175 - Nicholas Epley: A Little More Social

Welcome back to the Stanford Psychology Podcast, where we interview leading psychologists about their latest work. This week I was excited to speak with Nick Eppley, who is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He studies social cognition, how thinking people think about other thinking people, to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. Nick is one of the world's best 40 under 40 business school professors by poets and quads. He just published his second book for a popular audience called A Little More Social. And in this conversation I talk with Nick about under-sociality, the key idea in this book. Are we being less social than is good for us? How can we learn to connect, especially when it feels effortful? Can we be too social as well? How can we learn more about ourselves when we connect with others and what are some methodological limitations of Nick's work? This was really fun, hope you enjoy. Nick Eppley, welcome to the Stanford Psychology podcast. Thank you for making the time. Thank you Eric, it's great to be here. Under-sociality, a term that maybe not all of our listeners has heard before. How do you define it and when would our listeners know that they were being under-social? That's a good question. So I can define under-sociality better than I can identify when you know you were doing it. So this is a nice thing we get to do as academics. We get to sort of make up concepts in some ways or make up ideas that describe phenomena we're seeing. And so this term under-sociality was a term I thought was a good description of phenomena we were seeing. And those phenomena were gap between people's behavior, what they were choosing to do, and what might be optimal in some way for them. And how you divide optimality is tricky, of course, but I'm thinking about it in terms of mostly well-being and just the general quality of your life. Decades of research and psychology has documented that we are happier, healthier, generally live longer when we are connected with other people in ways that are rewarding, positive, and tight that connect us well with other people. And that being lonely and isolating is bad for us in almost any way you can measure or less happy in a big way, or less healthy, our cardiovascular functioning and our immune system gets compromised when we're feeling isolated and lonely, particularly chronically. And if loneliness and isolation kind of extends over the course of your life, it's also a risk factor for early death. And those effects aren't small, they're big. So connecting with other people generally is a great thing. And yet if you look around the world in your daily life, there are lots of times we have an opportunity to connect with other people that we're choosing not to take. Right? And so we don't talk to strangers, for instance. We lean back and type to each other rather than picking up the phone and talking to each other. And once talking, we tend to stick to small talk rather than deep talk. Lots of the prosocial activities that connect us positively with other people were often choosing not to do. We think of someone we're grateful to, but we don't express it to them. We need help, but don't ask. Have a kind thought. Come to mind. Don't share it. You need to be honest in our relationships, but our inner authentic can keep our true selves to ourselves. So there's this paradox that seems to me, at least in my mind, when I look around in the world of sociality being generally good for us in lots of ways, we would consider to be good ourselves, but not choosing it. And that's the way in which I think we are potentially under social, whether there are opportunities where we could easily choose to be a little more social that we're not. In the same way, sometimes we overeat, right? We eat more than is good for us in some way or eat more than leaves us feeling good and a given meal. Under sociality describes the inverse phenomena, which seems I think to be true of our social life, which is that we're often not social enough for our own good. Now, how do you know you're experiencing it? It's hard because the thing that creates under sociality also, I think, keeps you from learning or recognizing that you're experiencing it. I think finding in our research that we're overly reluctant to reach out and engage with others because we underestimate how positively other people respond to us when we reach out to them. But when we are doing that, we're also choosing not to reach out to other people, so we're also not learning that we might be wrong. That's, I think, a really good insight. How do we know when we're experiencing it? Because the very phenomena that creates it also keeps us from learning or feeling or recognizing that we're in the midst of it. You don't realize it until you test some of those barriers that are keeping you from reaching out to other people. You know, some of our colleagues call this asymmetric feedback, right? And so I always find this really fascinating. So if I am being kind to someone, I will immediately find out if they are kind to me as well or if they are like, "What the hell do you want from me?" But if I don't interact with someone, it's easy to just stick to my wild paranoid imagination of, "Oh God, who knows what could have been, thankfully I didn't talk to them. They're not going to come knocking on my door 20 years later with pictures of all the locations we could have gone on together because, you know, I miss out. I just don't have that information." And there's something really powerful but argument. So my former colleague, late colleague and friend Robin Hogarth, who was here at the University of Chicago before I arrived here, but still is in the field of judgment decision making, he described these two different worlds as kind learning environments versus wicked learning environments. In the book I refer to them as kind and unkind or kind and confusing. The kind environment is one of symmetric feedback, right? I take the test. I answer all the questions. I find out which ones I got right or wrong. In the book I found out that I had a test and I was like, "Oh, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to be a good teacher. I've got a test and I'm going to be a good teacher." And I found out that in the book I'm going to be a good teacher. I'm going to be a good teacher, but I think I'm going to be a good teacher. Because often in his mind it changes how other people respond to you, but it can also keep you from trusting other people, for instance, in ways that would give you the evidence to calibrate your beliefs. Okay. So you find on average we are wrong and predict that all kinds of social interactions will be awkward or outright dangerous, but on average they are not. What have we moved past? What is sure for most interactions we are wrong, but the interactions that do go wrong, they go so severely wrong that maybe it's better overall to be better safe than sorry. So that's an empirical question, right? And it's a hard question to address empirically in some way, and I don't have a great way to answer that, except that I think it's not true because in fact, when the negative experiences happen for the most part, the ones that people are imagining. Like if you reach out and talk to a stranger, you're imagining that they're not going to talk back to you. When the bad event actually does happen there, the one that people are often thinking about, it just isn't quite as bad even as they imagine it will be. You can carry on, you can carry on with that. So I think there is some sensibility that this would make sense if we were actually calibrated about the likelihood of the negative and happening and just wanting to avoid it. In our data though, and here we can get a little into the weeds. I don't think the data actually support that that's what people are doing. So this hypothesis, essentially what you're describing is risk aversion that, you know, we look, if I have a conversation with 100 strangers, I reach out and express gratitude to 100 acquaintances, I tell the truth 100 times in a row to my partner that, you know, on average, it's going to turn out OK, but occasionally a few are going to be really, really bad. I'm just wanting to avoid those so I'm going to choose not to do this thing. That makes a very distinct prediction that is just not true. That distinct prediction is that we have some sense of what the distribution actually looks like. Like I know, look, you know, only one out of a thousand times is a conversation with the stranger going to go poorly. Still that one would be so bad I'm going to choose not to OK. That makes that makes a prediction number one. It doesn't predict that people will underestimate how positive these conversations will go. They should be calibrated because they know what the distribution looks like right. That's not what we find. They are underestimating a positively. It will go on average. Second, when we ask people to actually predict what the distribution looks like of potential outcomes, say you have 100 deep conversations with somebody or as we sometimes ask people, imagine 100 different people have a deep conversation with someone. And we ask you to predict how many times will people say they enjoy it not at all zero or a way to predict how many times will people say they enjoy it not at all zero. or three, every point on the scale, right? This negativity bias or loss of version or these kinds of mechanisms predict that we'll know what the distribution looks like and our predictions will approximate that distribution, but that we're overweighting the probabilities on the negative outcomes and that's what's driving our choice. But when we ask people to predict the distribution, what we actually find is that the distributions that they create are overly pessimistic themselves. They are miscalibrated. So I'll give you an example with the deep conversation and experiences that I have people go through. I've now done this with over 5,000 people across many different public talks and demonstrations and things. The distribution of experiences here is very positive that it, you know, it typically let's say on a scale from zero to five, how much will you enjoy this? Most of the responses are five and above overwhelming and like nobody gives a zero or a one here. But if we ask people to predict how often out of 100 conversations, would you say zero one two or how many out of 100 people would say zero one two so on? They predict a much flatter distribution. They essentially say any outcome is possible. So I don't think that it overweighting the negative outcome is what's happening. I think it's overestimating the likelihood of negative outcomes and those are very different. People are avoiding experiences that they're just not likely to have, they're getting the probability of these things wrong. And I think if you knew what the probabilities were, you would choose differently. Indeed, after our experiences, people indicate that they would like to do this again. They update their beliefs in a direction that suggests that they are learning from their current experience. So that's what I would say that. I wish I could send this clip to our ethics review board at Stanford because the last study that I read about PhD was a conversation study where I paired up strangers on a video call to have an unmonadured five minute conversation with each other. And I proposed this study to our review board and they basically responded with, you are gonna do what now? And I had to do so much like, oh my god, I'm so sorry. I know this is crazy. Yes, it could be anyone. Yes, I cannot enter. If anything goes wrong, I watched all these hundreds of conversations by now and everyone is nice. Some of them are very awkward for sure. They sometimes say offensive things about me. They're always the separate researcher who thought this was gonna be, yeah, they've all kinds of comments, but they're nice to each other because we're face to face with another human. Very rarely are we gonna be rude to their face. Very validating to hear. Thank you. Sorry. I think what your ethics board was doing was overestimating the number of bad conversations that would be there, not thinking that the conversations would be so bad, the one really bad one would be so bad that we can't do them at all. That would be my prediction. Yikes. I'm glad they had a different IRB, my whole career would have been revealed otherwise. Okay, let's talk about winter coats. So let's say it's winter again. I grabbed my winter coat from the closet. I grabbed it to the pocket and there's a $20 bill in there. I am like, ooh, I didn't expect this, I'm happy. Now let's say I remember that I left a $20 bill in my winter coat and I grabbed it. It's still cool, but I expected it. I wonder for your research, if I expect very little from talking to a stranger and then I talk to them and I'm like, oh, that was nice. Part of the enjoyment comes from the conversation but part of it comes from me just having very cynical expectations. So if we fix people's expectations, maybe they don't enjoy it as much. So that makes a very distinct prediction, I think. So first off, let me say some of the enjoyment might come from surprise. It's a little hard to tell whether that's true or not. Is that true? No, it's not true. Never mind. Let me backtrack off of that. This is in a new paper with Stav a tier and I stov as one of my fabulous post-docs who's now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When we have people have consecutive conversations with each other, before the first one, they tend to underestimate how much they're going to enjoy it. They tend to predict that they will enjoy that conversation more after just having a conversation than if they didn't have a conversation. So they are updating. So now we have made them have more positive conversations. In that immediate second conversation, your hypothesis predicts that those who just have at a conversation will enjoy the second one less because now they know they expect it to be good and that we do not find. We find that people enjoy the second conversation equally well regardless of whether they just had a conversation or not. What differs are their expectations going into that second conversation? So actually don't think surprise is affecting too much that impact of that second conversation because here we have manipulated now their expectations and the experience in the conversation is highly similar. That's good. I hadn't actually been prompted to think of that by anybody before. So thank you, Eric. I appreciate that. The other thing, this is why it's great talking with psychologists in these podcasts. I'd love it. Second is that across the course of our, if we look across people's expectations, say in deep conversations, right? Some people are very pessimistic going in. They think they will enjoy it not at all and as you're at a 10 scale, they say zero. Not many people but some. Some say one, some say two, some say three. All the way up to people very optimistic. They think they'll enjoy it at 10. Okay? The surprise effect alone predicts that experience as I think ought to be negatively correlated with your expectations going in. So that maybe that's too strong of a prediction such that the more pessimistic you were beforehand, the more you enjoy it. Whereas those who were optimistic beforehand going in would enjoy it less. We don't find that. We do find some correlation. That is the people who are really optimistic, do enjoy it more, a little more than people who are really pessimistic. But the big gap is for the people who are most pessimistic. So I don't think surprise is really a comparison with the expectations before and is creating the experience. Part of me though, I think in addition to this data, things that's not likely going on only because in most of social life, our experiences are really, really powerful. And our expectations beforehand then become pretty weak. Right? Like you might think you would enjoy jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, but if you actually jumped off of the thing, your actual experience would dominate and your expectation will be very weak. Right? Conversation's not as strong as jumping off of a bridge, but it's pretty strong. All right, let's say I put on my winter coat because I wanted to go to the gym. Now the problem is I don't even leave my apartment. I put my winter coat back, I'm gonna use the $20 to watch a movie, whatever, not go to the gym. I know going to the gym is good for me, and I just don't wanna go. Yeah. And I will say I was your research assistant, oh God what, eight years ago, long time ago, where I first learned about this research and I think about it all the time. And yet, as you say, happiness is constant work. How much of people not being social enough is really driven by belief versus, we just don't wanna do it. It's effortful. It's easier the short trip to just sometimes stay in bed and not go out, not go to that party. What I do know is that people's expectations, at least when they are thinking of them, guide their choices. And I think routinely over time, these two things really start to blur with each other in a way that makes it very hard to separate. So if you think that talking with a stranger's gonna be unpleasant, or it's gonna take a lot of work, you won't try it, and then you won't learn that you might be wrong about that. And over time, that will become then habit, which turns into not wanting to do the thing. So it's very hard causally to separate these two things. The thinking it will be bad, and the just not wanting to put in the effort. We can separate these two things empirically by asking you about them beforehand. We can ask you how much will you enjoy this? How effortful do you think it will be? These things tend to go along with each other very highly. They're highly correlated with each other. So it's hard to separate them. We do know that if we change people's expectations, it makes them more interested in choosing to do the thing that they now are more optimistic about. So I can't differentiate these two, but I do know causally that if you are more optimistic about how social interactions would turn out, you would choose to do it more often. That's about the best I can say. I can't partition it very carefully. It's just very hard to separate those two things. The word habit is really fascinating to me. I'm exploring more ways in which people can be under social without it being driven by their beliefs, just to pressure test this idea. And so I can envision an individual who is very independent, who is lived by themselves for many years, who has built their routines, their habits, knows what makes them happy, what makes them relaxed and all kinds of ways. And they know, okay, I am lonely. I want to connect with people. It was leaf. It was. do good for me, but I am so stuck in my habits that it could be hard to do that. How much do you think that plays a role and how much can that be broken, I guess, by changing beliefs and habits themselves? I think habits are a lot of it, and I think the habits can come from our expectations upfront or beliefs. Upfront can develop those habits. In fact, I think habits are so strong that they become what look like traits for us. I think that's the way to think about traits like extroversion. It's not the way psychologists have thought about a trait like extroversion for the entire history of psychology, but I think at least when it comes to extroversion in the last 30 or 40 years or so of research and psychology suggests that habits are a good way to think about it. Not the type of person you are, but the type of choices that you make routinely that then just become part of what you do without really thinking much about it. But also then would inform your expectations about choosing differently. So back in 1980, as far as I understand it, was the first paper that psychologists ever published examining whether there was a correlation or relationship between people's personality and their well-being. On the face of it, you might imagine, so you're saying different types of people doing different things. On the face of it, you might imagine there's no relationship between well-being and personality like extroversion. Okay? Extroverts get what they want. They act energetic. They get out and connect with people. They're more sociable. Introverts get what they want. They like keeping to themselves, you know, spending more time alone. No difference in happiness. That just turns out not to be true. There's a huge correlation. The correlation is about 0.5 between extroversion and the amount of positive affect or happiness you report feeling day to day in your life. There's about 0.3 with satisfaction with life. Extroverts are higher in well-being than introverts. Ed Deener, one of the foundational figures in the psychology of happiness, claimed that to be a foundational finding in personality science in the mid-1990s. And then psychologists started asking, "Well, what would happen if we asked people to act more extroverted?" Because they were, "What is producing this correlation?" It could be there's just something different, a baseline about extroverts and introverts, and how happy they are. And maybe that's causing their extroversion and introversion. But what if we flip that and we ask people to act more extroverted? What would happen to their mood? So we'll fleece in a guy at Wake Forest University was the one, as far as I know, who started doing this research. And he found that in a half hour, if he asked people on the lab experiment to act more extroverted and outgoing in a social interaction, they enjoyed that experimental session, where they were playing a game with other people more than if he asked them to act introverted. And that was true for extroverts and introverts alike. Right? So acting more extroverted changed how good they felt in that section. That was true over experiments that took an hour, over the course of a day, over the course of a week, or a Sunday, a little bit more mere ski at UC Riverside, as in now doing over the course of two weeks or even longer. When you ask people to act more extroverted, they report more positive affect in their lives. And they asked them to act introverted again, regardless of how extroverted or introverted they report being on a personality survey. What seems to differ though across extroverts and introverts is not their experience in social interaction, but rather their expectations of social interaction. And therefore the kinds of choices they tend to make, the kinds of habits they form. Extroverts tend to think they will enjoy having a conversation with someone more than introverts do. When you actually have them have a conversation, the bigger gap, if anything, tends to be among the introverts than among the extroverts because experience doesn't differ that much. So I do think that habits are extremely important. Our habits become who we are. They become the type of person that we are in terms of how we choose to behave. They are not necessarily the descriptions of what we actually enjoy or get energy from or how we experience the world. Habits are determinants of what we choose. And I think that's super important. But it also means you can change your habits. Turns out that extroversion, personality scientists know extroversion is actually one of the easiest traits to change. Because if you change your habits, like if you just start acting more extroverted, a week later, two weeks later, a month later, you will report being more extroverted on a big five personality scale because you have changed your habits. Right? So I think habits are important. And I think the key to getting over some of these pessimistic expectations in your life are creating habits that get you doing it without really even thinking about it, to become routine and automatic. Recently, I ordered food from a food delivery service from a restaurant that happened to be a hundred feet away. Speaking of awkward interactions, facing that delivery guy, yes, it wasn't as awkward as I thought it was going to be, but it was still awkward. Now, how did we end up here? What's the habit? What's the belief? I genuinely think this is connected because I think there's something about beliefs, habit formation, and short term versus long term thinking, where or prioritization, where in any one moment, especially in our culture of convenience and a lot of technology products that we build, it's so easy to just prioritize, I've got this easy, I don't have to cook, I don't even have to direct with a driver, at least it's full of door. There's way more that everyone's raving about in San Francisco. I ask people, why do you like it? They almost always say, well, I don't have to interact with an Uber driver who I don't know they are going to be the same answer. And there's something tempting about reducing the friction and the moment, but there's going to be more social friction. And the long run, as we maybe lose these social skills that we have, and it becomes, we become these creatures that I'll comfort and it's really encouraging to hear that we can face them. Thank God. Yeah, although if people's expectations are miscalibrated, like thinking you wouldn't enjoy an Uber driver. And of course, it is awkward to ride an Uber driver if you don't engage with them, right? Or awkward to ride an Uber if you don't actually talk with these people, right? That's weird to do. But to your point, why are we doing that? I do think at any given moment, right? We're making a calculation about what the best thing to do is and it's hard to know when it comes to the social dimension, what we're actually losing if we don't have the interaction. So I was in LA a little bit ago and I took an Uber ride from the hotel I was at to the interview that I was doing. It's been 23 minutes long and I know this because it said so on the receipt. And I got into the Uber. The man was Iranian. And I asked him when I sat down. I'm going to say nothing and got out and I would have been no difference meaningfully in my life, other than an awkward 23 minute ride in silence with another human being there. But instead I sat down and I asked him, would you mind if I ask you how you feel about the war, about the war and the around that's going on right now as we're speaking? And he started kind of slowly. He did not have any love for the authoritarian regime whatsoever. But then as I was open to hearing more, he started telling me more about his story. It's not he lost his son in a protest. It was shot on the neck and killed. He went back to Iran and tried to get his body back. He was in Doha running a successful business and went back to try to retrieve his son's body. He had four kids. He was running a successful business out of Doha. They told him not to go back. All of his friends told him not to go back and do this. He went back. He was arrested at the airport, was put in prison for six years. He's shown me the scars on his hands and arms while he's driving that he incurred there. He ended up having to sell everything that he owned to pay off the Iranian regime, a ransom to get him out of the prison. He came to the US requesting asylum. He tried three different times to get it was finally granted asylum on the last time on the day that his wife died in a hospital. Right? Now. If I had never asked, if I had never inquired about what was in the mind of this man, I never would have learned all of this. We ended up embracing a hug in the back of his car and the trunk when he was pulling my stuff out. Both of us sent years at that point. Right? Very meaningful connection there that told me a story I never would have imagined would come out of this guy before. And I will not forget this, I keep talking about this story which happened just a couple of weeks ago. And I never would have known what I had missed if I had not talked to him. And that's the problem with calculations based purely on efficiency. At the time, we know that not walking a hundred feet down the street is going to be a little bit easier than going down an ordering in person or sitting there having a conversation with somebody else, but we don't always know what we're missing. And a lot of these pushes towards efficiency erasing some friction. The friction is also often social friction that we might not even be using in a way that is optimal for us and the person we're interacting with. And we won't know what we're missing even when it's gone. We won't know what we're missing. Which makes it hard to calibrate our lives, I think accordingly. It's a little bit like the question you asked me beginning, how do you know you're under social. You don't necessarily, right? until maybe, you know, it's years down the road and you're feeling lonely and you have a sense that you have no friends and the country is divided because nobody talks to each other anymore and you believe that people you don't talk to have overly extreme views, which sounds a little bit like the United States right now. - I can imagine that if I had been in your shoes hearing my Uber driver share this story, my first reaction almost could have been, oh no, I shouldn't have asked because now he has to talk about it, but the thing is, I would guess he was already thinking about it. This is not the kind of thing you're just, oh right, that happened, right? And then you remember and so it helps people feel. - Yeah, so these kinds of things, the things that people are willing to talk to are likely the things that they are already thinking about. You're not, when you open up to people and our data don't suggest that you should be intruding on people all the time or forcing them to have interactions that they would for whatever reason in that moment prefer not to have, that's not it at all. Our data suggests that you're underestimating how likely these interactions will turn out if you try. If you open up and welcome people, invite people into a conversation or an interaction or an engagement in some way with you, right? And so whenever people respond back to that invitation or something, you're not forcing it out of them, it's likely what they're thinking about. And when it comes to hard, difficult experiences, these are things people think about, I think about all the time, my colleague Linda Ginzel, she's told me this many times, because we went through a similar experience. Linda and her husband, Boa Skzar, who's a psychologist here, very well-known social cognitive psychologist and a linguist as well, they lost her son. And Danny Kesar, and two years old in a crib accident, which prompted them to open kids in danger, which is a consumer safety, product safety organization that ran for 20 or so years, 25 years, I think, trying to improve consumer products for kids. Linda told me that that loss was very hard for all the obvious reasons, but also people didn't connect with them very much afterwards. They didn't know what to say. And so when some trauma like that happens, you also get avoided. And Linda would say people wouldn't want to talk to me about it, as if I'm not thinking about it, but she was thinking about it all the time. My wife, Jen and I went through a similar experience. We lost a baby on July 11th, 2016, six months into my wife's pregnancy. Daughter had been diagnosed with Down syndrome for three months, which we knew when she was at high risk for death over the course of that pregnancy. But when we lost her daughter, people would avoid her on her way to school to drop the other kids off at the elementary school. Other parents, other moms, she knew would not, they just seemed to avoid her a little bit, not come up into it. Not because they didn't care or were mean, but because they didn't know what to say, and they were worried that bringing up would make us think about something we weren't already thinking about. You're thinking about her all the time. So inviting people into a conversation is simply that. Not forcing them to think about things, but allowing them to just share their thoughts with you, and that's often surprisingly rewarding. And you learn things you never would have guessed maybe before when you invite people into a conversation with you. - Again, thank you for sharing. There's something really, very niches about this idea of, I'm just not ready to connect with this other person. Maybe I'm tired or I've been breasted and worked lately, or it's so easy to keep making these excuses. And I think I see this manifest in our culture in so many different ways. So even if you look at dating, you hear things like, you should be happy and content and independent before you go on a date. And sure, you shouldn't hope the other person is gonna solve all your problems and put them on a pedestal to depend them. - Sure. - And wonder if from a perspective of understose reality, that is the advice that you would give, for example, or if maybe we're not meant to be, I mean, in the words of one of our faculty advisors here at Stanford, Hazel Marcus, you can't be yourself by yourself. Think about this often, right? It's really hard to conceptualize ourselves to understand ourselves truly in the absence of other people. But sometimes we frame it that way, at least in our culture. - Yeah. So Hazel is one of the best social psychologists in the business and his wise. And I would be an idiot to disagree with that. I think that's likely exactly right. And it speaks to a question that I've been talking with one of our first year PhD students here at the University of Chicago about Maya Ingraham, about the possibility that we actually come to know ourselves better through conversation. Right? So there's this old idea in psychology going back to 1902, 1936, about the looking-glass self that we understand who we are by seeing how we are seen and understood by other people to some extent, that they tell us the kind of person that we are in some way, because they see us out there in the world, right? And Mark Leary and Roy Baumeister have a very influential theory that self-esteem is a monitor that's tracking how well you're doing in the social world. We care about what others think about us and what other people think well about us. We think well about ourselves and that people think poorly of us. We're also then thinking poorly about ourselves. We gain our sense of self a little bit by thinking about ourselves through the eyes of other people. And that makes a prediction, which is that when we are in conversation with other people, or if you had a conversation with a stranger, it makes a prediction that you would be more certain about who you are. You would have more confidence in the type of person you are after the conversation than before. So I don't have a great answer to your question about whether the dating apps or whatever haven't right that you have to be sure about yourself before you reach out and engage with other people, but my prediction is that that seems wrong to me. And then in fact, it is through interacting. It is through connecting with other people that we become ourselves and that we come to know ourselves. I'm a different man because I've been married to an amazing human being, my wife Jen, for 30 years. And I come to understand who I am in my relationship with her. So you think about the kinds of traits that we embody. I hope I'm a kind person, right? I'm hope I'm a generous person. I hope I'm an honest person. And you only come to know yourself in those ways through interactions with other people. The other thing that I think is interesting is that when you look at the opposite end of the spectrum, you take people and you put them in solitary confinement, for instance, they will often say anecdotally that they lost themselves, right? They get very disordered thinking after spending so much time alone, not being themselves anymore by themselves to Hazel's point. Not to compare solitary confinement to doing a PhD, but I see very small versions of this. I think I can relate. And I'm sure many of our listeners have spent many hours by themselves sometimes trying to solve a problem. I would do this with my PhD, just solving my personal problems, solving an academic problem, trying to test an idea. And it's so easy to just go down these rabbit holes and then I talk to one person, no matter who they are, and they immediately tell me, well, this makes no sense, Eric, what the hell are you doing? Or, of course, everyone knows this. My grandma told me this. It's like, oh, okay, everything's possible. But it's just so luring this idea, especially in academia, I think, that we as individuals come up with these ideas and then we tell the world about it. And it's just so weird, even in social psychology. - So Amos Tversky, props to the Stanford Psych Department, famously used to say that people waste years by not being able to waste hours. And what he meant by that was that, and in his career, what was really so productive for him were the afternoons that he would spend talking with Danny. And they had very different working hours. So Amos liked to, he was a night owl, he would spend all night in the psych department when nobody else was around. Danny was more of a regular daytime person, he would work in the day, and then would go home in the evening, like a more normal person compared to Amos in that respect. But they would waste, quote unquote, waste entire afternoons in conversation with each other. And that's where their work came from, right? This is not to say that we don't need to spend time by ourselves right, I just finished writing a book. That's gonna awful lot of time by myself. But there were also lots of conversations along the way and presenting other people with the work. But one thing we do find in our research is that people underestimate how much they're gonna learn in conversation. That's a pretty reliable result. And it doesn't mean you should spend all your day in conversation, you do have to get time done, things done, and sometimes you need to do that alone. But wasting some hours in conversation to Amos's point may not be much of a waste at all. - Mario, today I was talking to a friend about how I was gonna do the podcast with you and she was like, oh cool, what's his research? And she had a very immediate reaction and the phone I questioned and her works. When does it end? Does it ever end? And so I asked her to clarify and I was like, what do you mean? She was like, wow, sometimes I just go to events with wonderful people, their wonderful events, too tired, or I just go because of FOMO. I guess another way of asking this question could be is over-sociality a thing? - Yeah, that's a good question. It's hard to find evidence for that, I would say. what we would expect to see if people were being maybe over. or social is regretting their interactions more often than we actually see them doing. It's not that it's zero, right? If you have a distribution of expectations that are overly pessimistic compared to experiences, right, it doesn't mean that you are never going to have an unpleasant interaction with someone, certainly you will. But it also doesn't mean that there's not some increased degree of sociality that would become problematic for you. You'd spend all of your day in conversation and none of it alone getting stuff done. However, the kinds of mistakes that get corrected are the over-social mistakes where you tried this thing or you did too much and now you're exhausted and you need to dial it back, that you learn from. The ones you don't learn from are the other end of the spectrum. So I guess I would have faith in your friend if they were out there trying and actually engaging with other people routinely to get some sense of what reality looks like to get somewhat calibrated over time. I think I have, after taking this research to heart, really changing the way I live my life in lots of ways, I miss fewer opportunities to engage with people that I otherwise would have overlooked. But I also don't necessarily overdo it either. I'm not talking to people all the time. That's not what our data suggests either. Well, I will start inviting my friend to all the party since he has no excuse. Okay, towards the end of our conversation, I want to zoom out and talk about you as a person as an academic who is doing all sorts of interesting things that are not required of you as far as I understand. Your job description, for example, writing books. This is not your first book. You have written two books for the general public and I am curious. What's the pricey of the most about your first book writing experience and is there something you learned writing the second book that writing the first one did not teach you? So the first time I was surprised that I could do it. That was really why I wrote that book. I owe a debt to Stanford University for this because I birthed the idea of the book. I wrote my proposal when I was on sabbatical at Casbus, the Center for Advanced Study and the Behavioral Sciences, just up the hill from campus on the dish property. That was where I wrote the book proposal and that's where that started. And really that first book was trying to see if I could do it and I wasn't sure. And I could do it. And I wrote a book that I was proud of and that I thought did the science justice. What I learned with the second book was that writing the first one didn't make the second one easier. For me, it was actually much harder. After the first one, I told my wife, I'm not going to do this again. Honey, I promise. Like, that was so hard. It's been hard on us, the family. I'm not going to do that again. The second one though, and it wasn't even that many years after, six years after the first one came out, I was back at it getting a contract again. And I didn't really want to write the second book in the sense that I remember the first one was so hard, but I kind of felt like I had to. I thought I would regret it if I didn't share these data in a book form. It's something bigger. If I didn't tell these stories from our data, if I didn't share this with people because I do think that learning about this research, learning about these pessimistic mistakes that we make about each other changes how you live your life. Moment to moment, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, it changes your character over time. So I thought it would regret not writing it, but I was a little more optimistic that, you know, this time through, I would get it done. So I got the contract in 2020 with a year and a half deadline, which is the same deadline I had before, which I kind of made, I was maybe six months late with the first one. But this one, you know, I started writing in 2020, pandemic hammered us and that was terrible. And then it just, it took a long time to get this story right, to get the book right. Because there's a lot of nuance to it. There's a lot of, yes, but what about this? What about that? What about these mistakes? Other kinds of mistakes, right? There's a lot of nuance about it that made it hard to write. And I guess I went into it being a little more optimistic that having written one would make the second one easier, it was not. It was really hard. Still really hard. So cool about the idea of under-society is, I'll broadly add a place and how many different faces I could see benefiting from learning about this concept, from architects designing third spaces to kindergarten teachers, right? And I always love asking professors about how they get to be psychologists outside of the ivory tower. Because there's all kinds of use cases for us to have an impact without writing papers or even writing books. And so I have a sense that you've been doing some consulting work or maybe run some public facing workshops or done some other speaking to organizations that might not have heard about this idea otherwise. So if you could just find some light and maybe highlight a specific place you've spoken at that really stood out to you. Yeah, so I do a lot of public speaking in part because our work is not hard, it's quite accessible. People can get it. And in my public speaking, the thing that I've really enjoyed in the last few years, particularly talking about this work, is that I've been able to take my job as a scientist to these public facing engagements in ways that I think are really impactful for people that really change the way people think about the work in the moment that they are in. So when I run, when I do a workshop, so for instance, I've done this now with over over 5,000 people or I have people have deep conversations with each other. I'll do that when I get book talks now, for instance. That's one where I'm brought in to give a keynote address or something. And I will start, I've been doing this now for quite a few years and I will run the audience through an experiment. I will tell them early on in the session that in just a minute, I'm going to have you, I'm going to pair you up with another person in the room. I'm going to have you have a conversation with this person. And I put some questions up on the board that they're going to talk about and they're meaningful questions. They're things like, you know, keep telling me, what are you most grateful for in your life? Please tell me about it. If I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? Can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? So all of the social psyched nerds listening to this podcast will know that those questions come from the art and the lane air and fast friends procedure. They're on the deep end of that spectrum slightly modified. And when I put those up, I also put a link to a survey up on the screen. People go to the survey and they report how they think the conversation is going to make them feel. Right. So last week I did this for the committee on evolutionary biology here at the University of Chicago. A couple days before that, I was in my daughter's high school doing this with all the AP psych students. I did this for 600 market researchers here in Chicago at a conference. All of our incoming MBA students at the University of Chicago now do this with us on the second day of their orientation. Fill out the survey. They then go to have the conversation. Dread is washed over the audience by then, right? They're all regretting that they came to this session. I'm the door wishing that they hadn't come. They then go off and have the conversation and then at that point, it's a struggle for me to get people to come back. When they come back, they then report how the conversation actually made them feel. Before their conversation, they also tell me, what would you rather do right now? Have this conversation or take a break, so measure their choice. Afterwards they come back and they say, what would you rather have done right now? Had this conversation or taken a break? And the gaps between their expectations before and their experiences afterwards are massive. And you can so clearly feel it in the room. I have people talk about what their experience is like. I've seen people cry in front of their fellow MBA students talking about how meaningful this conversation was, how they just told somebody something they have never told someone else before right here. How this was the best conversation that they have ever had in that moment. I can then show them the data from all of their peers because we pull it down off of a Qualtric survey and pop it right up there on the screen. I've now given this away to almost a hundred psychologists who are teaching psychology out at universities around the country so that they can go off and do this themselves. And the value of taking science, our science out into the world like that is that you get people to feel it, right? I'm not just telling them about an effect, showing them the data. They're actually feeling it. And we all kind of know a psychologist that you don't really think your way into feeling different. It's the opposite. You feel your way into thinking differently. And the best way to communicate to an audience is not just showing up stuff, right? Not just showing them on the screen things, but allowing them to actually feel it, right? So this is super powerful at the individual level, I think. I do that a lot. At scale, at the collective level, we have to do something else. So you mentioned the kindergarten teachers and the urban planners and things here. And like in I wrote the book and I do my speaking, my public speaking and workshops and things like that. I do that to reach individuals. I wrote the book as a psychologist about psychology to reach individuals where they are. That's the work that we do. If you move this to public policy, though, and we want to think about how do we change a school or a community or a workplace or a city or a state or a country, right? Then you need to start thinking differently. You're not going to do that through the level of individual beliefs, policy, often circumvents individual. beliefs to say design spaces where interaction is just easy. Okay? The University of Chicago's business school does this, I think, very well. So the office I will walk into every day, first room I walk by is this massive atrium of the center of the business school here at Booth. That invites people to sit down because it creates all these spaces where people can sit in community with each other and conversation with each other. Right? Those are designing spaces that just make it almost a requirement that you interact with other people. It's circumvent your belief by creating situations or context where people just naturally connect with each other and interact. And that's the way you think about intervening at the policy level. We're running up against time. One final question. Talked about how you help the people around you implement these ideas. How are you personally implementing this in your own life with your family? How are you trying to be less under social life? It's changed the mindset that I have walking around in the world. I know that other people are more open to engaging with me than I had thought that avoiding other people is not kind but unkind. And I also know that I feel empowered. In ways, I'm not afraid of interacting with other people. I don't have that sense of awkwardness or aversion to reaching out and inviting someone into a conversation or interaction with me. I'm not reluctant to be honest with my PhD students. For instance, in my meetings with them, I talk about my personal life and I talk about meaningful things with them. I don't create a barrier between us because I know it'll establish a better relationship that'll just be better for us day to day. I'm almost always talking to somebody on the train this morning. It was Ellen who I hadn't seen for a while. She works at the University of Chicago Press. As she sat down next to me this morning, Molly was on my other side. Molly works at the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. Now my challenge is who do I talk to on the train? Because I've kind of got a bevy of friends there, right? My buddy Harold Pollock, who I normally read the train with, was it with me this morning. But that's the challenge, right? Who do I engage with? When I walk to the office, I'm often talking with somebody. If I sidle up next to somebody on the sidewalk, I'll have a few block conversations with them. When I get into the building, I make a habit of walking through with my head up, staying high and smiling with people sitting alone to folks, which has allowed me to get to know so many more people in the building. I keep thank you notes readily on hand. It's just at my office desk. So that when I have a kind thought about somebody, I can go and share it. And when I need spares, I just reached my right here. And I grab a whole bunch of thank you cards. I've got them sitting right there, right? So I've noticed a lot of the red flags in my mind that are doubts about other people that would keep me from connecting with other people. And I think I've tested them enough to learn where I would commonly be making mistakes. And I think that's the way we take this and put it into practice in our own lives. Our data don't, I mean, this is the challenge of going from psychology, behavioral science to individual practice. I can't tell you Eric exactly how to put this in a practice in your life. I don't know what red flags are going off in your mind that are telling you to avoid other people because it's not going to go well. What we found in our research, though, is that by testing some of those flags, right, finding places where those flags go up and testing them reveals one context after another after another after another where those flags are miscalibrated. And then a reveal place is where we're overly pessimistic. And I think we want to do the same thing in our own lives, right? It's to take those flags that go off and just test them, right? You think it'll be weird to say hi to your breeze to ask them how their life is going or to say hello to the stranger who sits down next to you or to reach back to a high school friend and tell him that you'll always remember that time they were kind to you when you really needed it. And you don't know why you've never told them that, but you think about it all the time and you are so grateful. And you'll send that letter and you'll find out that what I've been holding you back was a little bit wrong and get a little more calibrated. So again, our data don't suggest you should be necessarily doing all of these things that we've studied in our research because I don't know what's holding you back. They do suggest that when the flags are going off in your mind, don't take them for granted. The other person doesn't want to talk or the Uber driver has nothing interesting to say or this act of kindness won't make any difference or my partner will respond negatively to me being totally honest with him about something and instead test that because my prediction is that you'll find a lot of those flags are wrong. Well, this is by turn for saying thank you for making the dying. This was a really fun conversation. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. It's going to be talk with you again. Thank you for listening. Following Robert Cheldini's advice here on this podcast, let's see if I can convince you to take about five seconds of your valuable time and leave us a quick review on Spotify, Apple podcasts or elsewhere. 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