Social anxiety is something we really can help people with.
Essentially, the strategy is very simple.
If you are afraid of talking with a stranger, having a deep conversation, the way to...
Get over that.
It's not to simulate it or to imagine.
It's not like you get up and you give a pretend speech.
That's what psychologists were doing for years.
It doesn't work because it's still pretending.
It has to be real.
You send people out in the world and to do the thing for real.
You're worried about getting rejected.
Go out and start asking people for help.
And you'll learn that your fear is misplaced, that you get accepted more often than you might guess.
Exposing people to that thing that they're anxious of, when the belief is misplaced and with social anxiety, it is usually wildly misplaced.
That's what we find over and over again is a mistaken barrier to connecting with other people.
That's how you ease that social anxiety and get rid of it, not because you dull your anxiety so much.
It's because you change your beliefs about what other people are like.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr. Nick Epley.
Dr Nick Epley is a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago and an expert researcher on the science of social connection.
What's different about today's conversation in the context of social connection is that it doesn't just center on improving relationships with friends or family or coworkers.
We do talk about that, but we also talk about the smaller everyday conversations that we have with people that we don't know so well and the positive impact that that can have on mental and physical health.
Now, I want to be clear, we're not talking about engaging in small talk for small talk sake.
We're talking about taking opportunities to connect with people once or several times per day and the tremendous benefits that can have for people's mental and physical health, including yours.
We also talk a lot about the assumptions that we tend to make about other people, both in real life and online, and how those actually match up with reality.
We also talk about Nick Epley himself because his life strongly has informed his research.
We talk about his biological and his adopted children, raising a child with additional needs, and the incredible joy and growth those choices have brought him and his family, by virtue of the sorts of social connections that they've brought.
I must say, today's conversation went a lot of places that I did not anticipate, and it certainly inspired me to look differently at everyday interactions as far from trivial and, in fact, key to the fabric of social connection and our mental and physical health.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.
And now for my discussion with Dr. Nick Epley.
Dr. Nick Epley, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me.
We make a lot of assumptions about other people.
And in my case, because I have a new puppy, about animals.
We're always thinking that we know what other beings are thinking.
But, as you pointed out, and as a colleague of mine in neurosciences, Dr Karl Deisseroth, has pointed out, most of the time we don't even know what we're thinking.
Like there's stuff going on in there, but we're not that good at thinking.
Oh, that last thought was a complete sentence.
That means blank.
That's not how the human mind works.
Usually, when we hear the word anthropomorphism, we're talking about humans making assumptions about other animals.
But humans are animals.
We just happen to be the curators of the planet.
So why and how do we anthropomorphize about other people and how does it hurt us and how does it help us?
I think the way to think about anthropomorphism is that what we are doing is we're trying to understand what's going on within another agent.
Essentially,
Anything that acts independently, you've got a ball rolling across the table.
If something else bumps into it and it moves in perfect deflection off of it, You don't need anything to explain why that ball moved as it did.
But if this ball is coming across the table and another one hits it and it just keeps going or it goes some other direction, well then it seems like there's something going on inside that thing that might be driving it right.
And that thing that's inside that ball might be a mind.
It might be a set of thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, some kind of psychology that's pushing it.
At least that's the way we interpret what an independent agent might be doing.
We do this when we think about other people.
You're nodding your head now.
I think you're thinking about something.
You move this way or that.
You wanted to do this thing or that thing.
We do that same kind of mind reading with non-human agents animals gods, sometimes the planet, even ourselves.
We reflect on ourselves.
We have experience, at least, with having certain mental states come to mind, and we use that experience as a guide to what's going on in other people too.
That kind of anthropomorphism, that kind of mind reading right where we infer others' thoughts or beliefs or attitudes.
That's helpful to us for at least two reasons.
One is it gives me some sense of why you're doing what you're doing now.
It allows me to understand what you're doing right now.
Are you trying to be kind?
Are you trying to be... aggressive, are you trying to be friendly?
But it also is pretty good at allowing me to predict what you're likely to do next.
So if I think you feel hungry, well, you're gonna go try to eat something.
If I think you don't like me very well, you're gonna behave a particular way towards me.
So this kind of mental state inference, this kind of mind reading serves us pretty well for getting around in a social world.
Don't always get it right, but in general, it's better than not doing it at all.
So, as we make assumptions about others and their intentions and their past choices, in some cases right.
Like, if somebody hits somebody else, we make an assumption about the certain things might've led up to that.
Yes, right.
Are we mainly paying attention to behavior, and or are we paying attention to what they seem to be paying attention to so-called theory of mind?
Yeah.
So it depends a lot on what kind of environment we're in.
We think about the minds of others in lots and lots of different contexts.
My wife right now is back home in Illinois.
I can think about what she might want for dinner, right? what she's feeling at any given time.
We can think about people when they're not present.
We can think about strangers, people we know nothing about.
I write a book.
I'm trying to think about how will people understand this book, right?
These are all cases where there's not somebody in front of us at all.
And when we're doing that, particularly with strangers, people we know nothing about, things we know nothing about, then the one thing we have at our disposal is ourselves.
We can use our own minds.
So if I walk into a classroom and I think it's kind of cold in here, well I can assume that other people will think it's cold too.
I'm using myself as a guide.
Once I know a little more maybe about you, right?
I learned that you're a PhD from Stanford.
I learned that somebody is an athlete or whatever.
I learned something about you.
You're a doctor or you're a lawyer.
Then I can use that information. my beliefs about groups of people as a guide, that's stereotyping.
Stereotypes contain a fair bit of accuracy to them.
If I know that you're a Democrat or a Republican, I can make some reasonable inferences about other thoughts you might have, other beliefs you might have.
Not perfect, but better than chance guessing.
And then once I see you, like what we're doing right now, if I can see you, then I'm watching your behavior and then behavior dominates.
Behavior though is tricky.
I'm watching you, right?
You could have two people kissing.
They seem, you know, delightfully in love.
They seem just so nice together.
And you can make one set of inferences when you see that happening based on that.
You can infer what's going on behind that based on what you're seeing.
And when we can see the behavior in front of us, that's then what we're paying most attention to.
But each of these different mechanisms egocentrism, stereotyping and behaviorism, I think working backwards from your behavior they all give us some accuracy, but they also create some error.
Egocentrism creates egocentric biases.
I assume that you think more like I do than you actually do.
Stereotyping tends to create a different set of mistakes.
I tend to think that groups are more distinct and different from each other than they actually are, because stereotypes are about the defining features of groups, which tends to exaggerate the differences between groups.
And when it comes to behavior, I tend to assume a simpler, more simplistic mind behind that behavior than actually exists.
Psychologists refer to this as the correspondence bias.
I tend to infer an intention or set of beliefs or attitudes that corresponds with your behavior.
As I see it,
So if I see you hit somebody, I might assume you are an aggressive person.
That's how I interpret right away.
Had I known it was in self-defense, then I would interpret it very differently, right?
But we tend to leap to mental states or intentions from behavior.
Sometimes that can get us into trouble when the relationship between intentions or thoughts and behavior is a little complicated.
So each of those gets us some accuracy. but each of them also creates some error.
If you are willing, I'd like to return to the example you gave at the beginning of a ball rolling on a table and another ball striking it or not.
In the second example you gave, the ball simply takes off on a different trajectory.
And you said that we're going to make some assumption that the ball has something like a mind, something controlling its decisions.
What I'm about to say reflects a strong bias, which is that I've long been interested in the visual system of non-human and human primates, because we are so visual and the eyes are two pieces of the brain.
They're the only pieces of the brain in healthy individuals that are outside the cranial vault.
And they give us a lot of information.
And I think People know that.
But I don't think they appreciate just how much information they give us, not just pupil size and whether or not our gaze is locked with theirs.
All that's true too.
But if I could just alter your experiment for a second, let's say that first ball had eyes and it's rolling forward, but then the eyes shift to the left and then the ball goes to the left.
Now I have additional information.
I have a window literally into the brain, where I can say what's over there that might've motivated that decision.
And I think with humans, we do this, right?
Like if somebody is going down the street just swinging their arms wildly and hitting people, we think this person's out of control.
They're crazy.
Whereas if they see somebody, then they orient their gaze toward them.
Now we start making all sorts of assumptions about the operations of that mind.
And in my worldview no pun intended the eyes are the best source of information about intent, about goals, et cetera.
So limiting the conversation to conditions where we can see the other person and what they see.
Are there any examples of our judgments about other people's thoughts and behavior and et cetera improving by virtue of that?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
So the eyes do provide- Oh, the eyes have a lot.
Valid information.
Oh, absolutely.
The voice also contains an awful lot.
So that's the other thing we spend a lot of time studying.
We are the most socially sophisticated primate species on the planet.
We have a brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others.
And that means that we are hypersensitive to certain things.
The eyes are one of them.
There's this great paper in 2008 on the cultural intelligence hypothesis.
It's a science paper where they compared, they tried to assess.
What is it that makes humans sort of unique on this planet?
And they compared a little over 100 two-year-old toddlers.
Imagine running this experiment, if you would.
A little over 100 two-year-old toddlers.
This was done at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, one of the Max Plancks.
Over 100 chimpanzees.
And then just for good measure, another 36 orangutans who apparently had nothing better to do.
What a fun experiment.
Isn't it crazy?
Yeah, it's crazy.
Exhausting.
Exactly, man, I can't, yeah.
I would like to know the background of details of this, how it was actually done and how long it took.
But what they did essentially is ran each of these groups through two different kinds of IQ tests.
You might think of them as
One was an IQ test involving physical objects, right?
So things like tracking where a reward was placed under a shell game or using a tool to solve some kind of problem.
Jane Goodall, once psychologist, once believed biologist, once believed that tool use made humans unique.
Until Jane Goodall watched the chimpanzees using twigs to get termites out of a termite mound right.
On the physical IQ test problems, The human toddlers, the adult chimps and the orangutans performed equally well.
There wasn't a difference.
It's not reasoning about physical things in space that make us unique.
The other group of IQ problems were social problems, where it required reasoning about the mind of another person.
And this involved doing things like tracking where someone's eyes are looking in order to monitor what somebody is thinking.
Because we tend to look at things we're thinking about and think about things we're looking at.
If I wanna know what's on your mind, what's governing your attention?
I wanna be really good at tracking your eyes.
And we are amazing at this. as human beings.
I can tell whether you're looking at me right now or looking at my right ear from this far without any trouble.
I can tell from 50 feet away whether you're looking at me or looking at 10 feet above me.
We're amazingly good at this.
Super sensitive.
I couldn't calculate the angle on a roof if you gave me a month and an armload of protractors to do it, but I can detect the angle in your eyes in an instant.
Also involve things like being able to understand somebody's intentions from their actions, right?
So if I reach out for this glass of water and I miss it, You can infer I'm thirsty and I want to drink.
You could, oh, you could hand me the glass, Nick, right?
If I wanted to drink.
Because that's, you couldn't read my mind, essentially.
You could infer my thoughts.
When they tested the two-year-old toddlers, the chimps and the orangutans in the social IQ test.
That's where the two-year-old toddlers were shining.
That's where we were crushing the competition on those social IQ problems.
You can do this, you know, in front of a chimpanzee all day long, and they will do nothing for you, right?
Nothing for you.
I do that in front of you and you can hand me the glass of water super easily.
So yes, the eyes give us a lot and we are extremely sensitive to all of those social cues that convey, might convey, what's on the mind of another person, because it allows me to anticipate what you're doing before you do it.
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And you mentioned voice.
I'm going to make an assumption.
I'm sure it's wrong, or at least partially wrong.
That voice offers a lot of information about autonomic tone how stressed or how relaxed somebody is.
And I'd be curious to know, A if that's true, what else it conveys, and also how much prior exposure to voice matters.
Today's the first time I met you.
I don't know what your voice normally sounds like in this context.
So I'm just operating off what I've got.
So what's in voice?
What's not in voice?
And what are we aware of?
What are we not aware of?
Yeah, so there are lots of things contained in the voice, because it is very closely connected to your mind.
You notice that your eyes are, right?
Your eyes are close, but your voice is also very closely connected to your online conscious experience.
You are speaking while you are thinking.
And as you're having thoughts, your voice can reflect authentically what's going on in your mind.
So when I speed up, you can tell I'm kind of excited about something.
When my voice varies in pitch, you can tell if I'm enthusiastic or not, or kind of sad about something.
You can pick up a lot about what's actually going on in the mind by listening to a person's voice.
And there are a couple of things that we've studied in our research.
One is voice just contains a lot of information that allows us to understand other people better.
So if you compare typing to somebody versus talking to them, the voice allows you to determine things like intentionality, to differentiate when you're telling a joke or being sarcastic than when you're not right.
Well, type this email.
This is so funny, right?
We think when we're sending off an email to somebody, it seems funny to us because we know this is meant to be a joke.
Person on the other end doesn't realize.
The comment about this person's aunt or brother or whatever was meant to be a joke and they're all offended, right.
But if you say this in your voice, sarcasm is crystal clear.
Interestingly what we find and this is because of egocentrism in part we're not always so sensitive to how our own communication is interpreted by another person.
Because we know what we're thinking when we're conveying something.
We tend to think we'll be understood equally well whether we're typing or talking.
But of course, on the receiving end, it varies a lot.
So voice contains a lot of information that allows us to understand what somebody is saying better.
But what we also find which I think is, at least from my perspective, also interesting is that the voice also conveys the presence of mind.
I don't have access to your thinking, to your reasoning, to what's going on between your ears.
I can only watch from the outside, right?
And I get cues.
I can see your visual gaze, but I can also hear you.
The voice contains a lot of cues to the presence of mind.
When you're really thinking hard about something, your voice slows down and you deliberate.
And that variability in the pace of your voice kind of tells me that your mind is alive.
Just like I can tell that you're biologically alive because you're moving, your voice also moves.
And it tells me you got a lively mind.
It conveys the presence of emotion.
It can convey the presence of thinking.
So when we have partisans, for instance, We did this.
This was with Juliana Schroeder, who is one of my amazing PhD students from years ago.
She's now on the faculty at Berkeley at Haas.
We had people, this was on the eve of the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
We had people who were voting for Trump or Clinton say why they were voting for the candidate they were voting for.
And they gave a verbal pitch.
And we could get a few different cues from this.
We could get an audio recorded clip so we could see and hear the person.
We could just get their voice.
And we could also strip out their voice and just see the content of their text, to see the words they were saying.
They also wrote a pitch, an explanation for why they were voting for this particular candidate.
What we then did is we had people watch and listen listen, read the transcript or read the written explanation and say essentially how mindful is this person?
How thoughtful are they?
How thoughtful, how intelligent, how rational, how capable of experiencing emotions are they?
Essentially they're asking are you a mindful, intelligent person or are you kind of just like a mindless idiot?
Are you human-like or are you kind of not human-like, more like a rock?
And what we found was that when people could hear what the person had to say, either while also seeing them or just with their voice,
They rated the person particularly when they disagreed with them, when there was a person on the other side as more thoughtful, more intelligent, more rational.
This tendency to dehumanize the other side, to think of them as mindless idiots, was dramatically reduced when you actually heard what the other person has to say.
So I think the voice, along with the eyes, along with eye gaze, but the voice allows us, gives us a lot of information, allows us to understand what's on somebody's mind.
And it also allows us something deeper.
It allows me to tell you that you've got a mind, that you have one.
It's very interesting.
The vision piece I'm... familiar with for reasons I stated before.
The physical behavior piece makes a lot of sense.
The voice piece as a reflection of an active mind is something I really haven't considered.
You know, we'll hear sometimes that the content of people's words is less informative than you know the timbre of their voice or something like that.
I don't know that I completely believe that.
I think that that's a, I think that's a 90s, it's like an 80s, 90s pop psychology-ism.
Absolutely.
That is a highly stylized experimental result.
So you will sometimes hear in this pop psych world that 80 of what's communicated is communicated through paralinguistic.
That obviously is not true.
I'm not going to be able to tell you about my book. just by using the tone of my voice.
So that is that- Words matter.
The words certainly do matter.
But above and beyond that, there are other things that matter in a person's voice that at least we find people aren't so sensitive to.
So when we ask for instance, when we ask our MBA students to give an elevator pitch, as Juliana and I did in one of our experiments
Give an elevator pitch for their desired job, the job they want most, right?
Why should this company hire you?
They can give it with their voice.
So we do the audio and visual.
We do just the audio.
We pull out the transcript, just get the words, or they type their pitch.
We then have people watch and listen, listen or read these pitches and say how intelligent does this person seem to be.
How hireable does this person seem to be?
And we've done this both with people who imagine working for companies and also with Fortune 500 recruiters too.
The person seems more intelligent, more rational, more thoughtful, more hireable when you hear what they have to say.
And yet the MBA students themselves think they'll be judged equally on those two, they're not.
And when we ask a separate group of people if you wanted to communicate with somebody in a way that would make you seem most intelligent, overwhelmingly people say I'd rather write.
And the thinking behind that, I think, is that people think they can edit and such, but what they're missing is that the sound of your voice conveys a lot more.
It conveys the fact that you have a mind.
Because I can't see it and I can't read it in your dead text, right?
Your dead text has none of the paralinguistic cues or features.
Really talented writers, novelists can do this.
But mostly your text is dead.
It doesn't have intonation.
It doesn't change its pitch.
It doesn't show me thinking while it's actually happening.
And people don't seem to realize that.
What does this reveal to us about AI?
Because people are spending more and more time with AI, on AI, and what comes back is text.
I mean, there are versions of it and soon, I imagine, there will be elaborated versions of it with avatars or even video AI.
Are you generally enthusiastic about what that could bring in terms of better understanding other humans?
Because I could imagine a world where you know I can't reach you, but I could go on AI and say Hey Nick, I would just do it directly.
Hey, Nick, I'm really curious.
I'm going to the Midwest, where you're from, and I'm super interested in, like culturally.
What's the best way that I could connect with someone around this, this and this?
Given the content on the internet, the LLM should be able to have a video of you.
Deliver to me what you would say.
We're pretty close to it.
That can be better than a bullet point list?
It will, yeah.
So people will find it more believable, I think, right?
But a lot of the things that people turn to AI for now are for facts, right?
For actual information, for text.
But I do think increasingly it's going to be used for social stuff.
People feel lonely, disconnected.
They need a friend.
I'm friends with Liz Dunn, who's a fabulous psychologist at the University of British Columbia.
And she told me that they're starting to do research about allowing people to practice having conversations with AI before they actually have a conversation with another person.
Like a conflict.
I can see ways in which AI could be used to do lots of things.
I can also see obvious problems with it.
If I'm connecting with the AI and I'm not connecting with other humans, I can see problems with it.
But I think, in terms of the presence versus absence of voice, I do think voice will allow us, to the extent that it's good and perfect right.
It sounds like a human voice.
My prediction would be that you can trust it more when you hear what it has to say, as long as it mimics really well a human voice, because you'd anthropomorphize it just like you do another person.
I don't want to spend too much time on politics, but I can't help but ask this next question.
Way back when Bush was president.
Second one I recall there was a lot of discussion around people who voted for him saying hey, he's the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with right.
Which I interpreted as, there's something about his style of speech, which was very everyday.
And we don't have to talk about current candidates and politicians, not to avoid it.
I don't tap dance around anything these days, but I think that nowadays we have a lot of access to people talking on video.
When you and I were growing up I think we're more or less the same age there would be a presidential address or there'd be a campaign and you'd hear from people, but it was very limited.
You didn't get so much exposure to people.
So now we have more and more information about voice, about behavior, about decision-making, depending on the resolution, where their eyes are going.
Do you think that we're getting better at assessing public figures or are we getting worse at assessing public figures?
That's a good question.
I think that'll take me too far out on a limb.
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, there's so much information that we have now, But the other thing too, is that the way we evaluate other people and this is central to a lot of our research other people are ambiguous, right.
They're not crystal clear.
That same thing that I say to you, that I mean to be a joke, can sound really hostile or violent to another person, right?
Can sound really awful. and be taken as offensive.
So I think that's what makes my work as a psychologist so interesting.
In the early 1900s psychologists you know, when social psychology my field in cognitive psychology started.
It came out of basically biology and vision sciences and basic sensory perception thinking that we could understand human thinking and measure it.
Measure our judgments about each other in the same way that we measure how people evaluate hot and cold and stuff like that.
But it turns out that other people are very ambiguous.
It's not always so crystal clear.
And so two people with a different set of beliefs or attitudes or perspectives on this situation can look at the very same stimulus and see totally different things, right.
A lot of our judgment is not happening out there coming to us.
It's happening in here, interpreting what we're seeing.
And in the world of politics.
Everyone who's listening to this podcast knows just how ambiguous things are.
Somebody says something and the right will interpret it this way.
The left will interpret it that way.
It's known as my side bias, even the very same stimulus.
So there is this sense that if we get more and more and more information, then we'll understand people better better, better.
That's not necessarily true if we come into these perceptions, into viewing these things, with very different starting points or very different perspectives.
To begin with,
You've worked a lot on this notion of under-socialization.
If I may, I'd like to invert it for today's conversation and talk a little bit less through the lens of how bad it is if we're under-socialized and explore instead how good it is if we do socialize.
Not because I have to make things positive, but because ultimately, I think actions to socialize more are going to be useful.
And I'm tempted to set this up as an experiment.
So, as with the example of the balls you gave before, in the most deprived condition, a human is in total isolation.
Okay.
So another condition is they can let's just say text with somebody else, but they can't see them.
They've never seen them.
And we can ratchet that up, right?
They've seen them before.
They can make a phone call.
They can do video chat.
They're in person.
I can see a million excellent arguments for why in-person interaction is good.
But what is the evidence that the other forms of social interaction are good also?
We hear so much about how they're bad, but we also hear about the isolation crisis.
And so we've sort of...
I've lumped the more deprived versions of socialization in with isolation.
And I'm not sure that I accept that.
I'm not trying to counter your work.
I don't know enough about it to do it.
I'm not qualified to anyway.
But is texting with a friend healthy?
Yes.
As opposed to spending time alone?
For sure.
Okay.
For sure.
In-person time clearly being the best.
It's a little better.
Although going from no contact to some contact is the big leap.
Tell me more.
So being isolated, so spending a day alone is pretty miserable.
So when psychologists look at this this comes from a famous psychologist paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton, both Nobel Prize winners in economics neither of them economists that looked at the Gallup daily well-being poll.
They call people up every day and they ask them how you're feeling today in a number of different ways.
They actually ask you about the day before.
Yesterday, did you enjoy yesterday?
Did you feel enjoyment yesterday?
Did you smile yesterday?
Did you experience sadness yesterday?
Did you experience stress yesterday?
So they ask about these different measures of well-being.
They also ask about all kinds of other things, like how much money you're making, are you religious or not.
They know how much insurance you have, or whether you're surveyed on a weekend or a weekday.
They also ask you, did you spend yesterday entirely alone or not?
And when they do that, you can compare the effects of things like social isolation, being alone, versus not against these other things.
It turns out the difference between spending yesterday alone versus somebody else.
The difference in your well-being on these other measures is about seven times bigger than being relatively high or low on their income measure, which is about a 60000 difference between these two groups.
Being alone is bad.
That's a bad day.
And having connections with other people improves it pretty dramatically.
Above and beyond that, it does matter.
It is better, those interactions.
But now you're adding good things to what was already somewhat a good thing.
Plus, we also need to...
We need to unpack a little bit what these different media do.
They're good for different things.
And we don't always use them for in the ways that are right.
But I think, you know, in many ways we do.
Like if I send you a text or I send my wife a text, right?
She's back in Illinois today.
We've been married for nearly 30, it'll be 30 years in August this year.
We know a ton about each other.
I can send her, you know, a heart.
When I'm feeling you know and want to send her, let her know that and she's going to feel that's going to lift her up a little bit.
That's going to feel good.
We already have a relationship that's establishing just some contact.
Texting is great for that.
It can allow us to stay in contact with somebody.
It is not good for building a relationship necessarily over time.
Like, if we're going to spend a half hour typing to each other, is not a good way to spend that half hour?
I'd be much better at picking the phone and talking to you to help establish that relationship.
But absolutely the ability to reach out and connect with other people frequently, as texting is used out in the world, can allow us to stay connected.
Now, if that's the only thing we're doing, if we're not actually spending time developing more meaningful relationships with people, that's not gonna be as good as it could be.
But you started this by asking about sociality more generally, and why is being social good for us?
The fact of the matter is, even with our imperfections in thinking about the minds of others, we are highly social.
Just the ability to think in the level of sophistication that we do about the minds of other people shows how important sociality is for us.
And you see the importance of sociality just almost everywhere.
You look the way our brain is organized.
So our neocortex is massive relative to the rest of our brain, compared to our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees.
A lot of that stuff is good for social stuff, for theory of mind use, for keeping track of who knows what and who you should trust and who you should avoid.
Living in large social groups is complicated.
And the size of our brain reflects a complication.
If you look across primate species, the size of the neocortex relative to the rest of the brain is correlated with.
This is work on the social brain hypothesis.
The size of the neocortex relative to the rest of the brain is correlated with the social complexity of the group the primate species lives in.
Our brains are built to be social.
Also, for most of human history, being alone and isolated is a death sentence, right?
You can't live on your own.
We depend on each other for survival.
That also means that we have a neural architecture that is desperately trying to keep us connected with other people.
And so when you spend a day alone, the reason why it feels like crap As my late colleague and friend, John Cassioppo, who was at the University of Chicago, studied loneliness really was the world's expert on loneliness noted that your neural architecture is screaming at you when you are alone to reach out and connect with other people.
That's why loneliness feels bad.
And that's why the opposite of loneliness feels so good, like getting a hug, that feels good.
Your brain is trying to tell you, get out there and connect with other people.
So when you're lonely, you get spikes in cortisol in your bloodstream that compromises your cardiovascular functioning, that compromises your immune system.
That's why being lonely can make you sick. and why it can shorten your life, right?
You also see that the opposite of loneliness, connecting with other people just feels darn good, right?
That's your brain telling you, that's your body telling you, yeah, do this a little more often.
This is really good, right?
So when you have that little conversation with a stranger like I did coming in, I had this amazing It was actually a very deep, hard conversation with my Uber driver who was Iranian, had lost a son in a protest shot in the neck years ago in Iran.
Yeah, very painful but also very meaningful.
Connected us to each other, felt a very strong bond with each other.
And the moment that's your brain telling you that's the kind of thing that we're built for, right?
Because living alone for most of human history was a bad, bad thing.
So we are hyper-social agents interested in connecting with other people.
It doesn't always mean we know exactly how to do it or that we get it right, but going from nothing to something is a huge leap for us, and texting can sometimes help us do that.
One comment, one question.
Sometimes I like a day alone.
I don't often get it, but that's because I don't spend time around lots of people.
But I spend a lot of time around certain set of people.
I adore them, but sometimes it's nice to get that space.
But one thing that I've noticed because when I was a graduate student I'd run these experiments often during the holidays because I worked on developmental neurobiology.
I didn't have a choice.
If my experimental subjects were a certain postnatal age, I was working that day.
It was my after all.
And there's this kind of interesting idea that I'm not sure I subscribe to, but well that I do subscribe to forgive me that there's something about us as humans that we really like to create action at a distance, you know.
And I don't know if there's a sex difference here, but I think it's like you know, young boys like create, like rockets, a remote control car.
You know you have boys, you know.
Or see something happen over there that you controlled in a meaningful way.
And it doesn't have to be violent, right?
We did rockets and guns, but it could be something else.
But this is somewhat philosophical more than it's scientific.
But could it be that if we spend too much time alone, we've got all this stuff in our mind and it's very hard to create some sort of reverberation or action at a distance that we know reflects us?
And I wonder if our unconscious mind actually gets to the question like, do I even exist?
Now, of course, we know we exist.
We can touch our limbs.
But the social isolation fear.
You know, if I've got fridge full of food and I've got music and I've got audio books.
That's all incoming.
But at some point you do get a little.
I know because I've spent days on days doing experiments.
Back when, by myself, you get a little weird.
Your thoughts get a little distorted and it's almost like you know there's stuff out there, but if you spend enough time away from it it kind of messes with your head a little bit.
And then of course, we think of like the Ted Kaczynski types and these extremes of people that have gone into isolation.
There's that movie about the true story, the guy that goes into the wilderness.
Oh yeah, right.
Yeah, Eddie Vedder wrote the soundtrack to that movie.
Into the Wild.
That's right.
Mechanus, right?
Mechanus?
Yeah.
And I think he wrote at the end, the connection with people is the thing.
He had this romantic view of going out into the wilderness by himself, where we think of Walden Pond.
And we romanticize this thing about being alone for long, extended amounts of time.
But I think it raises real questions about whether or not we're even there.
It's sort of the most existential version of like.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there, did it make a sound?
It's sort of like if we have thoughts and emotions and experiences and there's no one else around to reflect those, for them to have impact on like, do we even exist?
And this might be some hard wiring here.
I'm getting like almost Freudian.
And so forgive me, I'm not a psychologist.
But I'm curious what your thoughts are about the relationship between the fear of isolation, our need for our thoughts and desires and behaviors to have some sort of reverberation out there.
Some responsiveness to us.
Yeah, some confirmation that we're actually here.
I think the closest research to this to the extent that there is research on this is what happens to people prisoners who are put in solitary confinement.
That is not good for their mental health, is not good for their sense themselves, for who they are.
They do lose the sense of themselves.
There's not great research on this, because you can't randomly assign people to be isolated for long periods of time, right?
Yes, thank goodness.
Yes, that that's why we have irbs, right?
But that experience, i think, is very real.
When you were talking about this, it made me think of um you research in the early 1900s, the theories from sociologists that the way we understand ourselves is through other people.
The way I know who I am, what I'm like as a person, who Nick is, is from talking with you, Andrew.
And when we are in conversation, that's when I'm learning about myself.
You're telling me about myself.
I'm having thoughts that I'm sharing with you.
And that's what gives me a sense of self, this looking glass self.
And our sense of self-esteem, in fact, is highly tied.
Am I a valuable person?
It's highly tied to how well we're getting along with other people.
Psychologists believe that it is a monitor, in fact, for how well you're getting along with people, your very sense of self-worth.
And so when there is nobody out there, I think you're absolutely right.
That you can lose your sense of who you are.
And people who go out to the woods, I remember when I was a kid, I actually wrote this.
I won an early career award from APA, which is a great honor for me.
But in the bio that they asked you to write, I wrote in that, that about my childhood dream.
My childhood, before I was nine years old, I believed I was gonna be a mountain man.
Like I grew up in the woods in Iowa, hunting and fishing.
Being outdoors, all my extended family were farmers.
Watching Grizzly Adams on TV.
Like I thought that was a legit job.
Like you could, I could actually go do this, right?
And I was about nine years old when I don't remember quite how this happened, but I learned that this was not a real job.
This was not a legit thing that I could do, right?
But yes, I had romanticized it as well, that this is gonna be a wonderful thing to be able to do.
But when people actually go out and do that, they mostly go insane for a while.
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Social media, which I spend a decent amount of time on because I teach there and I learn there, we know has healthy aspects and unhealthy aspects.
A bunch of variables there age, what people are looking at, et cetera how much time they're spending on it.
Yeah, but social media offered people this opportunity to get out of aloneness through a different form of connection.
And so if we just kind of hypothesize that having our words or our thoughts have a visible, a known impact on somebody else's words or thoughts provide some sort of confirmation that we're there.
It kind of explains why, you know, taking the most aggressive or outrageous thought and putting a comment, and then somebody responds, or other people dog pile, or they respond.
And then you're like, I'm having an effect out there also safely behind a wall, right?
There's no, I think we're critical of that safely behind a wall piece.
You know, the stereotype that you hear online is, like you know, Apple 7689 in his mom's basement.
Like you know, trolling people, you know, but that we forget, like that person's alone in their basement.
Why are they doing it?
Like, why is it so satisfying to them?
I don't actually believe that most of these people are evil.
Some of them might be, but probably they want to see their words and thoughts have an effect.
And the best way to do that is to poke or to say something outrageous.
And so I'm hoping that whoever runs these platforms will try to create incentives for more positive interactions, because I think ultimately, what most people want is the interaction to feel that their thoughts and their feelings matter out there.
So if we can go to something even a little more concrete, if we just think about conversation right the back and forth, why is it that conversation is often such a pleasant thing?
It is because there is back and forth responsiveness in the conversation that allows me to detect that you're paying attention to me.
Right now, you're looking at me, right?
You're nodding at me as I'm speaking, and you'll give a or a right or a yeah as I'm going along.
And that allows me to recognize my thoughts are having an effect on you in a way that's having a positive effect in return on me.
And so I think very much that Action at a distance, as you put it.
Psychologists talk about that as responsiveness, or being in synchrony with another person is part of what makes conversation feel so good.
I have some friends who are recording artists and the only reason they still tour...
It's not for the money.
Leaving the money in some cases is good, but it's not as good as money they can make doing other things.
It's a huge hassle.
Takes them away from families or security issues.
There's all this stuff.
But they get to experience the apex of collective human action at a distance, based on their inflections, their things.
You mentioned Eddie Vedder, right?
And then their stories or whatever you like, scaled the at some concert already scaled up and like grabbed the microphone, got stuck up above.
And then he actually, I actually watched it.
It was pretty dangerous.
And then he actually rappelled down on the microphone wire.
Yeah, this was all spontaneous.
So he's doing these things.
I don't know how much he's conscious of the fact that he's, you know, exciting people and, you know, but recording artists love to do this.
They don't just love to sing. they love to see the response of the people they sing to.
And people go to concerts?
I believe because, whether they understand it or not, they're having an impact on what's happening up on stage.
They understand that reciprocity.
So I think we're just driven to do this.
I have to believe that this is part of our core wiring.
When we're kids and we round up in preschool already, everyone round up and everyone tries to sit still and the girls generally can and the boys generally can't for a little until a later age.
There's a lot of learning to let others speak to kind of like hold things in.
So, as a human psychologists, if you were to play primatologists for a moment and we are human, old world primates what are the sort of core components that social connection are built on?
We talked about dialogue.
We talked about vision.
We talked about sharing. we don't get a whole lot of training in this, if you really think about it.
We just kind of go through school.
We learn to sit, we learn to listen.
You're not supposed to hit people.
You're not supposed to yell at people.
You know, you run around at recess and so on, and you do what other people do.
But like, what is the socialization in human primates?
What are the core features that make somebody able to function really well socially or not.
I think the thing to keep in mind, at least, is the reason why we think social connection matters so much, why it's so important, is that it allows us to coordinate with other people.
And if I can coordinate with you, then you and I are better able to survive and to exist and pass along our genes than if we can't coordinate with each other.
And that groups that are able to coordinate with each other collectively cooperate with each other in ways that are good for the common good.
Those groups outperform groups where people are just at each other's throat.
Nobody's cooperating, right?
This is why corporations function effectively.
You get a collection of individuals all operating as a single unit, all oriented towards one common goal, and you can get a collection of people, of individuals, then doing things that are way more advanced and way bigger than any individual would do on their own.
This is why the East Indian Trading Company was able to send ships all around the world, because they had resources tied up in corporations so that they could send ships out into the world.
And if one went down, you wouldn't lose all of your resources.
You wouldn't lose all your riches as an investor.
So all of social connection, at least evolutionarily speaking this is the idea is pushing us toward cooperation and coordination, particularly with non-kin.
That's what makes us truly social on this planet is our ability to cooperate and to care for non-kin.
You don't need coordination with family members.
You don't need any special evolutionary mechanism to get coordination with family members.
It's hardwired.
They have your genes, right?
They have your genes.
So that makes perfect sense.
You're leaving genetic offspring.
But you need something else to explain why I'm so friendly with you and why we coordinate so well out there in the world.
We drive on the right side of the road where we befriend people who we're not related to.
And that's where I think all of this, that's what social connection is ultimately trying to serve.
Is that coordination function?
Do you think there are hardwired mechanisms that set us up for cooperation with our genetic offspring and siblings and so forth, more so than with non-genetic?
I know you have adopted kids.
We have adopted kids in our family as well.
And and it's sort of weird to say this because it's kind of a duh.
But for people that don't have adopted family members like, The notion that they're not like really part of your family is insane.
Like you know I, for privacy reasons, I don't want to disclose who these people are, but I can tell you that I have a younger family member who was adopted, and I never ever, ever think for a moment that she's not part of our family.
I'd lay down in traffic for her the same way I would for any other member of my family.
And I wasn't the one that raised her.
Do you think there's something hardwired about our genetic offspring and the other stuff?
Fortunately develops adopted children, close friends, community members.
Yeah.
I don't know the answer to that, Exactly, that's not what I study per se.
What I can tell you though, as a social psychologist, is that what we study is the power of context and roles to drive behavior.
And the thing that you are speaking to and the thing that we have experienced as parents.
We have three adopted children.
What really matters is the role you play, right?
And that is magical.
When we adopted our first two children from Ethiopia, we made a decision to do this.
And when you adopt, there's a point where you move from this being hypothetical to being this being real okay.
And the way this worked for us was that we were shown pictures of these children who we could adopt.
And of course, once you're in on it, like you're all in, you're not really making a choice.
I'm not sure.
They said, you know, we called up the agency.
We said we were ready to go.
And they said, how about these?
And they put a picture up for us.
And when we were first making this decision, it was hypothetical.
And the pictures look different to us.
Our kids have come from very, very hard places in life.
You don't end up in an orphanage, another part of the world, unless you've come through hard places.
They had come through very hard places.
They were in the second and third percentile in the WHO heightened weight charts.
They were in tough shape.
As soon as Jen and I said, yeah, we can do this.
I so vividly remember this.
They just looked.
They just, they looked more, you just felt more love.
They looked different the second we decided, yes, this is it, here we go, we have committed.
And then, once you bring people into your family anybody who's done this knows The huge effect is your dad or your mom.
And that's what matters.
We will sometimes.
I don't know if your family has done this, but I will sometimes very gently note to people.
They will sometimes talk to me as another father of my kids, and not my kids, right.
As if the biological and adopted children are different.
I very try to gently say, they are all our children and you don't feel different.
So I think what's interesting, not as if there is there any subtle difference that's left is how almost completely imperceptible or completely imperceptible it actually is.
And that's what makes us remarkable as human beings. that we can do that.
There is no other species we know of that does that kind of thing, that loves beyond their kin in the way that we can.
In fact, it's led to a total reshaping in many ways of the field of economics even.
Economists believe that humans are fundamentally self-interested.
They only care about themselves.
The only rub is when you actually look at the data.
People are just a lot nicer to each other than standard models of economics would predict.
We give money away to charity.
We give away kidneys to random strangers.
We care.
Like, if I give you 10 in an experiment and tell you you can divide it with another person however you want, you can keep all of it, give none of it, give it all away.
The standard prediction from economic theory is you'll be purely self-interest.
You won't care anything about this person you know nothing about.
You'll give them nothing.
That's not what real people do.
They give something, 30%, 50%, typically depending on the context that you're in.
And that's the thing that I think is remarkable in this particular case.
Not is there any bit left of this biological hardwiring, but how much of it is about the role that you play and how much our love for another, our ability to connect with another person, is a function of the role that we play in their lives.
Incredible example that the moment you made the decision you and your wife made the decision that these were the children you were going to adopt that your visual perception of them changed.
They looked different.
Yeah.
It's almost like two circuits merged in that moment.
And I can attest from a parallel experience, although I'm not the parent of this family member, that you never there's, it's an instant, and you never go back.
There's never a reconsideration.
That you know, and I think some people assume that.
Like well, in especially hard times, you know it's actually, it kind of just leaves the room.
Like the question of, it's a fascinating and reassuring aspect of our brainwiring.
Other people might imagine that you think this.
It just doesn't.
You're just a parent.
That's it.
Wild.
And very cool.
It is very cool.
And I think an underappreciated aspect of our sociality is how much... And we often... We kind of take it for granted.
You know, people are mean to each other.
Yeah, yeah.
People can be mean to each other.
But we also love each other way beyond what we should in some way, based on just pure kinship, relationships and biological offspring, would predict we would
And that's because we're highly social.
We got to cooperate with each other in order to get along successfully in life.
And so we've got these really hardwired kind of circuitry to care and love and connect with each other when we try.
What I'm about to describe might be different now, but a good portion of my family's in South America.
And I'll never forget when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I went down there and I went out with my cousins to a bar.
It was like a club, right?
And it was so interesting because They spoke to their friends.
We met up with their friends there.
People danced, people drank, did all the things that we were also doing back in California.
But there was no communication with other people at this club or this bar that they didn't already know.
This may have changed, but then and there, the culture was one where you go out with the people you already know and you have a really good time, but people weren't exchanging numbers, hitting on people, looking at other people crossing.
There were these little pipes pockets across the room.
So it wasn't this idea that oh, when you go out in public you go to a club or you drink or something you might meet somebody else.
There wasn't a fear of other people.
That wasn't the reason you go out.
You go out to see your friends.
And the interesting thing also was that many of these friendships had been lifelong friendships.
So in some sense, I wonder, is this one version of how humans evolved?
Because we always think about this village of like 100 people.
You know, Bob Sapolsky talks about this.
And, you know, we evolved in these cultures of 100 or 200 folks.
And you knew everyone and everyone's in each other's business.
And that's how our species evolved.
At the same time, we evolved.
We have different examples of sociology.
And that strangers weren't around as much.
Yeah.
That was the idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's hard to say.
I don't know.
Certainly today, if you look around the world, there is, and always has been, some anxiety about connecting with strangers.
And it can vary depending on where you are.
There's some places where there's more sociability than in others.
But there's always been some anxiety about the other. the one you don't know, right?
Because you don't know necessarily if I can trust you or not at this moment, whether that comes from our evolutionary heritage or not, or just unfamiliar with anything right.
So if you give me something to drink here, I don't know what's in it.
I'm going to be a little... nervous.
I want to find out before I drink it.
If I trust you, I'll drink it.
But if I don't, I'm not so sure.
I'm going to want to see what's in there first.
There's always some anxiety about the unknown or uncertainty.
And it could be a lot of stuff about strangers.
A reluctance to connect with other people, a desire to keep with the folks who we already know, comes simply from that, which also would apply to non-human interactions too, or non-human objects as well.
We just like what's familiar, because we know it and we trust it and we're comfortable with it as a result,
Everything else by comparison is a little bit riskier.
I can't say I'm particularly outgoing or not, but I was taught manners that had me ask how people's day was going.
Like if I'm checking out the grocery store, it's like, how's your day going?
And I'm interested.
Like, it's not just an icebreaker or something.
Like, how's your day going?
And you hold the door for people.
You say please and thank you.
I think a lot of people assume that manners equates to small talk, equates to superficial and that it's all a bunch of fluff, that it's not about deep connection.
But when I'm moving through the checkout line at Whole Foods, I don't have a lot of options.
If I say nothing, okay, these days no one would notice.
They could be on their phone.
No one would call that abnormal.
If I say, how's your day going?
And they go, pretty good.
If I say, what'd you do before you got here?
That's getting a little bit further down the line right, if I say, like what's the hardest thing that ever happened to you?
They're going to look at me like I'm crazy, right?
So what I wonder is, when we talk about manners and etiquette, which I believe there's been a real kind of erosion of at the level of kind of what is standard right.
For whatever reason.
We just don't have an etiquette everyone follows.
It used to be all men wore jackets and ties or at least ties to work.
I mean, now you show up in whatever, right?
I do think that as manners have become less common, or common manners have become less common, that the opportunities for casual, low-level exchange have evaporated.
And so there's less of a stepping stone to deeper exchange.
Yeah.
So I would think about manners kind of as habits, right?
That's kind of what they are.
And some sensibilities about other people being kind and decent to other people.
But Understanding how those manners might be affecting day-to-day behavior is a little bit tricky.
So one of the things, for instance, we find in a lot of public spaces people are reluctant to engage with other people because they don't want to interrupt.
They don't want to be impolite.
There's a version of that that is about manners, right?
And we have...
Sometimes we're getting signals of that.
Tech gives us signals that somebody doesn't want to be bothered, perhaps like we put earbuds in or we look at our phone right.
And so some of that could be coming from what you might think of as manners.
In the UK, for instance.
One of the reasons we find just well just this true in the US too, but even a little more so in the UK there's this Norm of politeness that I it's not okay for me to get into your business.
In Japan, it's even stronger, right?
I don't want to, and that's seen as being polite, right?
In those contexts.
I am with you though, that this general norm of saying hello or hi to people has gotten diminished a little bit, in part because people, I think, are getting out of the habit, because you've got these phones on you all the time.
But I think it's a little trickier.
It's a little harder to say maybe that manners have eroded because they're complicated out in the world.
Stuff that looks like could be a lack of manners in one context could, in people's own minds, be.
No, I'm being polite to you by not interrupting.
It's tricky.
Yeah, I mean I hear from a lot of podcast listeners that the challenges with you know, finding a romantic partner nowadays center largely around people not wanting to be seen as creepy, but also people not wanting strangers to talk to them.
So there's a little bit of an impasse right now.
I also hear from people who wonder why guys aren't asking them out just kind of randomly, or asking them for a coffee or for a number or something like that.
I think there's a lot of fear right now is what I hear.
And that fear is probably, well, it certainly is on both sides.
You know, you said you had an in-depth conversation with your Uber driver on the way over here.
I mean, it used to be that I would get into deep conversations on airplanes.
It just seems like we're stuck in this capsule.
I did last night coming out to talk to you.
The only downside being sometimes, if your neck is turned to one side, you can get off that plane with a stiff neck.
But in all seriousness, so are you...
One, to just open up conversation with people at random.
In part because we got to go back a long way to start at the beginning of our research, but I'll keep this simple.
I've interpreted reaching out and connecting with other people differently.
We find in our work that people underestimate how interested others are in engaging with them.
So you're sitting next to somebody on a plane or on a train and people if you're not already talking, you assume this person doesn't want to talk to you.
But that person is more likely to say they're interested in talking to you than you would guess.
But if you've got two people that aren't talking to each other?
This gets back to our earlier conversation, how I can use somebody's behavior as a guide to their thoughts.
In this case making a mistake.
I can infer you're not interested in talking to me.
If you're not, and you could be thinking well, Nick's not talking to me.
He's not interested in it either.
We can both then sit there, both be interested in talking to each other, but nobody's saying a word, because we misunderstand what silence is like.
Or we assume that people don't want to have meaningful conversations, when in fact most people say that's actually what they want.
So I've adopted a different way to think about manners here, in a way that I think attends more to both my own wellbeing and the person who I'm connecting with.
I think about social connection as an opportunity or an invitation to connect with somebody.
And to your point about fear.
We find over and over again people are overly pessimistic, overly afraid about how positively other people will respond to them when you reach out to them in a positive way.
So like with the Uber driver on the way here today, I just, he was Iranian.
I asked him, how do you feel about the war?
Can you tell me about it?
And it was clear that I was not wanting some superficial I cared.
I was taking an interest in him.
And he recognized I was taking an interest in him.
And he responded by taking an interest then in me and feeling comfortable sharing.
And he shared that his son died in a protest in Iran and that he had been imprisoned in Iran.
I mean, we were crying, but together at the end of that ride, it was 23 minutes to get here.
The fact that you're able to connect for a short while, I'm assuming you didn't exchange numbers.
You're not going to be in touch.
No, no.
Yeah.
So the point is not to create a lasting relationship.
The point is to connect.
To make that moment better.
Yeah.
I mean, I think actually this is a really important way to rethink. how you think about wellbeing.
Wellbeing is not just about the intense, you know, the really impactful moments in your life.
Happiness and wellbeing is a little more like a leaky tire.
Like you just got to keep pumping it up because you adapt to things, right?
You go on this amazing trip, you know, to out into the beautiful Sonoran Desert or something, right?
And that's great.
You come back the next day and then you got traffic coming to work and that sucks.
And you're right back to where you were before.
It doesn't last.
I mean, nothing really lasts for that long.
Obviously relationships can last, but moments come and go, right?
And what that means, I think, for our wellbeing is that we wanna start paying attention to creating Good moments, right.
Positive moments that can lift us up and the people around us as well.
And you can take.
I could have gone 23 minutes here to talk with you today and had a perfectly boring ride.
Or I could have heard one of the most amazing stories about somebody's life where he opens his heart up to me in this car ride in 23 minutes and made that 23 minutes way better.
And connect with another human being more deeply than you might imagine would be possible in that short time and make that moment better.
My day is better because that moment was better.
And if you start thinking about happiness and connection in terms of moments rather than some sort of illusion of some lasting, long-term impact, well then you start seeing opportunities that connect all over the place.
On my plane flight in last night, did that.
In the grocery store, store checkout.
You got an opportunity.
I now keep an eye out.
I just pay attention.
I take an interest in other people.
The research that I've done here on social connections fundamentally changed the way that I live my life.
I take an interest in other people, so I notice stuff that I didn't used to notice.
I'll throw out compliments, any kind thought I will share with somebody.
I just don't have anxiety about that.
Keep moving on.
If I'm passing, I'll shout out, like this morning, I got breakfast at the hotel I was at.
Guy's wearing a killer hat.
I'm walking by.
Hey, man, I love your hat.
That's awesome.
I'm walking by.
He says, I love it too.
And I just kept going.
But that moment was a little brighter.
And what's a good day if not to string along a few good moments?
And what's a good week if not to string along a few days that have some good moments in them?
And what's a good month, a good year?
A good life.
It's about those moments.
And we got lots of those moments.
And if we start thinking about them in terms of opportunities to connect, to be decent to another person, in a way that'll really use the skill we have to connect with other people instead of being held back by misplaced fear, changes the way you live your life.
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Yeah, I'm listening to you and I'm thinking.
Some of the best moments of my life and I've had many many are really at this kind of level of in passing.
You know you mentioned like in my mind I was saying like never underestimate the good feeling that comes from like a good fist bump with someone that you exchange no words with.
And I live in a very crowded area.
And so I don't go out much.
But when I do, occasionally I just pass someone on the sidewalk and you just like, put out a fist and like, and you feel a kinship.
The other day also, I have a very niche, but very, deep relationship to a certain genre of music.
So just like walking down the boardwalk and someone goes, someone like shouted out I was wearing a Minor Threat shirt.
I'm a big Ian McKay fan, Minor Threat, Fugazi.
And someone goes, Minor Threat.
And I go, Minor Threat.
I don't even know where they were.
I'm dating myself here by saying that, but still amazing band, right?
No matter how old you are, check it out.
But you feel a kinship to other members of your species that way.
I don't know who these people are.
It's interesting.
It's a whole other level of human connection that I hadn't thought of.
And as with manners and etiquette and that kind of superficial small talk piece, I kind of assumed that this stuff didn't matter.
That it was kind of like, ah, well, okay, that's like, that's not nourishment.
That's not a nice like elk steak or a beautiful vegetable spread.
That's the...
That's like a, that's like a cracker, you know, but the comparison isn't fair because ultimately, like you said, our life is a series of moments and the feeling that our species has a kinship that isn't based on anything else.
There was no exchange of money or opportunities or any of that is pretty awesome.
We're connected.
We're in this together in some way.
There's a hypothesis that many of my PhD students and postdocs over the years have suggested that we've talked about, but we have never figured out a way to actually test it.
But some sense that when you interact with a stranger a member of a group of some kind, But a stranger is a good example.
It doesn't just make you feel connected to that person.
It kind of changes your sense of connection to like the entire group.
Like you just feel a little better about humanity when you see that moment.
Like you deliver a compliment to somebody.
I was walking down the sidewalk.
Just a little bit ago on my way to the train, there was a woman standing next to a car.
She just had these awesome red glasses on.
They just look fabulous.
And I said to her while we're going by, I love those glasses.
You are killing it today.
And she took them off.
Almost it didn't, she wasn't gonna cry, but she stopped and she said thank you so much for telling me that I really needed that today.
I had met her in a moment where she had a bad day.
And my sense is she just felt uplifted, just like by people in general, by the world, just had a more favorable view of what the world was like, a different view of what human nature was like in that moment than you otherwise would have had.
Yesterday on my train ride into University of Chicago, before I got on a flight to come here, to see you Sit down next to a young man on the train.
He's got his earbuds in looking at his phone.
You know, easy stereotype young man disconnected from the world.
I sit down.
I sat right next to him.
I said, hi.
I reached out.
I'm Nick.
I had to shake a hand.
He came back with a fist bump rather than a handshake.
But then he took out his right earbud.
And I started talking to him.
I said, you know, what are you up to today?
What are you going into town for?
And he said well, I'm going to this culinary program downtown.
And what was so crystal clear right away was how proud he was that he was doing this.
He'd come from LA actually, and he was just started getting into this training program, this trade school, to get him into this culinary union where he's gonna work as a chef or maybe for a hotel or a big restaurant.
He pulled out his book, his little three ring binder that had his lessons for it.
I actually took a picture of it.
I have a son who's entering a trade program right now.
I've never seen him happier in his life than when he's doing this.
And he was flipping through showing me what they were doing today.
He was just so proud of what he was doing, so ready to talk with me about this.
His name was Gustavo, delightful young man.
And I remember leaving that conversation just like feeling better about my kids.
It's just about kids in general.
Like here's a kid who's really trying to make it.
And that felt good, not just about this young man Gustavo, who I felt fortunate to spend 30 minutes that made that 30 minutes much better but kind of uplifting about the entire category that he was from.
And what's interesting is how easy it is to your point about manners, say, to avoid that.
How to fear.
He doesn't want to talk to me.
He's not that interested in having a meaningful conversation with me.
He doesn't want to go there, right?
But in fact, that's the thing we're all dying for.
It's super interesting.
I'd never thought about this aspect of social dynamics.
Yes, manners.
Both my parents are very polite.
They taught us to be polite.
My girlfriend comes from the South, so she's like very polite.
Like manners are like a big thing.
And she's a genuinely kind person.
That's why I think people hear like manners and kindness and they think oh, like it's fake.
But it's not.
It's a real...
It's part of the social fabric.
Not that I'm the data point that matters, but I assure anyone who aspires to be a public-facing person, the thing you give up when you're a public-facing person is this
Oh, really?
Yeah, it's interesting.
And for somebody like me, it's compensated for by the other things you gain, right?
But that disappears, right?
Not with everyone, right?
But it disappears and so i'm as you're saying this i actually realized i like have a little bit of nostalgia about like just being able to like go out and interact with people and sometimes it happens but a lot of times that things revert back to to the podcast or things like which i really love i love it when people roll up and have questions and everyone knows me that like i'll give a podcast right there if someone has a question I'm gonna give an answer.
Sit down for two hours, please.
Well, I mean, I'm genuinely interested in them.
I'll be like, where are you from?
What's your name?
I'm genuinely interested.
I'm not asking it like to deflect.
I'm really interested.
But the anonymous brief exchange that reinforces our and their understanding.
It's not like a belief.
It's like an understanding.
It's a feeling that we're part of the same species.
And that is an incredibly powerful and reinforcing thing.
I think, I mean, especially for me, I'm very affiliative.
I can't imagine and I'll just table this possibility that there are some people who are not as affiliative.
You know, I know one or two people, whose names I won't mention, who don't really.
It's not that they dislike people, but unless it's their family, they're not really interested in other people.
They're just not.
And I can't say that they're unhappy.
They like their family.
They like their books.
They like their movies.
And we could say that they would be better off if they, you know, were different.
But they don't seem to really... like other people.
They don't dislike them, but they've got their people and then there's everyone else.
And the idea that, like they would interact with these other people except in professional circumstances, I think to them is kind of foreign.
But I'm making a lot of assumptions here too.
So you can find situations where everybody seems to act that way.
Like on my train coming into Chicago every morning where nobody's talking with each other.
It looks like nobody cares about other people.
They don't have any interest in talking to other people.
In those kinds of situations, when you ask people to connect with somebody else, Everybody kind of gets lifted up.
If you look across say, introversion and extroversion, a common hypothesis is that extroverts get their energy and their enjoyment from connecting with other people, whereas folks who are more introverted get their energy and enjoyment from keeping to themselves right.
That's what they want.
The data just don't support that.
So this we've known for a long time.
So extroversion is correlated with wellbeing, with happiness.
Going back to 1980, one of the very first papers that ever, one of the very first studies that ever tested is personality related to wellbeing.
An easy hypothesis is no, it's not.
It can't be because, right, people get what they want out of their lives, right?
And everybody's equally happy because You know, extroverts connect with other people.
They reach out.
They care about other people.
Introverts don't care as much about other people or they have other preferences to keep to themselves or have deeper, meaningful conversations.
Right.
But everybody's getting what they want.
So theoretically, there should be no correlation at all between personality and well-being.
And that just isn't true.
Correlation between happiness, positive affect day to day and extroversion is 05.
That's huge.
That is big.
That's like the correlation between the heights of fathers and sons.
That is a big correlation, right?
It's a little weaker with things like satisfaction with life.
It's a little more like 0.3, but that correlation is big and it shows up around the world.
In 1996, Ed Diener, one of the founding figures in the science of happiness or well-being, stated the foundational result in personality science is that extroversion is correlated with well-being or happiness.
The more outgoing and extrovert you are, the more you connect with others, the happier you are.
Lots of reasons why that could be.
There's a third variable.
Maybe extroverts are just happier than introverts to begin with, say.
But it raises this question.
Maybe it's something about how the choices they're making, the habits they're developing, how they're actually behaving.
And so that makes an easy prediction that, well...
What happens if we just ask people to reach out and connect more with other people, to act a little more extroverted?
Does it affect their wellbeing?
Could this be like a wellbeing intervention?
And it turns out it is.
Will Fleece, a psychologist at Wake Forest University, was one of the very first people to do this.
Half-hour lab study asked people to act more extroverted or more introverted.
When people acted more extroverted, they reported feeling more positive in that experiment.
When you asked people to act more introverted, they felt less positive, regardless of where they fell on this personality scale to begin with.
Over the course of a person's day.
Extroverts and introverts report feeling better alike when they're spending time with other people than when they're alone.
You ask both to spend more time connecting with other people being extroverted over the course of a day, a week or more.
Sonja Lubomirsky, a psychology professor at UC Riverside, has done some of the best research on this.
Over the course of two weeks You shift the positive affect meter up across the entire extroversion scale when people are connecting with others, compared to when they're acting introverted.
I think what differs here between the folks you're describing, who don't seem to get along well with others or like other people, or don't seem to care as much about other people, and folks who do, are the habits that they have developed.
A little like exercise, I think, is the way to think. think about it.
Some of us choose to exercise a lot.
You choose to exercise a lot, clearly.
I don't like- You're a former athlete.
I'm a former athlete.
You played football and you wrestled competitively.
Basketball, sorry.
Basketball and football, yeah.
No, I avoided wrestling because I wanted my ears to keep looking good.
Yeah, your ears look good.
Yeah, but I struggle to find the time for it.
So I don't choose to exercise as much as I should now, right?
But we all would feel better if we exercised a little more, regardless of what our habits are.
So what the data on this suggests is that Yeah, if people open themselves up a little bit more to other people try to reach out and connect in positive ways with other people.
The porcupines in our lives are not making themselves happier by keeping their quills out and keeping to themselves.
They're not living quite as good a life as they could live if they chose to live a little differently.
Now, whether they choose to or not, whether you exercise or not is not necessarily a moral virtue.
Somebody doesn't exercise, you can't say you have to exercise.
But if you wanted to lift your life up a little bit, reach out and engage a little more often, as what the data suggests, regardless of where you are on that spectrum.
I realize it's not your specific area of work, but what about for people with social anxiety?
I mean, my first impulse is to say, as long as you have the resources and the time, get a dog.
I'm not a big fan of dog parks for all sorts of health reasons.
But when I lived in San Diego, I would take my bulldog mastiff puppy to the dog park.
I made lots of friends.
He made friends.
A dog is better than bumming a cigarette, which nobody does anymore, right?
Tons of people that way.
So what's interesting about that is that creates like an excuse to have a conversation.
Right.
Well, I'm not suggesting anyone do this, but in the old days you would ask for a cigarette and you would then smoke side by side with somebody and you'd talk.
And sometimes there was a romantic interest.
Sometimes it was just a friendly interest, but you shared a brief experience.
Yes. got some nicotine in your system, which no doubt affected it.
And they gave something to you, right?
So they shared resources with you.
And so there's trust that's being.
Yeah, that was a very common mode of exchange until about People really stopped doing that kind of in the mid-90s is when smoking really dropped off.
So what's interesting about that?
I think those tokens the dog or the cigarette are serving to work our way around our anxiety a little bit that we have about connecting with other people.
I don't think they're necessary.
They're not necessary, but they do help to get around that anxiety.
But to people who have social anxiety, it's a painful thing, of course, and it's hard.
We all have it to some extent are nervous about reaching out and engaging with other people in varying degrees.
Some of that just being a function of how often we do it.
When I was in graduate school, for instance, I was terrified of public speaking.
Before my first job interview, which is my fourth year of graduate school at Princeton.
I got super lucky to get this job interview.
I was terrified.
Because you seem so facile with it now.
Now I am.
Now I am, right?
This is 25 years of practice and experience and exposure.
And if you have social anxiety disorder and you want to take care of it, this is something psychologists clinicians, can really take care of.
There are lots of things that as psychologists we can't really deal with.
Behaviorally, social anxiety is something we really can help people with.
For this book A Little More Social that I just wrote.
I had a conversation with the guy who is responsible for really developing exposure therapy to treat anxiety disorder.
Stefan Hoffman is his name.
Essentially, the strategy is very simple.
If you are afraid of talking with a stranger or having a deep conversation, the way to get over that is not to simulate it or to imagine.
It's not like you get up and you give a pretend speech.
That's what psychologists were doing for years.
It doesn't work because it's still pretending.
It's You're not a real audience.
It has to be real.
And that was Stefan Hoffman's.
Real innovation is you send people out in the world and to do the thing for real.
You're worried about getting rejected.
Go out and start asking people for help.
And you'll learn that your fear is misplaced, that you get accepted more often than you might guess.
Exposing people to that fear thing that they're anxious of.
When the belief is misplaced and with social anxiety, it is usually wildly misplaced.
That's what we find over and over again is a mistaken barrier to connecting with other people.
That then, that's how you ease that social anxiety and get rid of it.
Now, exposure therapy doesn't work for everything.
If you're afraid of bullets, right?
You're afraid of getting shot by bullets, right?
Repeated exposure to being shot by bullets is not gonna make you less afraid of that.
That's gonna be one trial learning and that's gonna be the end of it.
But when your fears are misplaced, like it is with social stuff, Exposure is what takes care of it.
Not because you dull your anxiety so much.
It's because you change your beliefs about what other people are like.
You learn, oh wait, other people are nicer than I think.
When I say hi to somebody, they tend to say hi back.
When I take an interest in somebody, they tend to take an interest in me.
When I ask somebody for a cigarette, and they have one, they tend to give me one when I ask for it.
And it makes this nice conversation.
Changes your beliefs.
That's why exposure therapy works.
That's really interesting bit surprising.
I completely believe it as you say it but that exposure therapy doesn't reduce your anxiety per se.
It changes your beliefs about how other people are going to react, which indirectly feeds back and changes how you feel.
Let me give you a story about somebody who I got connected to a little bit while I was writing this book.
Jia Jiang is his name.
And Jia lives up in the Bay Area.
Well, at least he did at the time.
I think that's still where he is.
He was an aspiring entrepreneur.
You can find him at rejectiontherapy.com, which is his website where he put this-
He's got all these videos.
They're amazing.
He decided he was an aspiring entrepreneur, but he was afraid of rejection.
And he decided he was going to cure himself of this fear of rejection by subjecting himself to exposure therapy.
And he'd heard of this, that you do this for a month, right?
The Stefan Hoffman work.
He's gonna try to make some outlandish request every day for a month and get rejected every day.
But because his anxiety was so bad, he needed more than a month.
He needed 100 days.
So he was a hundred days in a row.
He was gonna ask somebody some ludicrous request so that he would get rejected.
And then he was gonna develop thick skin, right?
He was gonna become immune to rejection.
He was gonna toughen himself up.
He was gonna desensitize himself, okay?
First day he goes up to a security guard and he videotapes all these so you can find these online.
They're beautiful.
He goes up to somebody at a bank like a security guard outside of a bank, and he asks him can I borrow 100 from you?
And the security guard says, that's not how this works, buddy.
And so Jian walks away, ah, success.
I got rejected, but then he says, but it actually wasn't that bad, right?
He thought the rejection was gonna be harsh, right?
Middle fingers blazing, swear words coming, somebody punched him in the face, whatever.
He thought it was gonna be harsh.
It wasn't that bad.
By the third day, he starts to fail.
He goes into a Krispy Kreme donut store in Atlanta.
Goes up to the desk.
A woman named Jackie Braun is kind of managing the shift there that day.
She comes up and he comes to the counter and he says can I get Krispy Kreme donuts in the shape of the Olympic rings?
Shape and color of the Olympic rings.
And he's thinking, oh, they're going to say, we don't do that here.
And instead Jackie sits down, gets in her thinker pose and starts drawing on a piece of paper what the Olympic rings are.
What colors are they?
We don't know.
They're trying to figure this out.
So just wait a minute.
Jia goes and sits down.
15 minutes later, she comes out with a box of donuts, a little sheepishly because she thought she could have done better.
And there are these Olympic rings that are amazing.
The voiceover on his video is something to the effect of, and this is why humanity is worth saving.
Over the course of his hundred days, he doubles up a few days.
He ends up with like 106 requests.
We, Don Lyons, who was my lab manager at the time, went through and evaluated all of those requests that he posted.
And we just asked how often was he actually rejected?
Walks up to a house in Texas and asks the guy at the house would you take a picture of me playing soccer in your backyard?
Yeah.
Yes is the answer.
There he's playing soccer.
He walks up to a Southwest Airlines gate.
He's getting on the plane.
He says, can I do the security briefing at the beginning?
It says, well, you can't do that, but you can address the entire plane if you want.
So there he is standing in front of the entire plane addressing this plane, right?
He goes to another airport, a private airport, never flown a plane in his life.
He asks, Can I co-pilot a plane?
Can I do that?
Yeah, he does.
He gets it done.
Walks up to a woman's house.
He's got a potted rose, pink rose.
Can I plant this in your front yard?
Oh, I love roses.
You bet.
Put it right there.
He actually is rejected less often than he is accepted.
And we coded the videos for how negative they are.
Mostly not negative at all.
Only about seven out of those hundred times.
Is there any negativity whatsoever?
And if anything, it's just slight.
Sometimes people can't do it, right?
So he's accepted 51 times, if I remember right, and rejected 48 times.
And then there are a few that are ambiguous, where he can't do the thing he asked for, but they do something else.
But out of all those, only a few times is there any negativity.
And when I was talking to him about this, he said I went into this thinking I was going to develop thicker skin.
I lost my fear of rejection, but it was because I changed how I think about other people.
Other people are way kinder than I expect.
And he talked about this now, this belief he has as being a kind of superpower.
Because he realizes that if you ask people for help, they are much more interested in trying to help you than you'd imagine.
That's why exposure to mistaken beliefs, like our social anxiety works, because you learn that your beliefs are wrong.
But if you never test them, you never find out you'd be wrong.
How persistent was he?
For instance, if he asked a question and the person said listen, you can't come to my backyard and play soccer, but maybe the front yard would he say backyard please?
Or if they said no outright, would he push?
He wasn't that persistent in these things.
And this Gia's experience is very consistent with what we find in the research literature as well.
There's a phenomena Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bones Frank is at Stanford, Vanessa is at Cornell both fabulous researchers documented this phenomenon known as the underestimation of compliance effect, which is you ask people to predict what percentage of people, or how many people will agree to some request and the very robust tendency is that they overestimate how many people they'll have to ask in order to get some number to agree to a request.
People are just much more likely to agree than you think.
We find in our research that not only are they more willing to agree to the request, they also feel much better when they agree to help you than you would guess.
You ask somebody to take a picture of you down along the boardwalk in LA, right?
You think you're pestering somebody, right?
You're being a burden to them.
They're usually happier to have helped you, because we are happier when we are being kind to other people.
So Jia's result is consistent with all of this work.
In his videos, he was not that persistent, but he would often accept other alternatives.
So he goes into Costco one time, goes up to the manager he says I love Costco, it's just my favorite store.
Can I go on the intercom and tell the entire store how much I love Costco and how fabulous I think you all are?
And the manager says well, I can't let you do that, but we can go get lunch over here at the pizza shop that's in Costco and we can spend some time talking.
And so he comps him a lunch and he gets a free lunch out of it.
That's what he does.
And like on the Southwest Airlines thing, he couldn't do the security briefing, but he could just address the whole plane flight, which is what he did.
So he would accept those.
And those were the few cases where it wasn't outright accepted.
But if he got a no, he said, thank you.
And that was it.
I don't want to give anyone social anxiety because you just provided a wonderful, or I don't want to discourage anyone from doing what you just described, because it's a really both entertaining and beautiful example of the goodness of humanity really being a fundamental feature of most-.
Surprisingly.
So it's not the case that everybody's always nice to you.
Of course not.
But it tends to go, he thought he'd be rejected a hundred days in a row.
He wasn't.
You have data.
I just have an anecdote.
So the fact that I'm going to tell you that a piece of that anecdote comes from a neurologist does not mean it has any more validity than, and maybe even less.
That was a joke against my neurology.
I have great jokes about neurologists.
By the way, I could do an entire podcast about the jokes against the different divisions of medicine.
Maybe I'll do that sometime.
We should do that, Rob.
The, uh, So I had a postdoc advisor.
Unfortunately, he passed, but that's not the point here.
He was a neurologist and he was an extremely friendly person.
His name was Ben Barris.
He used to walk down the hall.
He'd say, hi to the janitors.
He'd say he was always very good about bringing things to the admins up front.
You and I both know they are underpaid.
Yeah.
Yes.
At all universities.
They are true.
People always say, oh, all the administrators.
Like, well, you got high level administrators.
I'm not going to comment on what they make.
I don't know.
But all the administrators at the level of, like the front office, et cetera, they're underpaid, they're overworked.
He was just an extremely kind person.
He was very outgoing.
But he was a neurologist. in addition to being a scientist.
And he pointed something out, which was that there would be some people that he would interact with on campus, and we were adjacent to the hospital, so this plays in who you'd be friendly to.
Like, hey, how's it going?
And they say, hey, what do you do here?
And you'd say, oh well, we work on neuronal glial interactions.
Activity-dependent development of myelination.
And they go, oh, cool.
Like, what's that?
And you'd have a little exchange and then move on.
Great.
Healthy.
They're learning.
They realize academics aren't just trying to hide their information, no matter how busy they are.
Somebody just taking time out of their busy pace to stop and have an interaction with you.
This is something that I grew up observing in my mom and it's something that I just naturally do and enjoy.
So it's a lot of what you described before.
But I'll never forget Ben once telling me, he said, see this guy coming down the hall?
He's sticky.
And I said, what's sticky?
And he said that's neurologist.
Speak for the person that takes that kind of casual exchange and makes the assumption that you're a lot closer than you actually are.
And as somebody with a sister, you know you grow up hearing stories of like you know you hear through the wall.
You know like oh some, like you know, good looking guy asked for a number, excited about that.
But some other guy, like he was pretty persistent and like he wouldn't go away.
We're not talking about full stalker situation, that exists too.
So I think a lot of social anxiety comes from some people just don't know where the line is between normal healthy, casual social exchange and being too sticky.
And this takes us back to the eyes.
I'll never forget freshman year of college, forgive me for weaving in a second anecdote.
I had a roommate.
We were triple room but I had a roommate And feedback from people around us they're like what's wrong with your roommate?
I'm like, what do you mean?
He's like a perfectly nice guy.
Like he's super nice.
And they're like, no, he stares at people.
And I thought Oh, and he was very, very tall, you know, and I'm reasonably tall, but he was like really, really tall.
And so I started noticing when we would stand in groups, he would just like beam people.
And so I pulled him aside and I said, hey, listen, Dave, you can't stare at people.
He goes, I'm just looking at them.
And I'm like, I know, but you can't stare at people.
You're creeping people out.
And he goes, okay, where should I look?
Now he might've been a little bit on the spectrum.
I don't know.
We didn't have that language or understanding about spectrum back then.
But I explained to him, I was like, just keep your gaze moving and stop it.
And we all loved him, and he became part of our social circle.
But in those first weeks, he was a little bit, he was giving people an uneasy feeling.
So I think for a lot of people who have social anxiety, their concern is that they're going to be perceived as kind of creepy or sticky, and no one wants to be that person.
And so it is an art.
It is a learning to understand that, like a fist bump is one thing, but just because you see that person again the next day, you remember their name.
You're not best friends and you're not even really friends.
You're being friendly.
And I'm not trying to contaminate the positive waters here, but I think a lot of people don't know how to develop this skill as a honed skill and they're really afraid.
And I think it's not about someone calling the police because somebody's being too sticky Yeah, like if somebody doesn't call you back, like they probably don't want you to ping them a third time, right?
Or text you again.
And I think a lot of it always seems to sort of immediately deflect to like men doing this to women.
I can tell you a lot of women do this too.
So it's independent of sex, right?
If somebody doesn't respond a third time and it was a first time meeting and regardless of what the exchange was translation they don't want to continue the exchange for whatever reason.
And so how do you reconcile that in when giving advice for people to be more outgoing?
How do you keep people from being sticky?
I guess there's another way to think about it too.
Is that a lot of sensitivity or concern about social anxiety is about running into sticky people?
And there I think there probably is a gender difference, a sex difference, that women are likely to be more nervous about men misinterpreting something in a way that might become problematic or threatening for them.
Sure, well, because of physical differences.
Exactly.
And so I'm super sensitive to that.
And our data don't suggest that you should be ignoring risks or your senses about what's risky.
But our data suggests that your sense about risk is off a little bit.
And there are times where you might want to test some of those beliefs and you might find some places where you're mistaken.
I think the important thing from my perspective on this is that if you're really pessimistic about other people, it never gets corrected.
You never get to find the great people to have a conversation with, right?
But it does also mean that you will sometimes run into the people who aren't so great to have a conversation with, and you need to learn how to move on from those people, right.
We're not friends with everybody.
Certainly that is true.
The other thing that you mentioned was the importance of this being a skill.
It is something that you learn to do as you practice.
I have become a better conversationalist.
I've become a better public speaker.
I've become better at doing this because I do it for a living.
And I choose to try to do it and try to become better.
And I try to be, when I'm interacting with other people, to be sensitive to them as well.
Our data don't suggest that you should be reaching out to other people in order to make yourself feel good.
Our data suggests that what feels good is when you take an interest in other people and you open them up to you in a way that you would have avoided or missed before.
And you'll just have a lot more positive experiences that way.
But it does mean being sensitive to how they respond.
And you do learn to do this over time with practice, just like anything.
You get better with practice, right?
And so...
For folks who are concerned about starting or trying, my suggestion is, just like when you're starting anything that you're nervous about or you've never exercised.
The prescription is always to start small.
Pick a little thing that's easy and safe.
You know that person in the office who you've seen for years but you don't know their name?
Just go and say hi to them.
Let them see how that goes.
And then try that with somebody else.
Those are easy, those are safe, right?
That's not that difficult.
And you'll get better at this over time, including figuring out how to Do things like end conversations with somebody who's too sticky, or to move along or, like your advisor did, to recognize the person that's sticky.
And then you can manage that a little bit differently.
Those are skills you develop by approaching.
You don't develop them by avoiding.
And you miss a lot of people who are wonderful.
My Uber driver, right?
The young man Gustavo on my train ride yesterday morning.
Brian on my flight here to speak with you today on my plane last night.
You miss a lot of great people too.
And that's what we find in our research that I think is perhaps the bigger cost.
And, just like Jia, found he missed opportunities to get help from other people and even to allow people to feel better for helping him, because he was too afraid to ask.
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A lot of people are on their phones texting with people they already know.
They have an established relationship.
Presumably they're continuing to maintain, if not build those relationships by doing that.
And I think that, going back to this eye gaze thing from earlier, eyes down into a little box, it's a thicker shell to break through right.
Like, I don't think any of us really feel comfortable interrupting somebody texting or on a call.
I mean, I wouldn't do that.
You would think of it as bad manners, impolite.
Yeah, they're clearly in a conversation with somebody else.
The same way, I wouldn't just walk up and interrupt.
Actually, yesterday I was at a social gathering.
There was like three people talking and these guys all knew each other.
I was the stranger in the group.
And like you sort of learn like, what is this?
You have to quickly assess like, what is this conversation?
So I said sorry.
I don't know if I'm interrupting something critical, but if so I'm going to stand right here.
No, I just said, If I'm interrupting, you know, and they're like, no, no, no.
Like you have to be able to know how to break into a conversation.
It's very hard when people are on their phones.
It can be.
The way I think of it is you're giving people an invitation.
I got off the train one morning.
It was this guy. came up behind me.
I remember this very distinctly.
He's a little taller than I was.
So I'm about six foot.
He was probably six foot three.
Looks like an Orthodox monk, right?
He's got this big, long beard, graying beard, long hair.
Looks like the last thing he would want to do is talk to another person a very stern kind of dead off to work face.
And I saw him come up sidle up next to me.
He'd already put his left earbud in and he was putting his right earbud in at the same time, right?
It would have been easy for me to infer that he didn't want to talk to me, right?
But of course, nobody was talking to him either.
Nobody's talking.
And so that signal was a little ambiguous.
What does it mean?
Does he want to talk to me?
It's not clear.
He could be putting his earbud in because nobody's talking to him.
He doesn't think other people want to talk to him.
So he's just going to get off to work, right?
Get away from all these jerks.
I turned to him.
I said, hi, I'm Nick.
Most powerful words you have in your life.
Hi, I'm Nick. whoever you are, I'm Nick.
He took out his earbud and he turned to me and he just like came alive.
Like I was flipping a switch on his back.
Huge smile.
Hi, I'm Thibault.
He turns out he's French, very strong French accent.
We became friends over the years, right?
We walked down to four blocks to my office there.
And so sometimes these cues can be ambiguous and you don't know what the cue means until you test it.
So the way I think about reaching out, to connect with other people, to test our fears, our anxiety, our interpretations of other people, knowing that we can make mistakes with each other, is to think of it as an invitation.
When I turned to Gustavo yesterday Brian last night, my cab driver, my Uber driver this morning I wasn't demanding anything.
I was offering up an opportunity and invitation to connect if they wanted to.
Didn't have to pull their earbud out.
Brian last night had a little video game player in front of him.
I thought maybe he wanted to play video games.
No, he was happy to talk.
We kind of went in and out.
I had a manuscript review I had to do.
But if you start thinking of these opportunities as potential places where you might be misunderstanding somebody and don't take your beliefs about another person for granted but treat them as bets that might be wrong.
Well, then you start to see places where maybe you'd made a mistake and you give people an opportunity to show you know Thibault would have been happy to talk to me and became friends over years just because I was willing to test that initial belief I had, which was mistaken, that he didn't want to talk to me.
And the problem that at least we find over and over again in our social lives is all too often we infer immediately, We have overly pessimistic expectations about how other people will respond to us when we try.
And we just miss opportunities to connect with other people that we could have across the moments of our days weeks months, years of our lives.
That would just enrich our lives in lots of ways.
If we were willing to test those barriers that were keeping us from connecting with other people, to see if are they made out of steel or is it a pasta noodle?
Sometimes they're pasta noodles.
The data I've seen suggests that more and more people are going to church.
They're attending other religious gatherings.
You know, it seems that... In just recent years?
Oh, yeah, it's really on the upswing.
And my guess is there are a number of reasons for that.
People want to meet people with a certain set of values. maybe they are drinking less, who knows?
I think a component of those types of gatherings are that people generally are pretty friendly.
It's pretty inviting.
I mean, people still go to festivals too.
I didn't go, but Coachella was recently.
People tend to be in a good mood at festivals.
I was at TED last week.
Okay.
So a very good example.
Yeah.
So I'm just, you know, we could pepper with different examples and I think it is important to do so.
I didn't want to imply, it was just churches, but these kinds of common gatherings where people are there for their own reasons but also to interact with others, including strangers.
And I think this, in my mind, can be pretty well explained by the fact that people were indoors during the pandemic.
A lot of people were anyway, and everyone's on their phones more and devices.
So attending venues where there's clearly a an impulse towards interacting with strangers.
Actually sauna gatherings are really big in major cities.
You know people not just sitting in a sauna facing out like bleacher on the bleachers, but in around and doing breath work.
So and on and on.
So it's interesting.
I think people really crave this.
Earlier, you talked a little bit about your family and adoption.
And I've heard you say in a previous podcast that you have a child or children who are particularly outgoing, and yeah, so if you're willing i don't um would you share a little bit about that?
It was.
It's a very interesting and, i think, important example into um.
Well, differences among humans, and sometimes we think of differences as good, bad
In this case, it was clearly an example of how some people, by virtue of being more outgoing, having less fear, actually afford themselves and others a uniquely wonderful experience of life.
Yes, yes.
So our youngest daughter, Lindsay, has Down syndrome, and we adopted Lindsay from China.
The research that I've been doing over the last 15 or so years with my collaborators, where we're finding over and over again how overly pessimistic we are about how other people will respond to us when we reach out to connect with them, has just really changed the way I live my life.
It is sometimes hard to take behavioral science research and apply it to individual lives, but in my own life I've seen ways to do this over and over again, by testing some of these barriers and just being more open to reaching out and connect, realizing it's gonna be more positive than I might imagine.
About 10 years ago, my wife.
This is how this all got us to Lindsay in the end, and it came right through our research.
I remember this so vividly.
My wife, we were three months into pregnancy, We had named our daughter Sophie at that point.
We had four kids by that time.
We were open to more life, and Jen was open.
And three months into the pregnancy, we learned our daughter had Down syndrome.
And my response to that was to be very pessimistic.
It was uncertain.
I didn't know how this, I'd never, this was not where my mind was.
I didn't think.
I wasn't thinking that we'd be raising a child when we're in our forties with Down syndrome.
This was gonna be hard.
I know though, how easy it is to misunderstand how you'd respond in a situation you're not in.
And so my wife and I, and I'm not speaking for my wife's thoughts, my wife, Jen is an angel.
She's an amazing human being.
As my college football coach said, when he learned that I was going to ask her to marry me when I was a junior in college, she said Nick.
He said Nick, you're marrying up.
And he was absolutely right about that.
Marrying up.
But for me, I was nervous about this.
We started calling families who were raising kids with Down syndrome, every one of those families, trying to get their perspective, to learn what it would be like to be in the situation we weren't in.
To a person, those families referred to their children with Down syndrome as a blessing.
It was almost like they were reading off of a script.
It was amazing to hear their stories about how their children, who not have much social anxiety, were very open and loving and were like magnets in their family that everybody flocked around.
They just brought joy and love and a broader view of what humanity could do with each other than they'd ever imagined before.
Just enrich their lives, broaden their worldview in ways they couldn't have anticipated was a blessing.
Six months into our pregnancy, Sophie died.
So children with Down syndrome face a much higher risk of miscarriage or stillbirth.
Six months, it was a stillbirth.
July 11th, 2016.
Our daughter died.
It was the worst.
It was horrible.
It was the worst experience in our marriage we had ever had.
We mourned that loss for a good long stretch.
It was about a year.
One morning, I went into the sunroom.
My wife was sitting there.
We had two chairs there.
She was sitting in this chair where she always sits.
And I said, you know, honey, we were...
We were ready to have another baby.
We could do this again.
There are children out there who need parents.
We've adopted two before.
We know how this goes.
We can do this again.
We were ready.
We were in the starting blocks.
We were ready to go.
And she turned to me and she said, would you be open to adopting a child with Down syndrome?
Had not even occurred to me that that was something we could do.
I hadn't thought about it.
My head was not there.
All over again.
I was back where I was three months before, thinking I don't know that we can do this right.
This is gonna be super hard.
And then, If you're a researcher, you do think about your data all the time.
I started thinking again about where we were three months ago, calling all these families who talked about their kids as blessings.
All this data, thousands and thousands of data points.
By this point, as I'm talking to you now, we've run over 30000 people In over 120 experiments, people reaching out to others, documenting ways in which they're underestimating how positively others will respond.
They're making the choice to hold back too often rather than reaching out and engaging, connecting with other people too much.
And here we had this choice right in front of us.
My wife was offering it.
Do we reach out and bring this child into our lives, the stranger?
And I was full of doubt here, all the same kind of doubt.
How would she respond to us?
Our data, though, gave me some courage here, like data-driven courage.
Like, Nick, you are in the same position that all of your participants are in over and over again.
And it gave me courage to go where my wife was.
And to say, yeah, we can do this.
Honey, you and I can do this together.
Now, Jen and I are in a position that's different from lots of other families.
We have resources.
She's a fabulous human being.
We have a strong marriage.
Raising a child with intellectual disability is challenging.
But...
We could do this.
And my data really made me feel comfortable that it wouldn't just be good, it would be surprisingly good.
About a year after that, Jen and I boarded a flight with our four other kids.
We're like a traveling circus show on our way to China.
Folks had not seen a family like ours to adopt Lindsay.
She's two years old.
She was abandoned in China by a woman who we will never meet, whose thoughts we can't you know about how hard this might've been or how little support she had to raise a child like Lindsay.
We don't know.
Lindsay had beautiful brown eyes, relentless smile, despite a really, really hard start in life.
And that was how that started.
And she has been amazing.
She has been flat out amazing.
Not without difficulty.
Raising a child with an intellectual disability is really, really, really hard.
At the same time, she has been what every other family has said that raising a child with Down syndrome would be like a blessing to us in so many ways.
And to watch her go around The world.
I mean, she gets frustrated and she's stubborn and she gets angry at people, but she also lives without the same kind of social anxiety that many of us has.
She has no filter on her hello.
Taking her grocery shopping is super fun.
Goes up and down the aisles.
She says the hello to everybody, everybody.
And it's like, just like with my friend Tebow, who I flipped the switch on his back and he gives this big hello to me.
She flips the switch on so many people's backs.
Their faces light up when she says hello to them.
And she walks around the world this way. open hello to everybody.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
And I think about how close we could have been.
I could have been saying I don't think I can do this because we fail to appreciate just how well things would go when we reach out to love someone.
Bring them into our lives when we could.
And she's amazing.
What an incredible story.
If you don't mind me asking, what is the relationship between your youngest daughter and the other children in your family?
Because you described a beautiful set of examples with people outside your family and obviously you and your wife have an incredible connection to her.
But what is her relationship to the others?
She is the magnet in the family.
I mean, she is the baby.
Everybody is.
You know, if you, if you are in a family with a young, you know a youngest sibling, you all glom around that youngest one.
She is like that too, for the siblings too.
Now it's also hard.
They need some time alone, but they, when you come home and Lindsay is there, I get a hi dad.
That's of a volume that every dad should hear when they come home.
It is wonderful.
The sisters and the brothers all get that, too.
It's great.
It's great.
She is very connected to everybody in a way that I think even the other siblings aren't potentially.
They get older.
They go their own ways.
Right.
Everybody loves Lindsay.
Is it the case that children with Down are given up for adoption more?
I mean, you described a very, what I assume is a somewhat unique situation in China.
You said abandoned, so she was given to an orphanage.
I don't know anything about this, right?
Actually I had a colleague that studied GABA transmission in the brain and down, but I have zero, minus infinity, knowledge of this.
You can adopt a child with Down syndrome today in the United States, and there's a waiting list for these kids in most places.
The other thing that happens, though, is what could have happened to us at three months.
And I think this is more common now, as genetic testing allows you to tell whether your child has any number of different kind of genetic differences.
Diversity on that dimension.
And look, there's some conditions that are just very, very hard to manage or that aren't conducive to life.
Down syndrome is just not one of those.
But many families at that three month period because they're skeptical or pessimistic about how well they can handle this.
They don't know the supports that are available.
They don't realize the strength that they have or the amount of love that they will feel for this child once it becomes yours.
Hardships notwithstanding, it is harder.
No doubt about it will end those pregnancies when, like us, might have found it to be a massive blessing in their lives.
I don't know what to tell people to do with that other than telling our own story.
I think people have strength that they might not realize.
And there are lots of very challenging conditions.
Down syndrome is one that... is not as challenging as you might imagine.
These kids are amazing.
Amazing.
And, you know, our kids are our kids.
And you know even, like you know across as we were talking earlier, whether your kids have come in.
However, kids have come into your life once they're your kids.
I mean, the fact that she has Down syndrome is something that is always kind of on our minds because it governs lots of things we do.
Lindsay's just Lindsay, right?
She's got, she's got her own personality.
She does her own things.
Like the, the intellectual disability is just, is kind of a, becomes almost like a background thing.
It is not what defines her.
She loves playing with dolls and Disney characters.
She loves listening to stories.
She loves reading books with you.
She loves, loves, loves playing on the trampoline and playing in her outdoor kitchen.
She loves playing with the neighbor kids, Demi and Delilah.
They are her closest friends.
She loves all those things.
She has a huge personality, and that's what defines her in our lives day to day, not the diagnosis.
I've only known you a short while and I'm in no position to psychoanalyze you, but I have to assume that something very powerful about you and I'm also assuming about your wife Jen that your very clear, complete lack of shame about the fact that she has down has to be a positive force here in this.
I'm not trying to take anything away from who Lindsay is as an individual, but I don't know if I want to darken the conversation with a contrast story, but I will.
I will.
I won't reveal who this person is, but there's a very, very famous neuroscientist who was pretty well known that he had a son who had epileptic seizures.
I mean, what's the shame in that, right?
But he was ashamed of his son.
He wouldn't bring him to events.
He wouldn't bring them to things.
I'm actually aware of several high level scientists.
And I have to be careful because I don't want to paint a negative view of scientists.
I could tell you a thousand stories about wonderful scientists doing wonderful things for every bad story.
But I remember hearing this and thinking like, This is crazy.
Someone who worked in his lab said yeah, you know he's got a Nobel Prize, but he's incredibly ashamed of his son.
I thought, like, that's nuts.
I have a good friend in the positive side, my good friend Eddie Chang, who's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF and he works on epilepsy.
And like, you can treat various forms of epilepsy.
This wasn't intractable epilepsy.
So I think when parents have a shame about a child's condition, that has to impact the way that the child moves in the world.
I think it's really awesome that there is like zero minus infinity shame detected.
I hear only glowing things and pride.
And I also don't detect any hints of like we're doing this really hard thing and therefore we're amazing.
But like you said, she's just our daughter and we have this relationship.
We're her parents.
She's our daughter.
And like, we're just living life.
Yeah.
Which I think is awesome.
I think it's a real testament to who you are.
And I think it's a real, and your wife and Lindsay.
And I think it's a testament to like, what's possible when we get out of like, what do people think?
It just seems like all goodness just emerges.
Yeah, not to be clear.
I mean, it's been a struggle for me, too.
I don't want to certainly pay myself as not having concerns about this or being worried what people will think about us or, you know, even our other kids when they're going through difficult stretches in their lives.
They're not doing the kinds of things that maybe I did.
Right.
I have to make myself comfortable. okay with that and come to accept that.
And when I do that, so I have another son who we just love dearly, who college just wasn't for him.
I'm a third generation PhD one on my mom's side, and my dad is a PhD as well and college is just the root right.
I've been in academic life for my whole.
College was just the root, but it just wasn't for him and he just wasn't engaging with it.
I kept and I'm saying this with some shame myself right now that we kind of kept him in this path, thinking this is the right way to go.
And it would have been clear outside that this isn't what he wants to be doing.
He finally came to us very clearly and said that you know dad, this is just not what I want to keep doing.
And when we finally let go of that and just let him do what he wanted to do, which is now he's in a trade school.
I've never seen him happier.
We're just so proud of him now.
Like Gustavo, who I met on the train yesterday morning, taking this culinary class.
He's so proud of what he's doing.
Just made me feel so good about him, and also about my son, to let go of those things and just to love him for who he is.
Every parent struggles with that.
Every parent struggles with loving their kids for who they are.
And that takes some practice, too, and also some deliberate, careful thought and attention.
And it's worth challenging yourself to do because, of course, it makes the world a difference for them.
And we all struggle to do that somewhat.
With Lindsay, she's a ray of sunshine.
We refer to her sometimes as a unicorn because there aren't too many out there.
And we learned a little while ago, I don't know how true this is.
I don't know who comes up with these things, but it turns out a collection of unicorns.
Do you know what it is ostensibly called?
A blessing.
Really?
Really.
That's awesome.
Who'd have guessed?
Look, I won't put that to some sort of factual test.
That is what they're apparently called as a blessing.
And that certainly has been what she's been for us.
A lot of lessons in there and a lot of things for people to think about in terms of who they are and how they relate to people.
If you don't mind, I just would like to peel back another layer on relationships with...
I'll use the example of children, but it could be with other family member where that person is not typical of the average population.
And you described Lindsay in this beautiful way.
I almost feel like she's a bit in the room, right?
The way you describe her.
I think when I'm out and about and I see a parent or parents with a kid who has an, I mean I don't know what the diagnoses are right.
How could I?
An intellectual or some sort of atypical behavior.
The way you describe her is very delightful.
Yeah.
Sometimes the behavior of children with these challenges are disruptive.
It's hard to not feel the shame of the parent.
You know, like if a kid's being really loud or throwing a tantrum and this isn't a small child for instance, or saying things that clearly don't make sense.
And I don't expect you to be, you know, the ambassador for all these people.
I think we as sentient, well-meaning people around, we don't quite know how to react to that.
Do you want to say, gosh, I'm so sorry?
No, of course not.
Like, that's their life.
You know, who are you?
You also don't want to perhaps ignore them, but you also don't want people to feel like you're calling attention to them.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions?
I mean, it's like, It must be an odd experience to move through life that way.
And I'm so glad they don't isolate their kid.
But I think we've all been in this circumstance.
We don't quite know how to react.
Yeah.
So I think a good analog to this is with stuttering, and I think we all know how to deal with stuttering somebody who has a stutter is you wait patiently?
And you don't call attention to it.
You just wait patiently for them to express what they want to express, and then you carry on.
And maybe sometime, if you get to know somebody you can ask more specifically about how would you like me to help in this particular case.
Is there anything I can do to be of assistance?
How would you like me to respond?
We can ask people that directly, right?
And, you know, often, Often somebody, a caretaker, will be able to tell you that.
But patience is, I think, the way to deal with it.
Just to wait until whatever they're trying to do becomes clear.
And I think we can all do that with stuttering.
I think that's kind of understood, and maybe that's the way I would think about it.
But yes, some differences are harder than others, for sure.
Having grown up in a town, Palo Alto, where there are many, many professors and high-achieving parents, and I could list off a dozen or more examples of where the kids either didn't follow the traditional track.
Yes.
You could say oh, they didn't follow the traditional track, but they became like a Pulitzer winning writer, you know, or something like that.
I'm not talking about that, right?
I think it's so cool, by the way, that your son is in trade school.
I have friends that from all walks of life and fulfillment is- I've never seen our son happier.
Yeah, I mean, we're two academics.
You know, my dad's an academic and I can say that I actually think I would have been happy doing any number of things.
At one point, I wanted to join the fire service.
My dad every once in a while sorry Dad.
He'll say like oh, you know, I don't think that would have been fulfilling.
I think it would have been awesome.
Work out, the dog, like I love serving others, like get out, you know, and do things.
And I'm friends with the local fire department when they come through.
Like, I certainly don't know what it is to do that profession.
But like, I think fulfillment can be found in a number of ways.
For sure.
Fulfillment is about engagement, right?
Yeah.
And people like firefighters.
Being a cop is a little tricky because some people like you and some people hate you.
And the job is much more. from moment to moment is a lot less predictable.
I think one thing that we can do, and I haven't always been great at this in my family.
I told you it took me a while with my son to encourage him more down that path.
And I am just now realizing that's.
What I need to be doing is I think kids will often will feel like they are not following the right path and won't feel good about the path they're going down.
And that's where parents can really be helpful.
We have right outside my office window is the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which is a very elite private, And it goes all the way through down to preschool as well.
And the kids come out of there with a very clear expectation about what the right path is for them.
And a lot of kids struggle with that.
I just had a faculty member in my office yesterday before I left to get on a flight with you, describing how their children are struggling, I think, with expectations for what they ought to be doing that just don't fit with who they are.
And I think that's where parents can be really helpful for their kids is loving them for who they are and helping them find what's gonna make them the happiest, and making sure that kids know that any path is okay.
You want to be a carpenter?
Great.
That job won't be AI'd at least.
Or you want to get a PhD?
Fabulous.
Whatever field, go for it.
Trying to encourage kids with their passions and encouraging them to feel like it's okay.
That's important.
You have another side of you that most people aren't aware of, that we somehow landed on walking in here like somewhat randomly, which is you enjoy a lot of as much time as possible in the outdoors.
You're a hunter and a fisherman, an outdoorsman.
So you wanted to be Grizzly Adams.
Yeah, when I was a kid, yeah.
But in some sense, you play him from time to time.
Sort of.
But not out on your own.
So you and your sons and daughters go get out into the wilderness?
Yeah, yeah.
I grew up in rural Iowa, out in the country.
My dad and I went hunting and fishing all the time when I was a kid.
I was four years old the first time I went deer hunting with my dad.
And I love that time.
Four.
Four, yeah.
I walked along.
Shorter than the rifle.
Oh, yeah.
No, I remember years where the snow would feel like it was up to my hips, hunting deer in Iowa in early December.
And I wouldn't carry a gun until I was 12 or a bow.
I started bow hunting when I was 12.
But before then, you would push the deer.
You'd walk through the woods with other guys, with my dad, or with the friends that we'd have.
It was a real community of people.
I mean, the social connection there was great.
We used to go hunting with a guy when I was a kid, Lane McDowell, who was friends with my dad.
He was a football player for the University of Iowa, and he played for the Detroit Lions.
He was just a big monster of a man, a fabulous guy, and his son Thad, who would go, who is also my same age.
We played football together against each other in high school.
But yeah, I grew up doing that.
And then as I've gotten older, I've stayed connected to the outdoors.
I love being in the woods doing conservation kind of work.
There's kind of an element of caring for other people that also extends to caring for the, for the woodlands that are out there.
I do a lot of invasive species removal.
We have enrolled 40 acres in the Conservation Reserve Program, planted 9,000 trees on it.
And I see a lot of opportunities to connect with people in places that other people wouldn't.
Like I see the outdoors, hunting and fishing.
You almost never do that truly alone.
I always have somebody with me when I'm fishing.
I always go out with the kids when I'm turkey hunting or hunting deers.
And it's that social element that is really so important.
And there was an element of this that just felt like it came right out of my research.
That happened last fall in Oregon.
My oldest son, Ben, is a third year PhD student at Oregon State, pursuing a PhD there.
And bless his heart.
Last spring he asked his dad to do the thing that made me just the happiest he could have been.
He said, dad, would you like to come out here and go elk hunting with me?
Like, I grew up in rural Iowa.
The idea we'd be out in the mountains actually doing this just never was something that occurred to me that we could do, but he asked if we could do it.
And I was so excited.
We would get a week together, out in the remote wilderness of Oregon, just the two of us sitting around trees looking for elk.
It doesn't matter if you get one or not, whatever.
That's not what it's about.
It's about being out there and seeing what you see and being together.
And it was going to be fabulous.
And I was so excited.
So last fall, this was October, November.
I can't quite remember the exact date.
Went into Northeast Oregon, and we went out in the woods.
We're miles away from the nearest road.
We hike in.
It's really hard.
It's cold.
There's snow on the ground.
We're not really prepared for this.
First time we've ever done this.
We don't have any chairs with us or anything.
We got backpacking tents freezing our butts off.
And the first day, we go out to scout.
We don't know what we're doing here at all.
We're just going to say, I don't know, where are the elk?
How do we do this?
We go down into this valley.
And we're not there for more than 20 minutes, maybe when our time alone suddenly becomes a little more social than it would have been otherwise.
We look behind us.
Like three quarters of a mile up the valley.
We've got this group of guys coming in camo down the way.
And my son, Ben, was a little nervous about this, right?
A little anxiety about reaching out and connecting with other people, right?
A little like you'd have somebody sits down next to your train.
Well, maybe I'll just keep to myself.
Or on a plane, just keep to myself.
Here we're out in the wilderness and we got this group of hunters.
It's like a gang of men coming down the valley towards us all in camo.
And so Ben's like, let's move on dad, let's get going.
And I said, no, let's stay and talk with these guys.
And they wait, they come down and we start talking.
It turns out these guys have been hunting in this valley, in this area for years, for decades.
The older guy, Dennis had been going with another older guy.
I think they'd gotten connected through their church.
The other older guy had passed away recently.
But now they have another guy, Corey, who had gotten connected to them.
And the kids are all with them, Eric.
And there were, I think there were five at the time.
And we just started talking.
And then they start telling us how to do this and where we could go and how we could coordinate with each other to make sure we weren't we both had the best time that we could.
And they told us well, there's a blind up here where you could hunt, and you could go down there and hunt in this other spot.
And we just started working together and they were delightful.
Just like it is when you reach out to connect with other people, they reach back to you.
They invited us to their tent for dinner.
I'll just never forget.
They got this huge, this amazing wall tent.
They've got a camp stove.
They've got a spring where they get fresh water.
They got a bathroom where they are.
We walk into their tent.
It's heated.
We're freezing.
It took us off in the snow.
We walk into their tent.
The first thing they say to us, would you like red or white?
They got wine in their cabin miles from it.
These guys were fantastic. fabulous.
And it turned an event that was great for Ben and I into an even better event because we connected with these men who now, just yesterday Corey, sent me a text message saying it's time to apply for your elk tags.
This is when we're going to go and this is we're going to come out.
In case you want to do this with us again.
And in fact, Corey got an elk the first day, right?
He filled his bull tag.
And we were coming back from hunting.
Ben and I had seen one, but weren't able to get a shot at it.
It was still amazing to see one.
And we're walking back and the young kids, Eric is leading this group he says get on down there and show corey how to bone out that that elk.
I boned out many, many deer so it's the only red meat we eat of the venison that that i get and um, so i know how to butcher these animals and prepare them to to eat.
And they had just been hauling out these big quarters of animals like 100 pound rib cage.
Right there's a lot of bones that you don't even wanna.
So I got to go down and help Corey and show him how to bone out the back strap and the loins and all the meat that you actually eat and leave the bones that are there for the cougars and stuff to get later.
And it was fabulous, right?
And the courage that I had to talk with them, to connect with them out there again, I felt just came straight from our research.
How easy it is to underestimate how positively other people respond when you reach out to them.
And here it would have been easy for us to be competitive or avoid this.
And it was such a blessing. to have connected with them.
And we've stayed connected since.
And I hope we see him again in the fall out there in the woods.
It would be fabulous.
Wonderful men.
That's awesome.
And thanks for putting in a strong, clear, ethical picture of hunters.
I think a lot of people have a picture of hunters that is very different than what you just described.
My friend Cam Haynes is a serious about preserving wild lands and he's a very, very serious bow hunter, and I mean there are really shining examples.
There are bad apples out there too, but I think people often have a certain stereotype of hunters, you know, and yet Most of those people also buy store bought meat from factory farms.
And so, you know, not to guilt anybody, but there's a lot more to explore there.
So I appreciate not just the description of the beautiful social interaction and what grew from it, but also the context.
There's a level of caring.
I mean, I care about the woodlands and I try to protect it as best I can.
Turns out the deer are kind of a threat.
A lot of ecological damage that they, that they cause in the woodlands and the Midwest, because there are just a lot of them.
And so harvesting responsibly and respectfully.
I only help with a crossbow now, for instance, because I can be much more accurate with it.
And so I can take an animal ethically. and humanely and quickly.
And that's why I do that.
So most of the hunters that I've ever met are that way.
They care about being outdoors.
They like being with each other.
Getting an animal is part of it, but is not the main thing.
And yeah, folks who don't hunt, I think don't appreciate that that care that people have, outdoorsmen have for the outdoors.
What a great lesson for your son.
He's lucky to have you as a dad.
It was a wonderful week.
It's awesome.
I was reflecting on a couple of things, which leads me to probably what is the final question in a minute or two, but I was just sort of chuckling inside at one moment because you're describing that I'm thinking.
Okay, so my dad was a theoretical physicist, right?
So bringing me to work was a little different.
I mean, we did a great many things together, but he realized and he's quite smart, and he realized that showing me a bunch of equations on a whiteboard wasn't going to cut it.
So I'll never forget, he started off as an experimentalist.
And so my first like go to work with dad day was he took me to the lab and they had all these fruit and a big tank of liquid nitrogen.
And we spent the day dipping bananas into liquid nitrogen, smashing them on the walls which, for like a six-year-old kid, was like pure delight.
I went back to school telling all my friends that I could shatter bananas and all this stuff.
Wasn't quite what you described, but I have fishermen on my mom's side and my girlfriend's family.
She's got a long line of hunters and farmers.
So I think they're going to put me to the test soon.
Well, here's the parents doing great things with their kids.
Well, and that's the question I was going to ask, you know not to – in fact, to do the opposite of trivialize older generations teaching younger generations about what proper social interactions are.
The other thing I was thinking during your story is that this is how social dynamics and learning occurs in our species.
Like if that series that was on Netflix, the Chimp Empire series, did you watch it?
Oh, I have not seen that, no.
Oh, wow.
Fascinating because it's all about social dynamics in chimps.
Everything from covert gaze and they're brutal to each other.
They ostracize.
It's very intense.
Rip each other's arms.
And there's also a lot of beauty, but it's not just a bunch of, you know, like happy chimps.
It's intense warring between troops and so forth.
But it makes you think about our species, right?
And I'm raising a puppy right now.
And I was telling my girlfriend because she's not raised a puppy before she's a better at it than I am already, of course,
And I explained to her.
I said you know, the fastest way to train Strummer, our little bulldog mastiff, would be to get an older dog because, Because here we are, like teaching it these human cues and trying to – but we really need to get into the mindset of a dog and only a dog can really do that.
Like they're so nose-led.
They're great at sensing literally the autonomic tone of people around them.
They're sensitive to space.
Here we are saying sit and stay and do it like –
They hear it, but we're bringing them.
It'll be like us trying to learn how to use our noses to navigate.
So it is a fact that within every species, the older members of that species teach the younger members of that species how to socialize.
And I could rattle off lots of examples from my own life, but I won't where I observed my mom and dad doing certain things in certain situations.
And so while on the one hand, until now I feel like we've been talking to kind of like the young listeners and stuff, the parents of kids or the to-be parents of kids, or the siblings or the older or people who don't even have kids, like modeling really good social interactions.
I firmly believe, based on everything we've talked about today, that is every bit as critical as the person getting out there and pushing themselves past their anxiety to do the right things.
We need to model better everyday social interactions.
And so it's clear you did that in this example and another example.
So any ideas off the top of your head as to the, let's just call it like the 40 and up crowd.
Like it's kind of on us to model really good social interactions, because that's how, just like Strummer would learn better from a dog.
Learning from the internet is great, but a lot of kids don't have that.
Maybe they have a single parent or they're away from their parents or the ship passed, or maybe mom or dad was kind of a nasty person, unhappy person or overly outgoing and it got them hurt.
So what do you recommend people do to model really good social interactions?
So pay attention to your habits.
That's the most important thing.
It's those little moments and, you know, where I screw up.
I'm prone to a quick temper and where I've made, I still have the college football player inside me.
You like to hit things with your head?
Well, I want to, fix something, right?
And so if something's not going my way, I'll try to fix it in some way.
And so I still have that inside me from time to time.
And I have to actively try to create habits that don't do that.
So get out of a situation if I'm getting frustrated, rather than try to respond and correct it in that moment.
But those little habits, that's where it shows up.
People are watching.
People are watching you in those moments.
Those little things that you think aren't that important are what folks are paying attention to.
In our research, when I think about how you apply the stuff we're learning in our experiments, about people being overly pessimistic about how others will respond to them.
The way you apply that in your own life isn't that you learn how to behave differently from learning.
This is that you take that and you try to develop a little habit that then makes that something you do routinely, over and over again.
So, for instance, one little thing that I have started doing with this routine little habit in mind is I've made a habit when I get into my office and it's now expanded kind of beyond that, but I started at the office.
I was realizing one day that when I get to the office where the door is to get into the building, I've got maybe I don't know 150 yard walk through the atrium in the middle of the building to the elevators up to the fourth floor, down my halls to my office.
And I was usually making that walk with my head down, focused on getting to work as quickly as I could.
And I was passing all these people by. without saying hello or hi or whatever.
And I was missing all these opportunities just to brighten my mood a little bit there.
And so I started doing a little happiness walk, a little hello walk when I'd go from the door to my office.
Now, when I walk in I keep my head up and I smile and say hello to almost everybody.
I pass if I can.
So this last quarter, Nigel's been sitting right here to my right when I walk in at the table.
And Keith, who's got the biggest smile in the building, one of our custodial staff, is delightful.
Mario is usually somewhere around the second floor.
I can give him a shout out on the way.
And Zaya is often around the elevator when I walk in.
Eric, Virginia, Jane, Emma.
Joe, my colleagues when I walk in, I give them a shout out hello when I walk by their offices.
And that whole thing that just makes me a little brighter when I get to my office.
And it's also created a habit that I now just do without thinking.
And those little moments that become part of who you are, that's what people see.
And I think, as a parent, if you can think about how can you cultivate those habits to do these things routinely, because your kids are watching all the time, That's what's gonna matter.
I had a colleague one time, I thought this was very wise.
He realized that he was sometimes swearing in class.
And I sometimes, I'm guilty of that too.
That's my college football player, come on, I gotta be careful.
I try not to do that.
But I had one colleague who was adamant and this is really what got me started thinking about this years ago just, you never slip up in class because when you do that there people see that and they think that's who you are and what's appropriate in that context.
And that's just not the way you want to be.
So he's made a habit of never doing that anywhere in any part of his life, so that he also doesn't do it in class.
I like the notion of classroom rules.
It's actually one of the only ways I've survived.
Social media is I don't get into exchanges that I wouldn't get into in a classroom.
And I also don't honor the presence of comments.
People can say what they want about me to a point, you know.
But when they start attacking each other, you know, I always think if we were back in an undergraduate or graduate or medical school classroom, I would never let this exchange occur.
And this is my website, so.
Right.
You know, and people think, oh, you're blocking things.
You're deleting.
It's like it's not to avoid criticism.
It's like we're trying to keep a tone of education and respect.
Yeah.
Right.
And it can be heated.
But so I fully appreciate what you just said.
And I think the key to that is that it's it's not a huge thing.
It's a small thing that you do routinely and over and over again.
And that's those small habits are important to keep in mind.
I've been told by some of the people that are regular kind of commenters and things that they feel safe to comment there, which tells me they feel unsafe to comment elsewhere.
And the safe, unsafe thing, I'm not trying to like use like snowflake language.
I think like who wants to go online just for people to like be nasty, right?
So there's a lot of goodness to be had by keeping classroom rules, I guess.
Well, Nick, thank you so much for coming here today and sharing.
I really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule.
And I also really appreciate the work you do.
Also thank you for writing the book A Little More Social How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health and Connection, which comes out very soon.
Excited to read it.
Thank you, Andrew.
And I have to say, of all the guests we've ever had on this podcast, I think you represent the kind of extreme example of somebody whose work has informed their life and life has informed their work.
And that's somewhat straightforward to do when it always makes for kind of the easier better, obvious choice.
Like oh did research discovered?
You know, this style of cardiovascular exercise is better than that one.
I'm going to do that one.
But as you pointed out, it's brought many, many rewards than it has challenges.
But, in your case, your sensitivity to the theme of your work, which is that there's goodness and untapped beauty to be had in the spaces that we don't reflexively step into.
And that maybe even we initially are a little averse to that.
That's where the real magic often lies.
You applied in your own life in the realest of ways and you benefit too.
And that's the whole point.
So thank you for being both a scholar and a shining example of what you've taught us today.
Thank you so much, Andrew.
It's been wonderful being here.
I really appreciate it.
We'll come back again.
Thank you.
I would love to.
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