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Episode: You 2.0: The Gift of Other People

Author: Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Duration: 00:50:40

Episode Shownotes

Are you someone who strikes up a conversation with the person next to you on the train? Or do you keep your eyes fixed on your phone? Do you offer gratitude to friends and family? Or do you assume that they already know how you feel? This week, in the

kickoff to our annual You 2.0 series, we talk with psychologist Nicholas Epley about our interactions with other people, and how we can make them more rewarding.If you enjoy today's episode, check out these classic Hidden Brain episodes: A Secret Source of ConnectionHow Others See You Relationships 2.0: An Antidote to Loneliness

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. In the 1960s, Madison Avenue was trying to come up with a campaign for a major consumer brand. On a ranch in Wyoming, advertising executives discovered a cowboy who seemed like a perfect fit.

00:00:20 Speaker_03
His name was Daryl Winfield, and he came across as tough, masculine, self-reliant. His face was soon plastered on billboards across America, Asia, and Africa. Ads showed him riding across rugged landscapes, often in silhouette.

00:00:37 Speaker_03
As violins played hauntingly in the background, the slogan on screen read, This is Marlboro Country. The campaign to sell Marlboro cigarettes was one of the most effective in the history of advertising. It sold more than just tobacco products.

00:00:57 Speaker_03
it sold an image of the American West. In urban neighborhoods across the United States and in crowded cities and poor villages around the world, it offered a seductive vision of independence, self-sufficiency, and freedom.

00:01:13 Speaker_03
The Marlboro Man told two great lies. The first caused untold sickness, disease, and death. Cigarettes are responsible for millions of deaths from lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. But our story today is about the second great lie.

00:01:31 Speaker_03
The Marlboro Man, and countless other media creations like it, suggest that our best lives are lived when we can be free of the cares, the concerns, and the constraints of other people.

00:01:48 Speaker_03
Today, we unpack how those themes have been woven into our lives, in the attitudes we have, and in the choices we make. It's also the start of our annual summer series, U2.0.

00:02:01 Speaker_03
As we do every year, we will share ideas and wisdom that can help you to thrive and to grow. Unlocking the science of meaningful relationships, this week on Hidden Brain.

00:02:38 Speaker_03
Psychologists and social scientists have wrestled with the themes of connection and independence for decades. Human beings need one another and crave friendship and social approval. But we also value solitude, silence, and being left alone in peace.

00:02:55 Speaker_03
At the University of Chicago, psychologist Nicholas Epley has spent many years thinking about this tension. He has come up with innovative ways we can be the best version of ourselves. Nick Epley, welcome to Hidden Brain.

00:03:08 Speaker_00
Thanks, Shankar. Great to be here.

00:03:11 Speaker_03
Nick, you live on the outskirts of Chicago, and you take a long train ride into the city to go to work every day. For years, you followed an unvarying protocol on the train. What did you do?

00:03:24 Speaker_01
Oh, I just sat there and ignored everybody. I'd read a book. I'd listen to music. I'd scroll through my phone, looking at the news, the kind of thing that everybody else does. You sit down, and you leave other people alone.

00:03:45 Speaker_03
So, one morning many years ago, you stepped onto the train as usual, but something struck you for the first time. What did you find yourself thinking about that day, Nick?

00:03:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, I remember this day like a lightning bolt to the brain. I actually had been on that particular day writing a chapter describing how we're made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with others by being social.

00:04:09 Speaker_01
And yet, I kind of looked up that morning and realized for the first time, it just kind of hit me, that here we are, highly social creatures with brains uniquely adapted for connecting to the minds of others.

00:04:23 Speaker_01
And yet, we're all sitting here ignoring each other. And that struck me as bizarre.

00:04:37 Speaker_03
I guess no one really wants to be that guy that opens up a conversation that's an unwanted conversation.

00:04:45 Speaker_01
That guy that makes you want to put a pencil through your ear or wish you'd brought headphones with you, you know, that guy who drives you nuts. And so people sit there and are quiet.

00:04:57 Speaker_03
So on this day you get on the train, you notice the contrast between what you're writing about in the book and what you're seeing in the train compartment. What happens next?

00:05:07 Speaker_01
Well, I decided to run an experiment that day. I essentially enrolled myself in my own experiment, at least as a sample of one. And I decided I'd try to have a conversation with somebody that morning. I'd take an interest in somebody else.

00:05:23 Speaker_01
I'm not, I'm probably not the most inviting looking person. I'm kind of a big guy. I'm a man.

00:05:32 Speaker_01
And so typically people will get on the train and they'll take the seats that are open eventually until there are no seats left at which point somebody will have to sit next to me.

00:05:43 Speaker_01
So eventually all the seats are taken and a woman comes and sits down next to me. She's an African-American woman in probably her mid-50s or so I would guess. She had on a bright red hat. I remember that very vividly.

00:05:58 Speaker_01
She sat down next to me and I decided I'm going to try to get to know a little something about her. And so I said the first thing that came to my mind, which was a joke, but a compliment at the same time. I complimented her on her hat.

00:06:14 Speaker_01
I said how much I liked it and that I had one just like it. And we both chuckled. I mean, it wasn't, look, it's probably not the best joke you've ever heard. But that got the conversation started. And from there it just went.

00:06:26 Speaker_01
We talked about our careers and our jobs and what we did for a living, but also whether this was really what we wanted to do for a living.

00:06:33 Speaker_01
I remember her feeling sort of stuck in her job and wasn't quite what she wanted to do and thinking about making a change. She talked a little bit about her family, how she needed to support her family. And, you know, the conversation went really fast.

00:06:49 Speaker_01
It was about a half an hour trip. I was over really quickly. I was struck by that. And as I got up to leave, I thanked her for taking time to talk to me. She seemed delighted to have talked to me. And as I walked off the train, I remembered two feelings.

00:07:04 Speaker_01
One, that it felt nice. It was nicer than what I'd normally done that morning, which was probably scroll through the news. But the other thing I remembered was that it was surprisingly nice. I was surprised by that, surprised by how nice it was.

00:07:31 Speaker_03
There was another time in Nick's life when he found himself surprised by the effect of talking to strangers. He and his wife Jen were expecting a baby.

00:07:40 Speaker_03
Doctors had run some tests and told Nick that his daughter was likely going to have a genetic disorder.

00:07:47 Speaker_01
I remember Jen met me in the breezeway of the house when I got home and she told me that it was likely that our daughter had Down syndrome. And I remember it almost felt like I was hitting the chest. I kind of fell back against the wall.

00:08:05 Speaker_01
It was a shock. It was unexpected.

00:08:08 Speaker_03
At first, all that Nick wanted was to be left alone with his shock and confusion. He couldn't bear to talk to anyone else.

00:08:16 Speaker_01
Whenever you experience a shock like this, you look inward. It's a little bit hard to reach out to people, not quite sure what to talk about or what to say.

00:08:29 Speaker_01
And so my first instinct was to try to figure this out myself, figure out what best to do, how best to approach this.

00:08:45 Speaker_03
In time, however, Nick and Jen did reach out to other parents who had children with special needs. They quickly discovered that strangers were not only willing to talk, but had insights that felt surprisingly useful.

00:08:58 Speaker_01
It was actually pretty stunning. Pretty much every person we talked to, at some point in the conversation, used the same word to describe their experience. They all, at some point, used the word blessing.

00:09:15 Speaker_01
to describe the experience of having a child with Down syndrome, that they all considered it to be a major blessing in their lives, one that opened their eyes to a new way of living that they hadn't seen before, that gave them a new perspective on life that they hadn't had before, that brought their family together in a way they would not have guessed before,

00:09:43 Speaker_01
And for me, hearing these stories from these families, hearing what it was actually like, getting their perspective directly, was very reassuring for me to know that we could do this.

00:10:03 Speaker_03
Six months into the pregnancy, Jen suffered a miscarriage. Both she and Nick were devastated. Again, they turned to others for guidance and perspective.

00:10:14 Speaker_03
In a few months, based on the experience of other parents who had suffered similar tragedies, they decided to do something they would not have dreamed of doing months earlier. They decided to adopt a child with Down syndrome.

00:10:26 Speaker_03
Jen had done some research and learned that it might be possible to adopt a child from China.

00:10:32 Speaker_01
There's quite a community of people who have done this, and we had a lot of conversations before we moved ahead with this, but I would say not so much to reassure us

00:10:42 Speaker_01
that this was the right thing for us to do at this time, but rather to learn more about how this would actually happen and how long this would take.

00:10:50 Speaker_03
And did you end up adopting a child from China?

00:10:54 Speaker_01
We did. She's a blessing, Shankar. Her name is Lindsay. She is in first grade. She's eight years old now. This is five years ago that we brought her home.

00:11:06 Speaker_01
We took all of our kids to China when we brought Lindsay home with us, and it's been the most amazing thing that Jen and I have done together in our lives so far.

00:11:19 Speaker_01
I don't think we would have gotten to the position where we were open or even thought about bringing Lindsay into our lives without reaching out and connecting with other people to essentially be reassured that it would not just be something we could do, but that it'd be a blessing for us.

00:11:41 Speaker_01
I keep hearing those words. echoing in my mind over and over again that we heard from those families when we talked to them initially.

00:11:55 Speaker_03
In time, Nick came to see there was a pattern connecting these different stories. He fully expected he would feel better when he rode the train in silence, but he felt better when he talked to a stranger.

00:12:06 Speaker_03
He wanted to withdraw into himself when he learned his daughter would have Down syndrome, but when he reached out to strangers, those conversations unexpectedly changed the way he felt.

00:12:17 Speaker_03
He was not someone who imagined adopting a child with special needs, but talking to other people who had done this revealed to him something about himself that he did not know.

00:12:29 Speaker_03
When we come back, why we so often seek to walk alone or in silence, and the psychology of what happens when we resist this impulse. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

00:13:01 Speaker_03
When University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley received word that the baby he and his wife were expecting had Down syndrome, his first impulse was to withdraw from others and go it alone.

00:13:12 Speaker_03
But he eventually found great comfort and reassurance by hearing about the experiences of other parents. Over time, Nick came to see that this was not an isolated incident. Opportunities for connection present themselves to us every day.

00:13:27 Speaker_03
In his book, MindWise, Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want, he explores why our assumptions about people are often off base. Nick, you became increasingly curious about a phenomenon that you started to call under-sociality.

00:13:44 Speaker_03
What is under-sociality, Nick?

00:13:46 Speaker_01
So I'm kind of struck by what seems like a paradox that's right at the core of human life. That on the one hand, we as human beings are deeply social.

00:13:58 Speaker_01
We're made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting to other people, whether it's strangers or family and friends.

00:14:06 Speaker_01
And yet there are so many opportunities in daily life where we could reach out and connect with other people that we don't take. We have a compliment that comes to our mind that we don't share. We feel gratitude to somebody that we don't express.

00:14:22 Speaker_01
We have somebody we could say hello to or talk to or even just smile to that we don't. We have meaningful things we want to know about other people and we don't ask them about it.

00:14:33 Speaker_01
We don't seem, at least it seemed to me, to be social enough for our own good.

00:14:48 Speaker_03
So you started running experiments in the Chicago areas where you actually had commuters do what you did on the train that day. Walk me through one of these experiments. What did you ask your volunteers to do and what came of it?

00:15:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, so the very first one we did was in collaboration with Juliana Schroeder, one of my amazing PhD students at the time, who's now at UC Berkeley.

00:15:09 Speaker_01
And we went down to Homewood, Illinois, the Metra train station there, which is actually just one stop to the north of where we live in Flossmoor.

00:15:16 Speaker_01
And we set up a sign on the way up to the train platform that recruited people to participate in an experiment if they were interested.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
and we handed them a $5 Starbucks gift card, and then we randomly assigned them to do one of three things on the train that morning. In one condition, we asked people to just do whatever they normally do on the train.

00:15:42 Speaker_01
In the next condition, this is our solitude condition, we ask people to keep to themselves, to just focus on their day ahead and not engage other people in conversation.

00:15:51 Speaker_01
And in the third condition, we ask people to do the thing that I did on the train that morning, which was when somebody comes and sits down next to you, try to have a conversation.

00:16:02 Speaker_01
We then handed them an envelope that had their Starbucks gift card in it and a survey in it. And we told them at the end of your commute, fill out the survey, drop it back in the mail to us. And so off they went. And what did you find?

00:16:16 Speaker_01
So we asked them on the survey a few different things. We asked them, how pleasant was your commute compared to normal? How happy do you feel after this commute? And how sad do you feel?

00:16:25 Speaker_01
We collapsed these into a single composite, essentially about positive their commute was. And what we found was that people actually reported having the most positive experience when they talked to a stranger.

00:16:36 Speaker_01
And they had the least positive experience in the solitude condition, where we asked them to keep to themselves. The control condition where people did whatever they normally did fell in the middle.

00:16:46 Speaker_01
Although in subsequent experiments we found that usually that's more like the solitude condition.

00:16:52 Speaker_01
We conducted another experiment where we asked people not to tell us how they actually felt after doing these things, but to tell us how they thought they would feel if they were in each of these conditions, essentially to predict how they would feel.

00:17:05 Speaker_01
And what we found when we did this was that people actually predicted that they would have the least positive experience in the connection condition and the most positive experience in the control and the solitude condition.

00:17:18 Speaker_01
And those expectations were just precisely wrong.

00:17:28 Speaker_03
So you conducted a version of the same study in the London subway system sometime after this. My understanding is that folks in London want to talk to each other on the train even less than folks in Chicago want to do so.

00:17:42 Speaker_03
Tell me what you found, and I understand that this experiment was coming in the context of some debate about whether people should be talking to one another on trains in London.

00:17:52 Speaker_01
Yeah, we were able, through a collaboration with the BBC, to actually run these experiments in a place that's not known for its friendliness, which is London.

00:18:01 Speaker_01
And in fact, not long before we ran this experiment, a London tube rider, Jonathan Dunn, actually started a campaign trying to encourage London tube riders to talk to each other.

00:18:14 Speaker_01
He called it tube chat and he handed out buttons and he started a Twitter handle and a Facebook page trying to encourage people to reach out and talk to strangers on the train. And absolute rebellion ensued. There was an alternate

00:18:29 Speaker_01
Facebook page that was started up, the Shut Up Tube Chat campaign, which handed out their own buttons that discouraged people from talking to other people. Rather drink a pint of bleach than talk to another person, wear this button.

00:18:43 Speaker_01
They handed this stuff out. So it didn't seem like London was the friendliest place for us to be running these experiments. And it turned out that Londoners are human beings too. And just like we found in Chicago,

00:18:59 Speaker_01
Those folks who we randomly assigned to be in the connection condition, they reported having the most positive commute, and those folks in the control and the solitude conditions reported having the least positive commute.

00:19:14 Speaker_03
Now, hearing about these experiments, I'm imagining that some people will say, you know, extroverted people might enjoy talking to strangers, but what about the introverts among us? Does personality play a role here, do you think?

00:19:27 Speaker_01
So we've measured this in these experiments and we don't find that it does. And that's not unique to our research. Psychologists have been doing lots of experiments where they ask people to behave more extrovertedly or more introvertedly.

00:19:46 Speaker_01
And the very consistent finding is that when people actually do this,

00:19:52 Speaker_01
People feel happier when they act extroverted than when they act introverted, and that's just as true for folks who are consistently extroverted as it is for folks who are consistently introverted.

00:20:03 Speaker_01
As far as we can tell, where introversion and extroversion matters is not in people's experience of social interaction as much as it is in their choices of social interaction.

00:20:15 Speaker_01
That is, extroverts choose to reach out and engage with others a little bit more often than introverts do, and as a result, choosing to reach out, they tend to be a little bit happier.

00:20:25 Speaker_01
In many ways, it seems a little bit like physical exercise, that some of us choose to exercise more than others, even though all of us, regardless of whether we choose to or not, would actually be a little healthier if we exercised more often.

00:20:41 Speaker_01
Same thing seems to be true with our sociality as well.

00:20:45 Speaker_03
So if you were to ask me, if I was sitting on the average bus or plane or train, how many of the people around me would want to actually have a conversation with me, I would not put that number as being very high.

00:20:57 Speaker_03
I would imagine that most people want to be left to themselves. Now you've actually studied this. You've actually measured the impressions that people have about how much they think other people want to talk to them. What do you find?

00:21:11 Speaker_01
So what we find is that this is the big barrier to reaching out and engaging with other people, or at least is one of them, is believing that other people don't want to talk to you and hence you might be rejected or this person might be uninterested.

00:21:22 Speaker_01
So on the trains in Chicago and in the subsequent experiment we ran in buses here in Chicago, people thought less than half of the people on the train would be willing to talk to them if they tried. In London, it was even more grim.

00:21:39 Speaker_01
They thought only about 25% of folks on the trains in London would be willing to talk to you. Now, with at least believed odds like that, you probably wouldn't try to talk to other people either.

00:21:52 Speaker_01
So I think that helps to explain in part why folks are reluctant to reach out and engage. They think other people don't want to. And so you could get a whole carload of people never trying

00:22:05 Speaker_01
to talk to somebody else because they think other people don't want to, and then never finding out that they, in fact, might be wrong about it.

00:22:24 Speaker_03
So besides underestimating how much we will enjoy a conversation, how positive we'll feel when we talk to strangers, we also underestimate how much we will learn from a conversation. What do you find on this front, Nick?

00:22:37 Speaker_01
Bill Nye, famous science guy, once said, everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't. And Bill Nye is wise about that. Everybody's got a story. for you. Everybody has been through interesting experiences that you haven't been through.

00:22:51 Speaker_01
But notice when you look at somebody, you can't see that. You see kind of a blank slate. We don't know what we'll learn.

00:22:57 Speaker_01
And so when we ask people before their conversations with a stranger to anticipate how much they're going to learn in this conversation, we find very consistently that people, they think they're not going to learn a whole lot.

00:23:12 Speaker_01
And after the conversation, they report learning significantly more both about the person they're talking to, personal details about them, but also about things in general, whatever it is that you happen to be talking about in the conversation.

00:23:23 Speaker_01
It's surprisingly informative.

00:23:32 Speaker_03
Later in the day I interviewed Nick, I was at a restaurant with friends. Sitting at the next table were a group of people, and one young man had his son with him. The kid might have been three, and I thought he looked adorable.

00:23:45 Speaker_03
I should tell the dad how cute his kid was, I thought. Then I said, will it be weird for me to tell a stranger I thought his kid was adorable? Nick said something along these lines happened to his own daughter.

00:23:57 Speaker_03
The two of them were in their kitchen, looking out at the sidewalk in front of their house.

00:24:02 Speaker_01
And there's a woman who came down the sidewalk who just had this fabulous hair, just this beautiful, beautiful afro. She just looked spectacular. And Sion commented on it.

00:24:15 Speaker_01
And I remember standing in the kitchen there telling her, go to the front door and tell her how amazing she looks. And I don't think I could have budged her with a crowbar. out of that position.

00:24:26 Speaker_01
It just felt so weird to go up and say something like that to somebody, to compliment like that. And I think that's another one of these examples of undersociality. We have a kind thought come to mind. We could pass it along. We'd make them feel great.

00:24:42 Speaker_01
And yet, it feels a little weird to do that. And so Maybe we don't.

00:24:49 Speaker_03
And again, when you put people in a study and in effect, you know, force them to compliment other people, what do you find?

00:24:55 Speaker_01
So in these experiments, we ask people who are out together at some public place in Chicago, we ask one person to write down a compliment about this person that they're with, or sometimes three compliments depending on the experiment we're in, that they have just for whatever reason never shared with this person before.

00:25:17 Speaker_01
We then ask them to predict how the person's going to feel when they read this compliment or these compliments.

00:25:22 Speaker_01
We then bring the person they complimented back to read that compliment and they report how they actually felt about it and also how awkward or weird it was, which was often the barrier, right? It's going to be weird to do this.

00:25:36 Speaker_01
And what we find very consistently is that hearing compliments, even though we know they're going to be positive,

00:25:42 Speaker_01
to the other person, when people actually hear them, when people actually read them, they're even more positive than we expect they'll be. And in fact, this isn't just our research, but great work by Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bones.

00:25:56 Speaker_01
They found a similar thing concurrent with us, that when people compliment strangers, they feel better than the compliment givers expect, too. The effect seems to be pretty robust.

00:26:07 Speaker_03
So there's another form of compliment that many of us are reluctant to offer, and this involves not strangers, but people in our own lives, people we're very close to, and that is the idea of the repeated compliment.

00:26:18 Speaker_03
So maybe you thank someone for doing something nice for you, but they do it again the next week and the week after, and after some time, you start to say, well, maybe the repeated compliment, you know, it'll sound like it's too much.

00:26:29 Speaker_03
You've done research along these lines as well about repeated compliments. What do you find, Nick?

00:26:34 Speaker_01
Well, the fear, of course, is that you'll start to sound like a broken record if I tell my wife how great she looks, and how wonderful her cooking is, and how wonderful she is with the kids, and how great she is in friendships, and whatever.

00:26:48 Speaker_01
I just, you know, you keep giving somebody compliments, eventually it's gonna tire. You're gonna adapt to it. And it's reasonable to think this, because we do kind of adapt to a lot of stuff. In one experiment, we had people write down five compliments.

00:27:04 Speaker_01
to somebody who they were with on a given day. And the next week, we shared one of those compliments each day with the next person.

00:27:14 Speaker_01
And before sending those compliments out, the people who wrote them anticipated how positive the recipient would feel receiving those compliments.

00:27:24 Speaker_01
And we also asked a separate group of people to anticipate how the recipient would feel when they got these compliments. The observers who imagined complimenting this person every day thought the recipient would get tired of it.

00:27:39 Speaker_01
You know, I get it, you love me, enough. It turned out the recipients, though, they liked it just as much as the day before. We didn't see any consistent decrease in how positive they felt receiving the compliment, in part because each one was unique.

00:27:56 Speaker_01
And when stuff is different, you don't adapt to that. Stays good all along.

00:28:02 Speaker_03
So you're someone who likes to walk the talk and so you took this research finding back to your own family and you proposed a new Christmas tradition. Tell me what the tradition was that you proposed and how it went down.

00:28:16 Speaker_01
Yeah, so anybody who is familiar with the Christian tradition will be familiar with the concept of an advent calendar.

00:28:23 Speaker_01
It's a thing that you get where you open a little tag every day and there's chocolate behind every day up until Christmas starting December 1st. Well, this year I decided we would try something else in the family.

00:28:36 Speaker_01
We would do a compliment calendar in my family that followed the same sort of advent tradition, but instead of opening up a chocolate every day, it would be a compliment every day.

00:28:46 Speaker_01
So I asked everybody to write down a compliment about everybody else in the family that they could pass along. And they did four of these so that we could stretch it out through the month. So they wrote it down on a piece of paper. I folded that up.

00:29:02 Speaker_01
bend it over into a ring, and then strung it together into a chain of these rings. So every day, you'd tear off one of these rings, open it up, and there would be a compliment.

00:29:17 Speaker_03
And how did it go? Did the family embrace the idea? Did they love it?

00:29:21 Speaker_01
There was not great enthusiasm at the start of this, I would say. They were pretty confident that this is not going to go well, and I think I'd rather have chocolate instead of these compliments. But once we actually did it, it was great.

00:29:39 Speaker_01
I still have some of those compliments from that first year we did it sitting in my office at the house. I look at them every day when I'm working at home.

00:29:58 Speaker_03
I want to switch gears to another kind of social interaction that we often avoid. You had an extraordinary teacher whom you loved very much in high school. Tell me a bit about him, Nick.

00:30:10 Speaker_01
So I've been a professor since 2001 and even before then, you know, I was in graduate school for five years and was in college for five years before that.

00:30:20 Speaker_01
I've seen amazing teachers over the years, but the most amazing teacher I've ever seen and the best one I've certainly ever had was the band teacher at Cedar Rapids Prairie High School in Isle, which is where I went to high school.

00:30:34 Speaker_01
Craig Ani is his name. And Mr. Ani was a, was the most passionate teacher I've ever seen. We would march on the field in competitions, and you could hear Mr. Ani yelling from the stands with his own voice, not amplified in any way.

00:30:53 Speaker_01
And he was just so enthusiastic and encouraging, particularly for a bunch of kids, particularly like me. I was not the easiest kid to teach. I did not care to be in band much at all. I was mostly there to have fun and screw around.

00:31:09 Speaker_01
And he didn't care, he brought the best out of us no matter what.

00:31:15 Speaker_03
Did you have a chance to tell him that?

00:31:18 Speaker_01
You know, I never have. Part of it is that I took him for granted when I was in high school. And it wasn't obvious to me just how amazing he was until I spent so many years watching other people

00:31:36 Speaker_01
you know, being amazing teachers in their own right, but still not reaching that level. So it wasn't until I got older that I really appreciated just how great he was.

00:31:47 Speaker_01
And by that time, he had retired and I wasn't sure how to reach out and express that to him.

00:31:54 Speaker_03
You once ran a study where you asked volunteers to send a gratitude letter to someone in their lives. I'm assuming, as in the previous examples, most people misperceived the effect this letter would have on the recipients.

00:32:07 Speaker_01
That's part of the thing, too, for me with Mr. Ani, is that it's been so many years that reaching out, out of the blue, just feels like it's going to be weird.

00:32:22 Speaker_01
What often gets in the way is our concern or anxiety about how the other person might respond. What exactly will I say? Will I get the words just right? So the depth of appreciation that I feel for Mr. Ani is so intense.

00:32:36 Speaker_01
Am I gonna say that right or is it not gonna do it justice? So there are all these fears or anxieties that we have about how well we'll be able to do this that sometimes hold us back.

00:32:48 Speaker_01
And what we find is that when we ask people to actually do this, whether it's my MBA students here at the University of Chicago who have asked to do this in a class demonstration for years now, or just folks out there in the world we ask to do this.

00:33:04 Speaker_01
People tend to underestimate how positively their recipient is going to respond. They recognize it'll be great, but it turns out this is like one of the best letters you'll ever receive in your life.

00:33:27 Speaker_03
Nick's research shows that we systematically underestimate how much we will enjoy connecting with people and how meaningful our outreach will feel to others.

00:33:36 Speaker_03
But no matter how many times we see this, no matter how many times the data confirms this, it can still feel as though we'd be better off keeping to ourselves. When we come back, how to combat our false intuitions. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

00:33:55 Speaker_03
I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Nicholas Epley is a psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research suggests that every day, we have a choice to make.

00:34:25 Speaker_03
Do we strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to us on the train or plane? Or do we keep our eyes fixed on our phones and laptops? Do we offer compliments and gratitude to the people who matter in our lives?

00:34:37 Speaker_03
Or do we assume that they already know how we feel? Do we keep our views on sensitive topics to ourselves or open ourselves up to difficult but meaningful conversation?

00:34:52 Speaker_03
Nick, you said that we face what you call approach or avoid decisions all the time in social life.

00:34:58 Speaker_02
What do you mean by this and what is your advice?

00:35:01 Speaker_01
So I think of this as the choice, not just every day of our lives, but depending on where we are and what we're doing, sometimes every hour of our lives, every five minutes of our lives.

00:35:12 Speaker_01
And these choices, these social choices, often involve attention. between the desire to approach, to connect, but also the fears we have that sometimes lead us to avoid other people. This approach avoidance dynamic is fundamental to our motivation.

00:35:32 Speaker_01
We see this across species. This is kind of how motivation works, is a tension between these two systems in our own brains.

00:35:40 Speaker_01
And what we find in our research is that the inputs into those two motivational systems tilts us more towards avoidance than I think would be optimal for us.

00:35:55 Speaker_03
So you say that we can push back against being undersocial by actively looking for what you call affordances. These are opportunities to become more social.

00:36:05 Speaker_03
You recently identified an affordance for social interaction when a pear tree on your property needed picking. Tell me the story, Nick. Yeah.

00:36:14 Speaker_01
So I've got a little orchard behind our house. We've got one tree in particular. It's an Asian pear tree. It just pours through. We get wheelbarrows full of Asian pears in the fall. And they're great.

00:36:26 Speaker_01
But they're also a pain in the neck because there are like 500 of these things. And so most years we pick all these pears and then we would have

00:36:36 Speaker_01
you know, wheelbarrows and buckets full of Asian pears that we would try to eat for months as best we could, and then there were hundreds that we would try to give away to people.

00:36:46 Speaker_01
This last fall, though, we invited essentially the whole neighborhood over for a pear-picking party. And I have a tractor that's got a bucket on it.

00:36:55 Speaker_01
We brought that to the house, and I was lifting the kids up into the tree in the bucket, and we had a ladder up into the tree that kids were climbing up, and everybody had buckets.

00:37:06 Speaker_01
We spent, you know, hours, kids playing with each other on our trampoline. We just turned it into a party. And it turned that experience that otherwise would have been kind of arduous and isolating into one that was really, really fun.

00:37:23 Speaker_03
So when it comes to strangers, not neighbors, not friends, not relatives, but strangers, the hardest part of reaching out is often the moment of reaching out. Talk a moment about how we can get over that hump.

00:37:37 Speaker_01
An illustrative example comes from this great experiments, one I just love, from Gillian Sandstrom, Erica Boothby, and Gus Cooney, where they had people play a scavenger hunt over the course of a week. They were shown a whole bunch of different

00:37:56 Speaker_01
challenges. People that they were to identify and were asked to go out and have a conversation with. So top hat was one. Find somebody with a hat, go have a conversation with them. Manscape, find somebody with a beard, go have a conversation with them.

00:38:10 Speaker_01
And what they found over the course of this week was that people enjoyed these conversations more than they expected and over the course of the week they learned.

00:38:20 Speaker_01
But they also found more opportunities for engaging with other people over the course of the week than they had at the beginning of the week.

00:38:28 Speaker_01
Once you start looking for social affordances, ways to reach out and connect with people, once you start taking an interest in other people, I think opportunities start to emerge, opportunities you wouldn't have thought of before.

00:38:45 Speaker_01
And that I think involves or requires just changing your mindset a little bit. Once you start taking an interest in other people, paying attention to them, opportunities to engage will crop up. You'll notice a shirt that you can compliment somebody on.

00:39:01 Speaker_01
You'll notice that somebody's got a sticker on their backpack from a place you visited that you can ask them about.

00:39:07 Speaker_01
You'll realize, like I do in the morning when I'm walking, that if I see somebody's door open, that's a chance for me to say hi to them and just lift up that start of their day just a little bit more.

00:39:18 Speaker_01
You'll start seeing things that you hadn't seen before. I certainly do in my own life. So that's one, I think, important first step.

00:39:27 Speaker_03
So when we do manage to get over the hump and talk to strangers, we often restrict ourselves to small talk. We talk about sports. We talk about the weather. You say that this can sometimes be a mistake.

00:39:39 Speaker_03
And in fact, you've run experiments on making a choice between small talk and deep talk. What do you find, Nick?

00:39:47 Speaker_01
Well, like many of these social situations where you have to think about, do I reach out and approach this person or avoid?

00:39:53 Speaker_01
Once you've decided to approach somebody, once you're having a conversation with somebody, you have to decide what to talk about, right? So when you ask people, The word small talk and hate are often in close proximity to each other.

00:40:07 Speaker_01
Nobody likes small talk. And yet we find ourselves doing a lot of it.

00:40:14 Speaker_01
And what we find in our work is that stems not so much from not wanting to have deeper conversations when you ask people to generate topics of conversation that are deeper than they normally do. They come up with some pretty good stuff.

00:40:29 Speaker_01
They'll ask people, you know, what do you regret most in your life? Or what do you want to be known for? What are you most proud of? They come up with meaningful stuff. That doesn't seem to be too hard.

00:40:39 Speaker_01
Instead, the barrier seems to be anxiety about what will happen if I actually open up and ask this deep stuff. And this, again, is misplaced fear to some extent. We find that they think it's going to be more awkward than it actually is.

00:40:55 Speaker_01
They think they'll have less in common with another person than they find themselves to have. And they think they'll enjoy it less than they actually do.

00:41:03 Speaker_03
Have you ever had these conversations or attempted a conversation or attempted to launch into a deep topic and been rebuffed, Nick? I can't think of one.

00:41:13 Speaker_01
I've asked other people this, too, and people often can't think of them. So it's not that I can't imagine it happening. I can imagine it happening. But let me give you an example from my train ride just the other morning.

00:41:28 Speaker_01
There's a man sitting on the second level of the train on the side. I'd seen him before, once before, and he looked just sharp as could be, wearing a bow tie and a suit. He was killing it. And I told him that. I said, you look awesome today.

00:41:45 Speaker_01
Whatever you're doing, you're gonna nail it. And I asked him, would you be up for talking this morning? And he said, yeah, of course. And I introduced myself and then I just said, tell me about yourself. Why are you here and what are you doing?

00:42:02 Speaker_01
And it turned right away from kind of a trivial conversation we could have had.

00:42:08 Speaker_01
to having him tell me about difficult upbringing he'd had on the south side of Chicago, this program he'd gotten into that really turned his life around, difficulties he had with his father towards the end of his life, this amazing job opportunity he got at Northwestern on the north side of town.

00:42:26 Speaker_01
And it happened because I took an interest in him. And when you take an interest in another person, you're really genuinely interested in them, they tend to open up back to you.

00:42:38 Speaker_01
I cannot think of a time where I've tried to really connect meaningfully with somebody in conversation and they've said no.

00:42:58 Speaker_03
And you actually recommend that when people have these conversations, they try and reach for a deep question sooner rather than later.

00:43:08 Speaker_01
Yeah, so psychologists have long shared the intuition that I think most of us do too, which is that deep stuff

00:43:17 Speaker_01
finding out what really matters to somebody or you know what's really important to them that that you cannot really only talk about that to a friend that you can't engage new folks with that quickly. It takes a long runway, right?

00:43:31 Speaker_01
It's like a 747 taking off. You just, you gotta, you know, run slow along the ground for a while before you raise your intimacy level. You know, it's like taking the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building. That's what we think of it as.

00:43:48 Speaker_01
But I don't think that's quite right. I think you can press the elevator to a more meaningful and deep floor pretty quickly, get right up to the top without beating around the bush a lot. And I see it happen over and over again in my conversations.

00:44:03 Speaker_01
You take an interest in somebody, you ask about something they really care about, they're happy to talk to you about it typically.

00:44:17 Speaker_03
So once at a gathering of high-level financial folks, you decided to see what would happen if you asked the executives to have deep conversations with one another. How did the exercise play out, Nick?

00:44:28 Speaker_01
Yeah, so this was the very first time I tested experimentally in a very public setting. What happens when people go deep quickly in conversation?

00:44:39 Speaker_01
I was at a conference at a hedge fund in Connecticut standing in front of a room of just a little over 50 people, all like super serious banker types. They were all, you know, wearing suits I could never have afforded.

00:44:52 Speaker_01
I kind of thought I'd been brought in as the sideshow. for this math-heavy, quant jock kind of decision-making conference.

00:45:03 Speaker_01
And I decided that I was going to run an experiment with them where I had them have a deep and meaningful conversation with somebody else.

00:45:12 Speaker_01
That instead of doing the slow runway up to something deep and meaningful, we were going to start right away with something deep and meaningful. And so I told them in just a minute, I'm going to pair you up with somebody else in this room.

00:45:25 Speaker_01
They didn't know each other. And I put four questions up on the screen. Things like, if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you?

00:45:36 Speaker_01
If a crystal ball could tell you anything about the future, what would you want to know? And the last question I had up there was, can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? Yeah. Wow.

00:45:51 Speaker_01
So as soon as I put these up on the screen, it felt like, you know, somebody just sucked the air right out of the room. These people were not enthused, right?

00:46:01 Speaker_01
These were like my kids here, and we're going to do the compliment calendar for Christmas this year. They did not want to do this. A guy in the front swore. He said, oh, and then issued an expletive as soon as he saw the words up on the screen.

00:46:17 Speaker_01
Everybody else started kind of rumbling and grumbling. I felt like I was in a canoe right at the top of a waterfall, and I was just seeing over the edge, and this was going to go downhill fast.

00:46:29 Speaker_01
I was, you know, I tried to play it cool on the outside, but I was nervous this could be on the inside. I pushed forward and told them we're gonna pair them up, and we did. Gave them cards with these questions on it and let them go.

00:46:41 Speaker_01
And I was just a nervous wreck about this. Most of these people, you know, like 85% of them were men, super serious, older folks who did not come to this conference to bare their soul to some other person.

00:46:58 Speaker_01
But after a few minutes, the room just, it was like I'd flipped a switch on their backs or something. They kind of started coming to life. They were laughing with each other.

00:47:10 Speaker_01
And I was going to let them talk for 10 minutes, but at 10 minutes, the room was very loud. Everybody was talking. They were having a good time. And there was no way I was going to get them out of those conversations.

00:47:21 Speaker_01
About five minutes later, I started shouting into my microphone that we had just a few minutes left.

00:47:26 Speaker_01
I finally was able to corral them at about 20 minutes by doing a trick I heard from my kid's kindergarten teacher, counting down very loudly from five. When you hit one, they usually are quiet. And so, I had to do that.

00:47:43 Speaker_01
And what was just startling to me was the shift in the feeling in that room from the start of it, which was just absolute dread, to the end where I could hardly pull apart. There was one group I saw where one of the two guys was in tears.

00:48:01 Speaker_01
I saw another guy hugging another guy at the end of their session. Everybody was shaking hands with they left. The whole mood in that room brightened, that move from dread To delight at the end, I've never seen anything like that happen.

00:48:17 Speaker_01
That kind of switch. After the conversation, I had them tell me how it actually felt, and the gap between the expectations before and the experiences after were massive.

00:48:36 Speaker_03
Nicholas Epley is a psychologist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is the author of Mind Wise, Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Nick, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

00:48:51 Speaker_00
Thanks, Shankar.

00:48:57 Speaker_03
If you have follow-up questions for Nick Epley that you'd be willing to share with members of the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

00:49:09 Speaker_03
That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty, and please use the subject line, connecting. If you want to write out a question, please be sure to tell us how to pronounce your name.

00:49:25 Speaker_03
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

00:49:40 Speaker_03
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00:49:51 Speaker_03
It's where you'll find conversations you won't hear anywhere else, along with our segment, Your Questions Answered, where we bring back guests to respond to your follow-up questions about their work.

00:50:01 Speaker_03
To try a seven-day free trial of Hidden Brain Plus, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain or support.hiddenbrain.org. We truly appreciate your interest in our work. I'm Sankar Vedantam. See you soon.