during the pandemic.

I was putting the proposal together long before, and I started roughing it out probably twenty eighteen, but I didn't take it. I didn't really get taken seriously until twenty nineteen, so long long before COVID reared its ugly ahead. How's the pandemic affected you personally? Very double edged sword, you know, in the sense of writing the book, you know as well. I was very productive. I didn't have I didn't have

a lot of distractions going on. But on the other hand, I don't recommend reading studies on the negative effects of distance and loneliness while you're cooped up in a pandemic. That's not conducive to feeling great. Yeah. Well, I like the title of the book play well with others. Why do you choose that title? And how's that German to some overarching threads that run through the book. I mean,

I haven't been great personally. Relationships have never been my strong suit, and I thought it was kind of a relatable maxim We've all heard that we understand, and then personally I kind of you know, connected to because you know, on the Big five out of a possible one hundred unagreeableness, I scored a four. So I don't know what a what a report guard for a middle aged man would look like. But I don't know if I would have

scored so high on plays well with others. That's so interesting because that's not like my perception of you when I talk to you, so but maybe if I got to know you better. But when you say relationships, you're referring to not just romantic relationships. You're saying your own life, even with like friends, like has this, have there been issues for you throughout your life? You said you don't do that well with relationships, Like what does that mean?

I'm not really a joiner. That's not never been the focus for me, you know, And in some ways that's been a positive in the sense of redirecting time and energy towards other things. But it never came easy to me. It was never kind of number one for me, and I struggled because I didn't I didn't understand it. You never have access to other people's minds. You you never

kind of know what the baseline is. You just have this distance where you realize other people seem to be handling this very differently and I'm not, And what's something's going on here? So the book was too I mean I took the same I took the same structure basically that I used for the first book, which was the maximum of success trying to apply to social science and say,

does this whole book playing MythBuster? And second book same thing, but it was all about relationships and just trying to get to it, get to the fundamentals like does love conquerall? Is a friend in need? A friend? Indeed? You know, is no man an island? You know, and trying to understand that. And I think I found some things that are helpful in other people, but definitely found some things that helped elucidate things for me. I love it. I

love it. You do debunk a lot of myths in this book, So maybe like that's a great superpower of yours. What is one myth about relationships that we could start off with that you debunk in this book. One thing that really blew me away was the issue around loneliness, And you know, looking at Catchiopo's work and seeing that, yeah, he just found that lonely people on average, don't spend any less time with others than non lonely people do. And I think that's shocking. I think most people would

kneed jerk disagree with that. And yet if you think about it, you know, we've all felt lonely in a crowd. You know. It's like, just because you're in the middle of Times Square on New Year's Eve, doesn't mean that you feel connected to those people, are close to those people, And when you get to the core of it, you know, proximity,

you know, is not really the issue. As Ketchyoko basically said, to paraphrase, you know, loneliness is how you feel about your relationships and that perception of it, because you know you have the flip side. It's like you look at you know, VIVEC. Murphy says that you know, solitude is protective against loneliness, and ostensibly those two are the same thing. You're not proximate to other people, yet one is protective and the other is correlated with pretty much every negative

health metric you can imagine. And it's an issue of perception. I don't I don't mean to diminish it by saying that. I just mean it's that issue of do you feel you have strong connections to others? If you do, you can go on a business trip, be away from friends and family and feel you'll miss them, but you don't feel like horrible loneliness. Meanwhile, you can be in Times Square on New Year's Eve, be surrounded by people and feel like no one understands you. So it's that issue

of do you feel those connections are strong? And I think we I think most people, including myself, feel like, you know, oh, I just need to spend more time with other people. It's like, no, you probably need to deepen your connections with other people. Paul Rodgers talked about different forms of loneliness, and one of his forms was he called it, I think called existential loneliness, which is

how disconnected are you from yourself? So I wondered, to what extent do people crave relationships to fulfill a hole in their soul because they really feel they don't feel comfortable with themselves. They like need someone else to be with someone else to distract them from themselves. Am I getting to existential here? I think that cuts to the

quick of bit. I remember when I first when I first interviewed Arthur Aaron, he said something about fixing love relationships that you know, reading all this Gotlan stuff and which is awesome. Arthur Aaron was like, oh, well, the first thing you need to deal with is yourself. And it's so obvious in a way, but it doesn't really get discussed quite enough or at least as deeply, because it's like, if you don't feel comfortable with yourself, then

it's like, yeah, you're having relationship problems. It's like your patient zero, you know, I mean, you know you're you're the one going around and you know, potentially possibly causing the problems. So if you're not first, you know, addressing those issues, then the only possible solution would be to find someone who compensates for all of all of those issues, and that's not going to be fair or healthy. So no,

I totally agree with you. I think like, first and foremost, if you're dealing with serious issues around yourself, yeah, you have to resolve that before you're before you're going to have, you know, really good relationships with other people. And so many of the findings you talk about in your book so interesting. You talk about if you're about to walk down the aisle, you better be feeling crazy in love.

And this is a study I hadn't I wasn't familiar with, but said, women who have second thoughts before they say I do or two and a half times more likely to be divorced in four years for minutes, more than a fifty percent increase. Holy how I mean, if that's the case, how many people really are that crazy in love when they're about to get married. What's the statistics on that? What percentage of people are actually crazy in love?

I don't know what percentage of people are crazy in love, but I mean, no, I think you're right, And I think that speaks to some of the other stuff I discussed in the book, was the issue of, you know, marriages in a difficult situation. Right now, we don't have the social and cultural pressures that we used to do, which is fantastic in a lot of ways. You took the governor off the engine. You know, It's like, that's great. So if you're willing to do the work, and this

is most this is from ELI think all. You know, it's like, if you're willing to do the work and really craft and customize a great relationship, it's phenomenal. It's the best thing in the world. It's the do it yourself, it's a custom tailor. But if we don't do the work, we don't have those societal and cultural pressures, norms and

strictures to keep everything within bounds. We have tremendous freedom, which is great if you're willing to do the work, but we the defaults are and the averages are not as safe as as they used to be because we kind of removed those pressures. It's a tricky balance, and that's what Finkel found was that the happiest marriages right now are the happiest marriages that have ever existed. Meanwhile, the bottom end is not good at all. The average

is not as good. But the real critical factor here that doesn't show up as immediate, immediately and quick analysis of the data. One of the big things is people just aren't getting married. So a lot of things are skewed. Is a lot of people are opting out of the system, which again might might be the best thing for them, but it still shows that we have a lot of myths and skewed perspectives on marriage, the place of marriage, and how it's going to how it's end how it's

going to end up. Yeah, we sure are you married, Eric, No? You know, John Gottman's seminal research is mind blowing. You know, the extent to which he can predict whether or not people are going to stay together after watching videos encoding their responses after three minutes of an interaction with each other. You know, the most important factors he's discovered that will predict a healthy marriage. First and foremost, he talks about

his four horsemen. First and foremost. A lot of people are afraid of having, you know, marild disputes because they think it's it's going to go badly. We're going to argue and we're going to get divorced. And yet, you know, what gotten found was that yelling and screaming only lead a divorce. That's only forty percent of the time. More importantly, it's usually an issue of not communicating, you know, it's not talking about those things. Then we're only having a

conversation with ourselves. That most marriages don't end with yelling and screaming. You yell and scream when you care. You know, is that most couples split because they started living parallel lives, so you have to talk. And then in terms of talking, he sees four critical things for critical mistakes that are highly correlated I think like eighty five percent with divorce,

and that's criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness, and contempt. And criticism is the issue of complaining is good complaining raises issues, you raise them, you can solve them. Is when you make it you make it about the other person's character, not their actions, and that doesn't go nearly as well when you start attacking the other person's character. Stonewalling is when you shut down in response to issues that your your partner raises, and it's basically a passive form of being dismissive,

you know. And defensiveness is they raise an issue and then you fire back and it just keeps escalating, which obviously isn't good. And then contempt is when you see your partner on a lower plane than yourself. Gottman describes it as sulphuric acid for love and it is the single biggest, you know, predictor of divorce. But the flip side that I would say is that's the negative. Avoiding those negatives is good, But avoiding negatives we generally focus

too much on that. You know, it's like that you know potentially could just get you a neutral and neutral is in love. What Gottman talks about, like you said, about the being able to predict the successive relationship and predict divorce, that comes down to the story, and it's really about kind of that that aspect of embracing the negatives, you know, seeing it towards this like, hey, we had problems,

but we got over them. That sort of embracing the negative, overcoming it, you know, that's that critical aspect that he looks for in a story that allows him to predict, you know, whether a couple will be divorced in five years. So many marital problems don't get resolved. Another big part of that research is showing that kind of the manner in which people try to resolve things really matters a lot,

not necessarily the contents of the conflict. Can you kind of laborate a little bit more on what I'm talking about. Gotman found that sixty nine percent of ongoing marital issues never get resolved, and I think a lot of people immediately feel like that's depressing and that's negative, But I don't think that's the best way to look at it.

The best way to look at it is to realize that that sixty nine percent is true of unhappy couples and true of happy couples that you're always going to have issues and some of them aren't going to get resolved, and that does not predict necessarily the success of the union. We have to solve this, we have to settle this. That's a dangerous perspective, you know. To paraphrase Gotman, he put it really well. Is it's not about the resolution

of conflict. It's about the regulation of conflict. To discuss it, to talk with your partner, to understand because it might be just a different perspective. Something that is very important to them might not be as important to you, and vice versa. And if you don't talk, those things can be very idiosyncratic and non intuitive. You don't talk, you can't find those and there might be a way to honor both of your perspectives, you know, or to deal

with it. But it's it's less about like trying to just kill problems dead so they never pop up again, and it's more about trying to find a way where both of your values can get respected, can get understood, you know, playing fair. You know. In terms of that, the regulation of conflict, not the resolution of conflict. I mean, that's kind of a game changer to think, like, it's kind of analogous to life in general. The point is that point of life to resolve all your conflicts or

is at the journey? You know? Is it like the meaning you find through trying to reconcile the conflict seems to be, well, that's more meaningful than just resolving them all. Yeah. What about the you know the fact that passion feeds very quickly in a marriage, some marriages more quickly than others. But what about people who want to keep love alive? What does the research show on that? I mean, what's really critical there is just that understanding that the crazy

love typically dies down about you know, eighteen months. It's tricky because we associate that with marriage and love and this you know overwhelming and usually that dies down, usually moves towards a more companionate love. And as Gobman finds, you know, it is actually the what predicts a successful marriage over the long haul is usually much more about the friendship aspects of marriage than the insane, passionate love.

But we can keep some of that alive. It's just that we there's a bit of a bait and switch in there in that love is very passive, you know, in the sense that those feelings just hit you, those feelings rise up. That passionate love, you know, is not a choice. It just occurs. But it does die down. However, you know, if you think about the principle which I know you're familiar with, of emotional contagion, that whichever situation we're in, we tend to associate those feelings with the

person that we're with. We can leverage that to try and keep the ball in the air volleyball wise, with those positive emotions, where rather than just having another night of Netflix and pizza, to go out do fun things, put yourself an exciting, fun environment. There was one study where they compared it, you know, two cohorts. One went on quote unquote pleasant dates and the other went on

exciting dates and exciting one hands down. You know, adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder, you know, it's like to keep that stimulation alive, we will come to associate those exciting feelings with our partner and we can keep those kind of like positive very early love emotions going. But again it shifts to it's on us. We have to be a little bit more deliberate about it before we

shift to the friendship segment of our chat. What else within the romantic relationships I kind of left out that would be really big ones for our listeners to help them. I mean. One of the biggest that I found that I think can have a huge impact was Gobman's incredible work. He found that just by listening to the first three minutes of a conversation, he could predict the end of

the conversation with over ninety percent accuracy. And the practical takeaway is, if it starts harsh, it's going to end harsh. If you start relationship discussions with both barrels on the attack. He just found that the vast majority of the time, that's how it's going to end, versus if we pause, if we take a deep breath, complaining is good, criticisms bad. We don't make it about the other person, we don't attack their character, We focus on the issue itself, keep

it calm. That has an enormous effect on the end result, the end resolution, and the emotions that people take away. And that's you know, another surprising finding I found is that you know, if people think back, usually couples can't remember the substance the content of the argument, but they remember how they felt, and so raising issues in a diplomatic what you know way produces better emotional endings, and those better emotional endings are what is remembered over the

long haul. I mean, it makes sense when you're in it. It's a little bit harder because, well, ego gets in the way. I mean, isn't ego a big block to some of these things? I mean? And I think that's why keeping those lanes of communication open is really critical, you know, because it's like, if you're bottling it up and you have this issue and you hold up yeah, then ego and you start to make assumptions you know, are out to get me, they're trying to make me miserable,

versus an ongoing communication. You bring it up relatively quickly, then it doesn't fester. To really think about that because another thing I found that was really powerful when Gotman talks about love maps, you know, that issue getting to know your partner better. That gets a lot of you know, quick talk, oh, get to know your partner better. But I thought he framed it really well in the issue of yeah, knowing how your partner likes their coffee or

knowing what your partner's favorite vacation destination is. That's nice, But asking bigger, harder questions like what is your definition of love? What is a good husband to you, what is a good wife to you? What does marriage mean to you? Those are questions that are The answers are idiosyncratic and personal. There are no like kind of set There's some things we can agree on, but there are no set answers. Those are very personal and it kind

of gets to the answers to the test. I think it reveals a lot of Oh, that's why my partner or is getting so bin out of shape about this little thing, because to them it's not little. And there's no book that's going to tell you your partner's idiosyncratic, you know, feelings on what love means, what marriage means. You have to ask them, and by doing that then you can start to say, Okay, maybe handle this in this way, or maybe raise this issue in this way.

And it becomes a lot easier when you realize, oh, they have a phobia about this. I don't need to screaming yell, I know they have a phobia about this. I can just kind of politely remind them, Oh, this is really great advice. Like, in the research you looked into in this book, how much should you look at the role of physical attraction and how that can blind us from really good at getting into good relationships? Have you looked into physical attraction at all? And it's I

don't really know what I'm asking. Yeah, no, no, oh no, no, no, man, I know. That was the trickiest thing. What was really funny for me was in writing the book. Writing the love section was daunting because there's so much research. I mean, you can get a great amount from Gotman, but there's a lot of research and so you kind of have to put boundaries on it because you can't cover or that would just become the book. It would be a love book. And then what was funny was I was like, oh, good,

I got through all this. And then the friendship issue is there's not a lot of research on friendship. So I ended up with total opposite problem, which is that you know, we pay for marriage counselors, marriages an institution, you know, friendship. There's no business around friendship. There's no institution back in friendships interests. So it was really interesting for me. But for love I kind of had to put boundaries on it because otherwise it would have become

the book. And with physical attraction, now you're also getting into issues of it's a lot less one size fits all, what a women find attractive in men, what a men find attractive in women, what a men find attractive and men, what a women find attractive in women. It's like, now the permutations start to increase exponentially, and trying to handle all that, the scope would have increased, you know, beyond the bounds of a reasonable book. No, that's totally fair.

That's totally fair. I just I just feel like so many of us jump into relationships because we're physical attracted to someone, and then it dissipates after a couple of weeks, like stuck with the person. No, I mean, that's that's why. Basically I framed that section of the book around like how do you make love? How do you make a marriage last? How do you make love last? So I didn't talk as much about the issues of attraction as what sustains this in a healthy way. That's great, that's

really great. Have you read Carlin Flora's book Friend of Fluence? Oh and cited it and leaned on it heavily. She did a great job of a fantastic job of rounding up, you know, the existing research on friendship. It's one of the few really good research based books on friendship. I interviewed Hero's number that book's probably likes ten years old. I interviewed her the way back, I mean, because she did a phenomenal gum. I agree, I agree. Let's dive

into the friendship research a little bit. One of the interesting findings is that not being open and vulnerable doesn't just kill friendships, but it can also kill you. Can you talk a little bit more about the value of openness and vulnerability. It's really critical. That's worked by Robert Garfield at University of Pennsylvania where I attended, where you taught the Yeah, no, I mean, it's very critical in

terms of actually many aspects. Because the first thing I did, playing my usual MythBusters angle was to look at Dale Carnegie, you know, and Dale Carnegie's stuff on friends. He wrote it before the advent of most social science research. Truth is, most of it holds up. Carnegie was very focused more on business contacts and more on the initiation of relationships. So I wanted to dive deeper and kind of see what sustains relationships or what deepens them, or what produces

close friends best friends. And what the research pointed to was two things was time and vulnerability, and the key thing being the issue of costly signals. It's easy to bob your head, pay compliments, find similarity, and that's Those are useful things for people. Those are useful things for conn artists. That produces you know, much more shallow connections deep in it. Time is always limited, it's always scarce. Spending a lot of time with somebody over a long

period of time shows they matter. It's a really critical thing. It's also the thing that friends fight over the most. The other thing is vulnerability. Very simply, if I tell you things that could be used against me, if I tell you things that make me look bad, that is a very powerful demonstration of trust. It's not a casual oh I trust you, here's a metaphorical weapon that you could use against me. I trust you not to That

sends a powerful signal of trust. And often if the other person feels the same way about you, they reciprocate. And this is worked by Daniel Hushka where it's like that basically putting yourself out there, you know, you know, being vulnerable. They reciprocate and you escalate that vulnerability. That's what deepens friendships. I mean, you look at je Jeff

Hall's work. You see on average and typical relationships takes an enormous amount of time to create, you know, a deep friendship, you know, like for dozens of hours for a close friend and over one hundred hours for the highest level of friends. But you know, Arthur Aaron managed to make people feel like lifelong friends in forty five minutes by having people ask deeper questions, having people go

back and forth. That vulnerability is a good litmus test for who who you care about, who cares about you. It is powerful in terms of deepening it. But to your initial point, if we don't have it, that's where you get into the area of loneliness again, where our friends can't know us, can't help us, can't feel close to us if we don't share those things. And in the book, I positive the scary rule, that's scary, say it. You can be incremental about it, but we need to

share those difficult things. It's good for us, it's good for our friends, and it's good for the friendship overall, trust is so important for a friendship, any relationship really, and by being vulnerable with someone, you're signaling that you trust them not to tell your secrets. In terms of all the factors that are health related that can kill you, what are the biggest predictors and which are the ones that maybe we think our big predictors are not as

big predictors. You could talk a little about Robin Dunbar's work a little bit. Oh yeah, Like, I mean that was botily insightful and impactful, but he was also pretty funny about it. Robin Dunbar teaches it Oxford to you know, famous for the Dunbar number. Can you explain what the Dunbar number is? Actually? Yeah, Basically, he found that there are consistencies in terms of our social circles and how many people we can feel close to. Most people are

familiar with Dunbar number. In terms of this like hard stop on how big you know groups can be like in the workplace, military units, et cetera. And you see a shocking consistency over how well those match over time. If you go deeper into his research, you know he talks about kind of the hierarchy where it's like how many close friends can we have, how many semi close friends,

how many acquaintances can we have? That where it almost seems like we are programmed at a certain level to have certain only be this many close to this many people less close to this many people that they're sort of slots. And that also aligns with the work that shows after seven years fifty percent of close friends aren't close friends anymore. That basically, as as new people you know, move in, you only have so many slots. As new people move in, other people have to move out, and

so Dunbar. It's it's really critical to see that, to see that we do seem almost wired for a certain number of people to be close to us at a certain level. But what he found health wise was mind blowing because he looked at all of the factors in terms of health and said, specifically, one year after a heart attack, what determines whether you'll be alive or not? And he found that really it came down to two things, and that was whether you smoke and how many friends

you have. Now. Granted, nutrition, exercise, all those things do matter, but the gap between smoking, you know, close friends and everything else, he jokingly said, Oh, you could slav about you don't have to get off the couch, but like, don't smoke and have a number of close friends. Which is also interesting because the bulk of the research shows that quality of friendships matters more than quantity. But Dunbar also found that, you know, to a degree, quantity matters

as well. Cool really really important work twenty ten study of over fourteen thousand college students found that a decline empathy over the past few decades, while a separate study found scores in the narsis and personality in DEX increased by almost fifty percent between nineteen ninety and two thousand and six among a similar cohort. What what what is the takeaway? What do you what do you get from that? The issue becoming part of that is due to our

increase in parasocial relationships. I mean, you start with you know, you start with the work of Robert Putnam. You know, end of the twentieth century, we saw the decline of community in the in almost every sphere, we saw a decline of community interactions. If we think about like the Elk lodge or bowling leagues. That almost seems archaic to us, but the community kind of decline, and he attributed the bulk of those shifts to television, you know, television providing

these pseudo parasocial relationships. And now in the twenty first century, you know, we have social media, we have online you know support, which is this weird thing where on one hand, it delivers some of the positive and if it's some of the connections, but it doesn't deliver some of the others. And we have this human inate ability to be efficient would be the would be the polite spin on it. But we can also be lazy. And it's easier to turn You can turn on the TV, turn off the TV.

You can turn on Instagram, turn off Instagram whenever you want. Instagram doesn't ask you to our money, you know, it's

it's it's a lot easier. You can have, you know, relationships at your convenience, and that has kind of encroached on those deeper connections, face to face connections, and we all kind of get a pass during the pandemic, but these trends are pretty clear that hey, if I can get some of the friendship benefits but not the costs and difficulties, are the lazy end of our of our brains is kind of saying, oh, hey, maybe that sounds like a better deal. And we're seeing this and it's

it's bad. We're getting a level of self absorption. You you you see that there's an increasing focus on popularity, on staf so for likability, which aren't well correlated. Most people who are very popular are not very likable, and it's really challenging for us. And you see this level of self absorption. But you know, as a cherry turkle found when these kids, some of the same kids you show up when they go to camp and their phones

are taken away, empathy levels return to normal. So you know it is that issue of social media is not an unadulterated evil. It's just that it can encroach on the limited amount of social time we have every day. Do you really think like prior generations really weren't narcissistic when you compare different generations to each other, Like I feel like every older generation is like, oh, the kids these days are so narcissistic, Like in the sixties, I

bet parents were saying that about the children. I feel like we always in every generation, we have something in our culture that is that makes the young kids there's something programmed about young kids being narcissistic in general. I think that's totally true. I think it's I think it's both. I mean, every older generation is critical of the younger generation because they're not exactly like them, and because different

phases of life. Babies are very selfish, but they don't have a choice not to be, you know, it's an issue of survival. They need us, and young people are trying to find their way in the world. They still have to define their personality itself, to define their role in place in the world, so that means they're going

to be a little bit more self focused. However, we've never had this little community because before community mean survival, you couldn't exist on your own for the vast majority of human existence, and you didn't have the ability to opt out and live, you know. Now we have an extraordinary ability to opt out or at least to live

at arm's length, you know. And I think you get a vicious circle there where we are able to keep that distance, and that affects us emotionally, and we don't think as much about others' needs because we're not in that loop of being dependent upon them and then being dependent upon us. You can live a pretty independent life, but it doesn't necessarily have positive effects on our connections to others or how we feel in ourselves. I mean

when you look at them. I talk about some of the MRI data that when people feel lonely, when they feel disconnected, their brains scan for threats twice as fast. You know, that's not a choice. That's just at a fundamental level, when you feel disconnected from others, your brain realizes, hey, I'd better be on the lookout for threats because help isn't coming if there's a problem. And again that's not

a choice, that's something that just happened. Again, that's It might be smart from a survival perspective in our ancestral environment, but it certainly isn't conducive to happiness, especially in the modern era. No here here, okay, So why is reading people's body language overrated? There is no Rosetta stone for body language. We can never know why someone is doing is doing something if they're shivering, maybe they're nervous, maybe they're cold. You know, we don't necessarily know. And the

other issue is that a lot of it's idiosyncratic. You know somebody, you know, some people, scratching their face might mean they're nervous and lying, and other people it might be either just itchy. So we don't know what particular signals for any individual mean a specific thing. By getting to know them better, you might get better. But the truth is, like Nicholas Epley's or at the University of Chicago, we're not good at reading the thoughts and feelings of others.

You know, with strangers we're about twenty percent accurate. With friends or thirty percent accurate, and spouses can you get thirty five percent. So whatever you think your spouse is thinking,

two thirds of the time, you're wrong. So we with body language, we're trying to make these associations and you know, again, unconsciously we can read people, size people up pretty well, but trying to look at individual specific actions and attribute overall global motives and perspectives, that's really not our speciality. So it's it's better to hear someone than see them, is their research on that. Yeah, this was this was dramatic,

you know, was the issue. They did studies where people if you could see someone but couldn't hear them, and pathic accuracy dropped off enormously. But when you could listen to someone but not see them. You know, it's like

we still it only dropped off mildly. So I mean, this is this is good news for podcasts, but you know, it's like we're hearing somebody actually delivers a lot more information than seeing someone again because we're really not that good at reading those intricacies of body language in the moment. That just blows my mind that that discrepancy. So the drop off is fifty four percent when you can see

something to not hear them. It was something like that. Yeah, what the implications for like interviews, for orchestra auditions, there are other deep implications here for lots of things in life potentially. I mean, well, job interviews as we usually perform them are terribly fraught anyway. I mean, the primary issue.

One of the best ways the research is to improve job interviews is to make them structured and formalized, because people very dramatically and what questions they ask to one candidate versus another candidate, So then all of a sudden it moves completely out of the bounds of like getting legit information and more of that issue of do you feel rapport with this person? And rapport is not necessarily

predictive of job performance. So it's really critical in job interviews that we think about, you know, that issue of structure, but it's also critical to think about the job at hand. You know, if you're evaluating someone who's going to be coding and writing software, their ability to you know, present themselves in an interview may have very low correlation with like how well they perform their job. Meanwhile, sales professional, their ability to interact with others might be critical to

the profession. So there's this varying scale, but we kind of use a very similar system for everybody. And I don't know if this one size fits all approach is necessarily the best way to determine who's going to be awesome at a job. I agree. So what can you do if you want to catch a liar? I mean, this was something that I found fascinating because, again, MythBusters so much of what we believe is wrong. We usually look for signs of anxiety, and that's not the case.

We usually look for body language, body language out of reach. It's never been correlated, it's never been seen to show an association. What's really critical when it comes to lies is that whyes, actually take a surprising amount of thought. You have to think about the truth. You have to think about the lie you're telling. You have to monitor the other person to see if they're catching on. They ask questions, you have to update your fictional story in

real time. That requires a fair amount of brain power. So the best way to fundamentally, the best way to detect lives is to increase that cognitive load. Is to make it even harder. They make them have to think more until to use a computer metaphor, the processor starts to slow down because it can't handle all of this. And specifically, what's very valuable is to ask unanticipated questions. Is the issue of no liar can prepare for every question you might ask them, So to ask them something

which they're not expecting. Again, that's something that creates this big gap. It's very easy for a truth teller to answer, it's very difficult for a liar to answer. So the example I use is if you're a bartender and someone comes into the bar who's obviously underage. If you ask them how old are you, they're going to say twenty one. They know the right answer. If you ask them what year were you born? They probably didn't prepare for that. Now they're going to have to do math, and all

of a sudden, it's going to slow down. A truth teller knows what year they were born, you know, a liar might have to wait. I don't. And then now all of a sudden, again it's not perfect, but it's a bigger improvement or when you start to oh, it's very powerful. And now it was really funny. I was. I was in Prague three weeks ago and one of the research studies that I found going unanticipated questions was

a study of airport screeners. And while I was in the airport in Prague, an airline attendant came up to me and said, Hey, give a second, can I ask you a couple of questions. The questions were not direct where are you going to? It was kind of like, so what did you do in your stay? So where did you? What did you? What did you do? Like yesterday? They were asking me these very kind of off and I'm like, oh my god, like my research, the recent the research I was looking at for the book, like

is actually being used on me. And it was so funny to see, like I'm being subjected to this, and luckily I was telling the truth, so I had quick answers, but I could imagine that the number of the questions she asked me were not things that if I was lying, that I would have been able to produce in advance, if I was there doing a drug deal or something else, Versus I was ea able to say, I'm here for a wedding, it's my friend Nick with the event was

at this location, it was at this time. It was very easy, but I can imagine for somebody's line it would have been much more difficult. Yeah, for sure. Well, Eric Parker, I really appreciate you coming on my podcast today, and we covered quite a wide range of ways in which you can play well with others, within the romantic demean within the friendship to mean, and within even just

being able to spot the bullshit of others. So I just I think it's a very comprehensive book, actually quite more comprehensive than a lot of books on the topic of connection. I want to leave with one last question, then, in all these different demeans you cover in your book, I mean, is there a thread that you see that kind of runs through all of them. Is there some sort of overarching, transcendent takeaway about human connection that you can leave us with today. I did find a through line,

and that is the issue of stories. You know, when we are reading people, or trying to read people, our brains are immediately within middleseconds starting to construct a story about this person, and then confirmation bias kicks in and we have to be very careful to challenge those stories because we tell these stories about other people with very little information, and that can lead to biasing and stereotypes and on a higher level, but also on an individual level.

And if we don't deal with people again, we get no chance to challenge that confirmation bias. And then, you know, in friendship, what I was amazed to find is that our style said friends are another self, and that actually proves to be true. You know, you have this ven diagram overlap this issue where when you interview people about their friends and you ask them, hey, is this quality

true of you or true of your best friend? It will take them longer to answer because as we grow closer to people, as we go closer to friends, our ident in our minds are our identity and their identity overlaps. We tell ourselves the story that they are part of us and in love. You know, like I said, Gottman's ability with ninety plus percent accuracy to predict whether a couple of be divorced in five years. He gets there by simply asking them, tell me your story is the

critical thing. And for communities, you know, at large, is no man an island those issues. Communities are built around a story, a story of connection. Many of the stories that human beings have told themselves throughout history about how we're connected have not been factually true. But what they did do was they bound us together. They told us the story of connection and unity, and we need those

stories so throughout every aspect. The theme I found running through every aspect of the different types of relationships is it all comes down to the stories we tell ourselves. That's brilliant. Maybe that's where mindfulness can come in as well, and helping us to be more mindful and the presence of others where we don't allow these automatic thoughts to and trude and what the beauty of the beauty of whatever relationship could be. Our Eric's expectations get in the

way sometimes. Absolutely, Eric, thank you so much. It was great, so great talking to you. And let's not let's not go another five years. How's that sound that sounds that sounds fantastic, But thank you very much, Scott. It was. It was really great to be here man. Thank you thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion

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