Mind Reading & Instant Connections | Dr. Nicholas Epley

[0:00] Nicholas Epley: Nobody gets along in life on their own. We all need help from other people at times. And it turns out when we are providing help to other people, it tends to lift us up. If I want to make somebody feel good on any given day, I should ask them to do an act of kindness. As a researcher, as a scientist, I ask them to do an act of kindness. That’s going to make you feel better on any given day. And when you ask for help from somebody, you are giving them an opportunity to be kind to you.

[0:35] AJ: Alright, let’s kick off today’s show. Today we’re talking with Nick Epley, University of Chicago professor and author of A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection. Nick studies social cognition and why people routinely misunderstand. And today he shares why introverts actually don’t prefer being alone, how others judge your warmth and intent, not your performance or fluency, why hard honesty doesn’t ruin rapport, and how asking for help from others creates an opportunity and a real gift for warmth and connection. Welcome to the show, Nick. It’s great to have you.

[1:13] Nicholas Epley: Thank you, AJ. It’s great to be here again.

[1:15] AJ: What I have to say about your research is it’s so exciting for me and Johnny to see validation in the work that we do with our clients and why our career has been so fulfilling over the last 19 years. Helping these small social habits transform the lives of our clients and see the impact on their relationships, their health, and just how they show up in the world has been so gratifying. And the work you do in the lab really reinforces the importance and the impact that these small social habits have on our life and well-being. I’d love to hear how it’s personally impacted you, because I love those personal anecdotes.

[1:56] Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So, to even sharpen that point just a little bit more, I think what our research really highlights is the surprising impact of these things, which of course is why the work that you do is important, and why the research that we do is interesting, because these things are not obvious to us. It is not obvious to us that passing along a small compliment or expressing gratitude or having a small conversation with someone or reaching out to express support when someone’s in need, that it’ll matter that much. And we find over and over again that people underestimate how much these things will matter.

[2:33] Nicholas Epley: And so that’s the really interesting thing to me about our work, that gap. And for me, it has changed the way I live my life in so many different ways. What it’s done is it has highlighted the ways in which doubts or indifference about how other people will respond when I reach out to connect to them, how pessimistic I can be about those, how overly pessimistic I can be. And it gives me opportunities to reach out that I wouldn’t take otherwise. So one very simple example. I go into the office every day. I take the train on the way into the University of Chicago.

[3:09] Nicholas Epley: I work as a professor of behavioral science. I’m often talking to people on the train, so that’s one simple thing. When I get on, I’ve got an army of people I can talk with. And one thing I do to help me maintain some of those relationships and connections with people, to bring people closer to me, is on my otherwise tool of disconnection, my iPhone, I keep a note page that has people’s names on it. People I’ve met. So I have a neighbor’s note and I have an on the train note and I have an at work note where I write down the names of folks who I’ve had conversation with, so that when I see them again I can use their names, because who uses our names? Our friends do. Right. Then when I get to the office, I’ve got a four block walk to the Booth School of Business where I work. I often have a conversation with somebody along those four blocks. And then when I get to my office, I open the door, and I realized at one point, I was walking up to my office with my head down, trying to get there as efficiently as I can.

[4:17] Nicholas Epley: And I have about a 200-yard walk, and I realized I was walking by people without really engaging with them, and it’d be really easy to do that. And so I have now, purposefully, when I walk into the office, I walk in with my head up saying hi and hello to people as I go by. And I’ve met lots more students that way, many of our staff that way, and that’s just on my way into work in the morning. It ripples throughout the rest of the day, too, in ways small and big for me.

[4:49] Johnny: Well, one of the reasons that people don’t recognize or understand the power of what we’ve all been studying for how many decades now is a lot of this communication takes place subconsciously. So you’re having your little experiments on the train. For me, I got started because I was a bartender and I was bored. And so I had a laboratory of sorts, a lab of rats every night to work with. So for me, it was how do I make this job more interesting? […] So that’s when I got into understanding the communication of it.

[5:37] Johnny: And I would read about a concept and then the next night at work, I would run that concept […]. And then I would watch as these concepts became part of my conversational repertoire, the ones that became very powerful. But what I saw was not just that these tiny little habits and experiments make me more sociable. Yes, but it also made people more delighted to see me. […]

[6:33] Johnny: So now, walking into a room, there are frameworks and strategies that I will use, whether it’s going to be, is this an opportunity for connection, leading or influence? And those tiny communication social habits need to be put in place for those results to be actualized.

[6:57] Nicholas Epley: Can I comment on two things in that wonderful comment there? Maybe three. First, let me start with a comment that Bob Cialdini, who’s a famous psychologist who studied persuasion, once made, which is that he never told a used car salesman anything he didn’t already know. There are different laboratories in the world. As researchers, we have particularly careful ways we do this, but of course you learn from experience out in the world, as long as you test repeatedly over and over and over again, not just one time. So, that’s beautiful. We’ve got the basement of the business school building in Hyde Park. You’ve got your bar.

[7:38] Nicholas Epley: I know where it’s more fun to run experiments, but yeah. The second thing is you mentioned the subconscious part. In my mind, the subconscious part for me is often how easily we let these opportunities slip by without even noticing it, right? You get into these habits, these routines, you get onto a train or into a cab or walk through the office or head home at night and sit down in front of TV. All of these things we do automatically or mindlessly without noticing that we’ve missed an opportunity to engage with somebody, to take a dull moment and make it a little brighter.

[8:20] Nicholas Epley: And when you start looking for those things, we recommend, for instance, that people do a choice journal, which is to look over their past day and just for each hour, look at the opportunities where they could have made a choice to reach out and engage with somebody but didn’t, right? A lot of those will escape your attention, and once you notice them, you can find opportunities to engage a little more. And the third thing you mentioned was power. I think that’s really, really important. If there is one thing that I have felt in our work, and one thing that I have learned over and over again from talking with people like you guys who talk to people a lot, is that they will tell me that they feel like they have a superpower.

[9:11] Nicholas Epley: Yes. In our work, I feel like the main message is empowering, because what our work suggests is that there are times, many times, I think, where we could reach out and engage with other people, but our overly pessimistic beliefs about how other people will respond to us when we reach out to them hold us back. And those are mistakes. Those are prison bars, essentially, we are keeping ourselves in, that are misplaced. And if we don’t test them, we’re going to think they’re steel, when in fact, they’re more like wet pasta noodles. And when you do push on them, you realize that this anxiety you have about engaging with other people or the ways in which you’re holding yourself back are just making you weaker than you could be.

[10:00] Nicholas Epley: You could be lifting up a lot of people in ways you’re not. You could be making dull moments better in ways perhaps you’re not. And once you see those, it starts to feel like a superpower.

[10:14] AJ: Well, I think the one thing that stands out in this habit stack that we’re talking about here is how much modern life has influenced us in ways that we don’t even realize. The habit of putting in our AirPods, the habit of staring at our phone on the train, the habit of building parasocial relationships with people digitally that we follow that are showing their life, that are influencers. And we use that as a substitute for all of these micro interactions we’re talking about here that you have opportunity for every single day. And then on top of it, it’s stressful at work. So the modern convenience of having stuff delivered to you, but not even opening the door to talk to the delivery person, not even having a conversation with the Uber driver, but instead turning inward.

[10:59] AJ: And then over time, building this weakness towards socialization and this loneliness that can feel like a prison, that can feel completely helpless as we’re going about our day missing all of these opportunities out there.

[11:15] Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So just a couple of comments on this. That’s an excellent observation. For most of human history, social connection wasn’t really a choice that we had to make. It was made for us. You had to be interacting with other people in order to get along and get ahead and basically survive. And modern life, though, has enabled to a greater, I mean, you always had some choice in connecting with other people. But modern life has given us the opportunity to do lots of things more efficiently that don’t involve other people at all. And now we can make a lot of choices. We could choose on any given day, for instance, to spend the entire day completely to ourselves in ways that humans have never before been able to do.

[12:03] Nicholas Epley: You can get up in the morning, get your food delivered to you without seeing anybody, spend your day working from home, right? Go down and make lunch that you ordered through Instacart. Get your dinner delivered the same way. Sit down and Netflix and chill in the evening, right? And never see anybody. There was a woman in Italy I write about in my book, A Little More Social. There’s a woman in Italy who passed away and was not found for two years until firefighters came to her house after a storm and found her sitting there, long since deceased for two years.

[12:42] Nicholas Epley: And the mayor of the town said the tragedy of this person’s life wasn’t that she died alone. Nobody knew that she had died. It was that nobody knew that she was alive. Right? That is a distinctly modern phenomenon, at least to some extent. The other thing, though, is to note how much of this becomes just again automatic and routine in a way you might even miss. And the data supports this kind of steady decay towards isolation. Mathias Mehl, who’s a psychologist at the University of Arizona, just published a paper where he, Mathias, and his co-author, had been tracking essentially how much people are speaking over a 12-year period from 2007 to 2019.

[13:40] Nicholas Epley: This was almost incidental. They were running experiments where people wear a little microphone on their shirt that just captures conversation over the course of the day, and they found that between 2007 and 2019 we were speaking on average 338 words a day less over those years. That’s about 120,000 words a year lost, right? And some of those are big conversations, but a lot of those are just little interactions that we have that we now no longer have. And that’s going to matter a lot for our well-being.

[14:18] Johnny: Everyone, as we just talked about, and AJ brought it up, everyone’s slipping into this isolation. But that isolation is also a bit of a, we can call it a sleep socially, because our brain is somewhere else. And what our clients notice is now that they’re taking action in the social realm, their first acknowledgement is everybody is asleep around me. I now have these tools that make me proactive in the social realm and everyone is just getting out of my way because they want to remain asleep. So I just go and do what I need to do and get the results that I want. And I’m surprised no one is stepping in, no one is pulling, no one is waking up.

[15:14] Johnny: So add to that idea that you’re gaining this superpower, it’s also this unfair advantage because everyone is isolated and asleep in their own world.

[15:30] Nicholas Epley: One thing that I would add to that comment, which is a good one, is that this technology can send a signal that other people don’t want to engage or talk with us. And that is, in fact, what we find is the real barrier to reaching out and engaging with other people, which is thinking that other people won’t want to reach back to us if we reach out to them. And that cuts across all kinds of things, whether you’re having a conversation with a stranger, passing along a compliment to someone, or having a deeper conversation with someone, or expressing gratitude, or doing an act of kindness, the belief that other people aren’t going to reciprocate that is what really creates the powerful barrier.

[16:09] Nicholas Epley: And our headphones, and our iPhones, and things that we carry with us, those are all signals we take that other people aren’t interested. But I would caution listeners to notice that those are imperfect signals. You might sit there and look at your phone, not because you are not interested in engaging with somebody, but because nobody else is. And you’d be happy to talk if somebody engaged with you, but because nobody is, you’re sitting there staring at your phone. And so, one thing that I like to do is to think about conversation as an invitation. Think about hello as an invitation to someone to join you in a conversation.

[16:50] Nicholas Epley: And it might be, so John, I might have you sitting down next to me on a plane, like I was flying home last night, you might have your earbuds in, right? And I could take that as a sign that you don’t want to talk to anybody. And so then maybe I wouldn’t try, but I could also turn to you and say, hi, I’m Nick, are you heading home or are you leaving home? And if you take out your earbuds, then I’ve invited you into a conversation and then you’re choosing to continue. But if you keep them in or put them back in, then you’re telling me that you’ve got music to listen to or an audio book and that’s okay, right?

[17:24] Nicholas Epley: But you can test these things too, and find out sometimes that people, in fact, are happy to talk if you say hello to them first.

[17:32] Johnny: One part to add to that, how many people, I do this all the time, so I’m going to only assume that other people do it as well, which is a lot of times if I’m on a train or I’m in a place that’s very social and there’s a lot of people and it’s lively and I have my earphones or my earpods in, but there’s no music playing. I’m now the person they don’t think is listening, but I’m listening. Hmm.

[18:03] Nicholas Epley: Okay, you’re also communicating that you don’t want to be listening.

[18:07] Johnny: Well, I don’t want them to think

[18:08] AJ: that you’re not open.

[18:10] Johnny: Right. So it’s all going in. So how many other people are around who you think are zoned out who are actually tuned in?

[18:22] Nicholas Epley: Could be. I don’t do that, but perhaps other people do, yes.

[18:28] AJ: Well, I want to double click on the voice part, because losing our voice, I don’t think the listeners really understand how much impact that has. I think modern technology has allowed us to communicate asynchronously and think a text message and an email is enough, a resume is enough, but there’s strong research that losing your voice has serious implications on your career, your relationship satisfaction, your ability to connect with people, and it might feel easier to send the text, to send the emoji, to like a person’s Facebook or Instagram post, but not having that actual conversation that we’re talking about here is really detrimental. Yes.

[19:11] Nicholas Epley: We find in our work that the voice really communicates a lot of what’s on our mind, and therefore does three things. One is it makes it clearer what we’re saying. So you can detect things like sincerity and sarcasm, for instance, much better when you hear what somebody has to say than when you read what they have to say. But in our experiments, people who are trying to be sincere or sarcastic don’t anticipate that. They think that they’ll be communicating equally well, regardless of the context they’re communicating in. Because it’s clear to us, right? What we’re trying to communicate, it can be hard to tell how this information is being received.

[19:51] Nicholas Epley: Your voice conveys a lot of information. Second, the voice also communicates not just what’s on your mind. We also find, perhaps even more important, that it communicates that you have a mind. So I can’t tell necessarily that you are thinking or feeling something. I don’t have access to your mind, right? I can’t see your mind. I can’t see a want or a belief or a thought or reasoning or rationality. But our data suggests you can hear it. And you can hear it in the voice and the cues that the voice gives beyond the spoken semantic content itself. So you can hear my voice, for instance, rise up and down, right?

[20:36] Nicholas Epley: That’s intonation. And I speed up and slow down. That’s variance in pace, right? And your voice then has movement. It has life in it that communicates the presence of a mind. Just like I can tell that you’re alive physically by watching you move, you can tell that I’m alive mentally when you hear that movement in my voice. How do you make somebody seem mindless? You strip that life away and you make it completely monotone, which is not how real people actually speak usually, or you turn it into text, which is dead essentially, right? Text does not have those same cues, or at least it doesn’t have it as easily.

[21:16] Nicholas Epley: So we find that people seem less mindful, less thoughtful, intelligent, rational when you read what they have to say than when you hear what they have to say. And this includes job applicants as well. Interestingly, though, job applicants think that if they want to be seen as intelligent, they would prefer to write rather than to speak, and they’re just, I think, often wrong about that. If you get a chance to talk to somebody, take it. And the third thing that the voice does is it connects us. So all of that life that we hear in a person’s voice and in conversation beyond our semantic content, we’re communicating a bunch of things behind the scenes, right?

[21:54] Nicholas Epley: You’re back channeling. Mm-hmm, right? Yeah, as I’m speaking, you’re making noises in the background that tell me that you’re listening. And those noises connect us with other people. But again, we find in people’s expectations when we ask people to reach out to an old friend, for instance, they thought it would be more awkward to call them than to type to them, even though they thought they would be more connected if they talked than if they typed. But most people then said, if I had a choice, I would actually type to my old friend rather than talk to them. When we actually had people do this, though, talking was not, in fact, any more awkward than typing, and people enjoyed their conversation and felt more connected when they talked than when they typed.

[22:40] Nicholas Epley: And so, once again, our misunderstanding about these things would have led lots of people to make what I think they would have considered to be the wrong choice. When it comes to communication, the voice really hasn’t.

[22:52] AJ: And I think going along with this, what we’re talking about by losing our voice and losing the social muscle, by making these choices, whether conscious or unconscious around our environment and how we’re choosing to interact with it, that the social uncertainty we’re feeling gets greater and greater over time. So for my dad growing up, he wasn’t living on a laptop. He wasn’t using digital communication at all. If he wanted or needed something, he would pick up the phone or most likely just go have the conversation. Just go ask for it. Just go talk to the butcher about what the best cut of meat is.

[23:27] AJ: And now we default to, well, it’s less uncertain that I’ll get a wrong answer or I’ll get into conflict or I’ll get rejected. So let me just Google it. Let me just type it. Let me just remove my voice from the equation. And as that uncertainty gets greater and greater, we build those walls around us. And getting comfortable with managing the social uncertainty of not listening to your favorite music on the train, which makes you feel good and their certainty, you’re going to enjoy it. But stepping into that zone of uncertainty is where life really is.

[23:59] Nicholas Epley: Yeah, yeah. One thing that we find in our work over and over again is that people are overly uncertain about how social interactions will turn out. They tend to see it as a much bigger, much riskier thing than it actually is. Like, if I try to have a deep conversation with you, AJ, I ask you, look, tell me what your story is, how did you get to where you are right now in life? People, when we ask them to predict how this conversation could go, they tend to predict it could go the entire range of pretty terrible to really great, right? The truth, though, is that when you reach out to other people, in these dynamic face-to-face or at least using your voice context, because of reciprocity, the actual range of outcomes is actually much, much narrower.

[24:51] Nicholas Epley: So that mostly they turn out on the positive side of the spectrum because of reciprocity. If I take an interest in you, you tend to take an interest in me. But to your point, if we are pessimistic about this and if we are overly pessimistic, then we might not reach out and try to have that conversation or try to go a little deeper than we might otherwise, or express our gratitude, or ask for help when we need it, or be honest when we have to in our relationships, and then we don’t find out that we might be wrong. And so, pessimism, our anxiety, our cynicism, our doubt, our beliefs about indifference, pessimistic expectations are self-fulfilling because they create avoidance where you don’t reach out and find out you’re mistaken.

[25:35] Nicholas Epley: Your dad, though, who is more optimistic, those expectations get calibrated, right? Because you try, you reach out, you have the interaction, and then you find out what it’s really like, and you get more calibrated as a result, you get more accurate.

[25:50] AJ: But I know a lot of people listening would not label themselves as pessimists. So when we hear that, we go, that’s the other person, I get the loner, I get the person who isolates themselves, but I’m an optimistic person. And what I’m sharing is I have a buddy who lives in London and we were planning a group trip in Europe and I was like, hey, can you get the rental car and we’ll coordinate from there. And he called me and was like, AJ, I have to be honest with you, I haven’t driven a car in seven years. Now, his uncertainty around driving a car is at an all time high because he hasn’t done it in seven years.

[26:29] AJ: Me living in LA, I do it every single day. So I’m like, what are you talking uncertainty? So that’s the difference here. When we’re not using our muscle, our social muscle on a daily basis, that uncertainty just gets greater and greater and greater subconsciously without us realizing that we have turned into a pessimist around these things. We have allowed that subconscious to create a pessimism that might be invisible to us. If we’re like, hey, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m optimistic. Hey, I believe in AI, I’m optimistic. I’m a futurist. I think everything’s getting better. But we don’t recognize the social uncertainty has turned us, as it’s ramped up over time by not using this muscle, into being more pessimistic about reaching out to that long lost friend, asking that person out at the bar that we’re attracted to, asking for a raise at work or stepping into the conflict that we’re having with the coworker that we think is gonna blow up in our face.

[27:22] Nicholas Epley: Yeah, that could be. As a psychologist, I’m always a little leery about conscious and subconscious or unconscious kind of language. Because most of the things that we’re talking about are things that people can recognize if you ask them. I think, though, often, and I think the phenomena that you’re describing is that we’re just not thinking about these things. It’s not occurring to us, perhaps, and so we’re passing through not taking opportunities to do things that we might otherwise be able to. But the other thing that I think might resonate with listeners a little bit too is our data suggests people are overly pessimistic in that our expectations are more pessimistic than they ought to be.

[28:06] Nicholas Epley: But if you actually look at where they exist at an absolute level, really, I think, in many of these phenomena, the better description is that we’re not optimistic enough. So people, for instance, and I’ve done this now with several thousand people in my classes at the University of Chicago, I have them reach out to express gratitude to someone who they really appreciate, but who they’ve never expressed their gratitude to before for whatever reason. My students, these folks, are not confused that the recipient of their gratitude letter will feel good. They think that they will be considerably happier than normal. What they don’t anticipate is that their recipient will feel even better than that.

[28:51] Nicholas Epley: That they will be delighted, three emojis, multiple crying faces, actual tears when they call, that they will be maxing out their pause and move. That’s what they don’t get. So you’re right, the pessimism language is relative. I think the way this shows up in experience often is that people are somewhat optimistic, but not optimistic enough about the power they have to lift people up.

[29:19] AJ: Yeah, I think in general, when you’ve been on the receiving end of it, it feels far more obvious to us. When we get that message, and we’re overwhelmed with joy of being seen in that way, validated for what we have taken in our mind as steps to really nurture the relationship, to care about the other person, to invest in them. And we’re recognized for that. Yeah, it feels incredible. But then when we’re sitting there writing it or talking it into existence, it just doesn’t feel like it’s gonna land that way. And that awkwardness comes up. And a lot of what we’re talking about here, and you touched on earlier, is the labeling and the self-identity that we then lean into around that labeling.

[30:01] AJ: Small talk is awkward. I’m an introvert. I have these beliefs about myself that color my expectations of how the world will react to these behaviors.

[30:11] Nicholas Epley: Yeah, and keep me stuck, missing opportunities that could have lifted myself up and other people up as well. Yeah, that is very powerful. And this shift in perspective is also really important. It is one of the reasons why we consistently underestimate how well reaching out will go. When we think about ourselves, we view ourselves through a different lens than we view other people and that other people view us through. When we’re thinking about ourselves, we tend to think about ourselves in terms of our competency. So you sit down to write a gratitude letter to somebody you love but who you just haven’t shared this with before.

[30:47] Nicholas Epley: What’s on the top of your mind is, what on earth am I going to say? How am I going to do this? You sit down next to somebody and think about having a conversation or a meaningful conversation with somebody. You think about, how am I going to carry on this conversation? You’re thinking about your competency. Other people, though, when they’re evaluating us, they’re not thinking as much about our competency. They’re caring a lot more about our warmth. Is this somebody who is kind? Is trustworthy? Seems like somebody I should approach versus avoid and stay away from. And so when we’re reaching out to other people in these social, these pro-social ways that connect us with other people, those are inherently warm activities, inherently warm actions that other people tend to evaluate fairly highly.

[31:32] Nicholas Epley: But if we’re worried about our competence, right, that’s what’s going to lead us to underestimate how well these are going to turn out. And you can feel that if you just flip the lens on it, right? So think about a gratitude letter you received. Were you really spell checking it? Were you really checking the grammar to make sure they got that exactly right? Really? No, you weren’t. You just knew that was lovely and nice, but it can be hard for us to see when we’re in a different perspective.

[32:03] AJ: With that label, we see this all the time with our clients who self-identify as introvert. They then follow along saying, well, introverts enjoy being alone. So therefore I’m taking rational behaviors of being alone. I’m making these choices of wearing headphones and not interacting or reaching out like, well, that’s the label, I’m an introvert. And it’s actually not true. And we find this again and again in our clients who then step outside of that label and just take a little action towards connection. And then the way they feel after receiving that connection back, it’s far better than sitting in solitude. It’s far better than making the choice to watch another Netflix show.

[32:43] Nicholas Epley: Yeah, this is where I think I get the most pushback from research in the field and from how I write about it in the book as well. And I want to be gentle here. I think the way to think about this is in terms of exercise, where we don’t quite have these reactions. But when it comes to things like introversion and extroversion or our personality, we often think of these things as describing the type of people that we are. That extroverts like connecting with other people, introverts prefer keeping to themselves. That just doesn’t show up in the data.

[33:20] Nicholas Epley: In fact, what shows up in the data is that people across that spectrum over the course of their day or in a given interaction are actually reporting feeling more positive when they’re connecting with other people than when they’re keeping to themselves. But what differs are, as you point out, people’s beliefs about this. And so personality, like extroversion or introversion, describes less the type of person you are than it does the types of beliefs you hold, and therefore the types of choices you make, and therefore the types of habits you develop, right? And we can think about this analogously to physical exercise, right?

[33:59] Nicholas Epley: So, some of us exercise a lot. Some of us exercise not at all. We’d all be a little healthier if we exercised a little bit more, in varying degrees. If you’re already exercising a lot, exercising more is not going to matter that much. But if we were exercising more, you’d increase how healthy you are, including, especially perhaps, if you’re not exercising at all. And that’s true in terms of our social exercise as well. We’ve known since the 1980s that extroversion is strongly correlated with how much positive affect, how much happiness people report feeling over the course of a day, how satisfied they are with their lives, and that you can also increase well-being by encouraging or prompting people to be a little more social in their days, to act a little more extroverted.

[34:48] Nicholas Epley: And you can take that on gently, just like you would exercise. So if you’re not somebody who exercises a lot, you wouldn’t go out and run a marathon today, right? You maybe choose to walk or take the stairs and then take those steps where you have an opportunity to do it and try it, see how it feels. Maybe there are activities that are easier for you than others. Try those, see how they feel, and then just take note of that and see, can you do this again? That’s all. Same thing like physical exercise. We can do that in our social lives, too. And if you would like to have a little more positive mood over the course of your day, saying hello every now and then, giving somebody a smile, patting a back when you have a chance, walking with somebody to get coffee together rather than alone are good ways to try doing it.

[35:38] AJ: And oftentimes that labeling we might not have even thought about. This is something that my wife and I are really thinking a lot about with our young daughter. We encounter parents who will say, oh, my child’s this shy. And it’s like, well, they’re a toddler. Are they really shy or are they just really connected to mom? Do they really feel comfortable around strangers or is it stranger danger? So this labeling oftentimes, I’m shy, may have come from a family member or a friend who just labeled you as that and then you held on to that. And now you’re making choices that go along with this identity and belief you have about how a shy person interacts. A shy person can’t talk to people on the train.

[36:17] AJ: It can’t do your morning routine, Nick. I’m shy.

[36:20] Nicholas Epley: Right, right. There’s another challenge to this kind of labeling when it comes to sociality, extroversion and introversion too. We find that people tend to overestimate how introverted they are. That is, if you ask people to put themselves on a percentile scale, for most dimensions, people tend to think of themselves as above average on the traits that are desirable, on the desirable end of the spectrum. But when it comes to extroversion and introversion, people actually tend to think that they are more introverted on these scales than they actually are. They tend to think, for instance, they’re in the 70th percentile of introversion on average when they’re actually in the 50th percentile, say.

[36:58] Nicholas Epley: And the reason for that is that there’s an asymmetry in the information that we have about ourselves and other people. So you, for instance, notice that after you spend a lot of time talking with people, you go home and you’re tired. It turns out that doesn’t make you introverted. That makes you a human being. Other people are going home and feeling the same way. You are not seeing that, right? You also see other people’s extroverted behavior, right? You are around other people when they are around you, right? When you are talking with each other, you don’t see them when they are alone by themselves on a Friday night, just wanting to have some time to themselves watching Netflix, right?

[37:39] Nicholas Epley: And so there’s an asymmetry in the information we have about ourselves. We see our own, quote unquote, introverted behavior, but we tend to only see other people’s extroverted behavior. And that makes us think that we are more introverted than we actually are. The other thing that I think is important to recognize is that there are a lot of myths about extroversion and introversion that can then come from this. I spend a lot of time in the book talking about this, about people’s experience. A big one is that people get their happiness from different places. That doesn’t look to be true. And that also there are differences in how fatigued or tired, for instance, people get, that extroverts are energized by interacting with other people, introverts are fatigued by it.

[38:23] Nicholas Epley: It turns out when scientists actually look at this across the spectrum, people are more energized when they’re engaging with other people. And then afterwards, just like if you do physical exercise, you get tired because it’s tiring. You’re doing stuff, right? And so you get this drop in how much energy you feel. You get tired afterwards. But that drop, research suggests, comes at the same point, whether you report being extroverted or introverted, a few hours after you’ve engaged in some social activity, just like we all get fatigued after we exercise too. So there’s often a disconnect between our beliefs about these labels and reality, and those beliefs can keep us in places we don’t necessarily want to be.

[39:09] Johnny: Some people are more of an effort to hang out with than other people. Some people fit your personality and are very easy. And imagine being the person who has to deal with an extreme introvert. […]

[39:27] Nicholas Epley: That is true. […]

[39:39] Nicholas Epley: So some of this can certainly affect our social relationships. Look, I don’t mean to suggest that everybody’s the same. Not everybody’s the same. There’s plenty of diversity here. What we find, though, is that across our differences, this tendency to be not optimistic enough, as AJ might put it, seems to be quite robust. And our data don’t suggest you should be reaching out all the time, or that it’s always going to turn out well. That’s not at all what it suggests. It suggests that we get the odds that it will turn out well wrong, that we get the odds that somebody will reach back well to us in a way that feels good to both of us.

[40:20] Nicholas Epley: If we reach out to connect with them first, we get the odds wrong. And as a result, we’re a little overly reluctant to reach out and engage. And so it suggests, when you have those red flags go off in your mind, maybe this person doesn’t want to engage even though I’d be happy to talk, or maybe they won’t get the words right in this gratitude letter, or maybe they won’t want to help me if I ask for this thing that I really need and that they can help me with, that you should just test it. Just test that flag. We find in our data over and over again in our research that when we test those flags, people aren’t optimistic enough.

[40:56] Nicholas Epley: And I find in my own life that when I test those flags, these interactions often turn out notably better than I would expect they would. I’ve worked that out of my system after years of doing it, but that was certainly the place that I started from.

[41:11] AJ: What’s interesting to me is, because of this need for social connectedness, those failures tend to stand out more, those rejections, those parts where we put ourselves out there and we didn’t get the response we had hoped. We can hold onto those for years and we see this with our clients where even after that event, you can have tons and tons of data, if I was a scientist collecting, where it did go well, where they did respond well. That one negative experience we can hold onto to not only self-label, but then to adjust our behavior to avoid the pain of feeling that way.

[41:47] AJ: Vulnerability and authenticity open us up to pain. And if you’ve had the pain, the challenge, the difficulty of not getting the result you want or not feeling connected in that moment or feeling rejected, that can feel emotionally very traumatizing for you and then create a pattern of behavior to avoid that in the future. Yeah.

[42:06] Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So psychologists refer to that as negativity dominance. We actually came into this research thinking that would be a really, really powerful mechanism. Interestingly, and this is surprising to me, we’ve had a harder time finding support for that in our data than I would have guessed, that the negative moments don’t stand out quite as much as I might have imagined, at least when people have lots of experience to learn from. But I think what you are seeing in your clients, and what we were imagining in our data, and what I think happens out in the world a lot, is that these bad experiences can stand out for you, and often they can stop you from trying to continue learning.

[42:52] Nicholas Epley: They change your behavior, right? So we don’t then get the same kind of data after a rejection that we might have before one, because you stop trying as much. Oh, I won’t do that again. You learn when you have a bad conversation on a plane. And then people will maybe talk to you, so maybe you’ll get more data like that. But you might be reluctant to reach out and engage again in the same way you once were. And so I think just treating those as single data points, continuing to be a good scientist or a good experimentalist in your own life, and continuing to test those beliefs is the way to go.

[43:30] Nicholas Epley: Maybe one out of a hundred will turn out poorly. Maybe not that, maybe even not that poorly. But if you get that one early, it doesn’t mean that you should stop running the experiment and testing yourself.

[43:43] AJ: I think another belief that a lot of people have is the sequencing of communication. So I have to do small talk first, I have to exchange pleasantries, and then I can get to the deeper talk. But actually, I just enjoy the deeper talk. And that’s why I only want to be with my friends and not with strangers. Yeah.

[43:58] Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So, in fact, psychologists thought this. Art and Elaine Aron, two famous social psychologists, a married couple, they study relationships, wonderful people, developed this procedure known as the Fast Friends Procedure, early 1990s. This became famous thanks to Mandy Len Catron’s New York Times piece about the 36 questions that will lead you to fall in love with anyone, essentially. And Art and Elaine Aron designed this procedure where you ask a series of 36 different questions that are increasingly deep, or they remain kind of shallow. And they thought you needed a long runway in order to really get deep with someone. You needed all of these questions. They thought lots of other things, too, that turned out not to be true in these conversations.

[44:45] Nicholas Epley: They thought that you had to want to become friends with somebody, that you had to be similar to someone in order for these deeper conversations to really connect. Those things turn out not to be true. All you needed was talking about the deep stuff. And we find in our work that you can get to those deep questions very quickly if you want, and that those conversations then tend to go not just well, but surprisingly well. I’ve run people through these deep conversation experiments thousands of times, over 5,000 times in fact, by this point, where we have people talk about things like, what are you most grateful for in your life?

[45:24] Nicholas Epley: Can you tell me about it? Or can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? Those are taken right from Art and Elaine Aron’s Fast Friends Procedure. And they’re asking those questions right away in these conversations. And what folks find is that when they reach out and take an interest in another person through these questions, in a context that allows the other person to take an interest in them too, these conversations go much better than they expect them to. You don’t have to beat around the bush forever in order to ask somebody, what’s your story? How’d you get here today?

[46:01] Nicholas Epley: What do you do? Fine. Do you love what you do? Who’s a great friend of yours? Tell me about a friend you love. What’s an activity you love doing? What would your dream job be? You don’t have to wait 36 questions to get to that. That can be question number two.

[46:21] AJ: Yeah, and what I love about all those examples is it really touches on their core values, positive emotions that they feel, their passions, things that drive them. And it cuts through a lot of the stuff that we put in front of ourselves, like we have to talk about the weather, we have to talk about how we got here on the train.

[46:41] Nicholas Epley: Yep, yep. It gets from conversation outside the person to stuff that’s really inside a person, right? So why, right? It gets to motivations and goals and desires, or how are you feeling, right? It gets to focusing on the future, what would you hope to do in the future? That gets outside of the kind of mundane small talk, which is outside the person, to stuff that’s more meaningful. What do you actually care about? What’s important to you? That’s what we mean by deeper conversation.

[47:15] AJ: Another belief we find a lot of our clients have is that honesty kills rapport. So once you’ve started to create a connection, you’ve got momentum working, you really feel good about the potential here, then I have to soften things. I can’t be quite so honest. I can’t share what I’m really feeling. I can’t be authentic. And they remove the authenticity that’s actually needed for that deeper connection. I know the science is really interesting here too.

[47:42] Nicholas Epley: Yeah, no, this has surprised me some too, and it surprises our participants as well. Some of this research comes from my colleague, Emma Levine, here at the University of Chicago. And what people do, for instance, is spend their entire day either being as kind as they possibly can in all of their relationships or being as honest as they possibly can in all of their relationships. And then there’s a third condition where people are just asked to be more mindful about their relationships, which is their control condition. And going into this day, right, so before the day, people think that being kind is going to be a happy day and is going to strengthen their relationships, and being mindful is also going to be okay, but being honest is going to be bad for it, right?

[48:27] Nicholas Epley: It’s going to harm my relationships and not going to be a nice day. When they actually go through the day, they find that being honest is just as good an experience as being kind, and in some ways better, because they feel more authentic in their relationships, and that part is uplifting. And what Emma finds that people miss is that they tend to think about the content of what they’re conveying, whether it is kind or unkind, positive or negative, the content of what I’m saying to you. And they don’t quite fully appreciate what the act of being honest with someone is also conveying beyond just the words.

[49:11] Nicholas Epley: So when I am honest with a friend or with a colleague or with someone I love or even with a stranger, I am conveying content in my words, right, about whatever it is I’m talking about. But I’m also signaling to them that I trust them because I’m being honest with them. And I’m being authentic with them. And that is a warm characteristic. And that kind of honesty, to my PhD students or postdocs or to me even, if I give a talk and I wasn’t doing a very good job, it is unkind to lie to me about that. Giving honest feedback is kind, or it can be kind when it’s well-intended and it is something that somebody can do something about, and it is then also interpreted by the people who receive it in those cases as being kind.

[50:06] Nicholas Epley: When you tell me, this talk didn’t go very well, you just gave Nick, or this lecture wasn’t very good if you’re a student of mine, in these ways, these are the ways you can make it better. That’s kindness to me, right? And that’s what Emma and we find as well, that people misunderstand how honesty can also be kind to people and interpret it as kind.

[50:28] AJ: What’s interesting is this warmth factor. So our warmth is well received, but giving people an opportunity to be warm to us is also well received. And this is a roadblock to many of our high performers who joined the course because they feel like asking for help is a burden, shows weakness in areas where they are already judging themselves, and they withhold these opportunities to give someone else in their life an opportunity to be warm to them, to help support them.

[50:59] Nicholas Epley: Right, right. So these barriers to reaching out and engaging with other people that will create relationships show up all over the place. And what you’re describing here are barriers to asking for help when you need it, right? Nobody gets along in life on their own. We all need help from other people at times. And it turns out when we are providing help to other people, it tends to lift us up. If I want to make somebody feel good on any given day, I should ask them to do an act of kindness, as a researcher, as a scientist, ask them to do an act of kindness.

[51:30] Nicholas Epley: That’s going to make you feel better on any given day. And when you ask for help from somebody, you are giving them an opportunity to be kind to you. And so what we find in our work is that people who are asked for help do in fact feel a little better after they’re helping. Things that they can do are pretty easy to do, but those who are asking for help from these people tend to underestimate how willing they’ll be to help, how happy they’ll feel to help. They tend to perceive this in terms of the content that they’re asking for. I’m asking you to do something for me without thinking about the meaning of that act, which is an act of kindness for that other person that’s going to make them feel better about themselves.

[52:12] Nicholas Epley: This has really changed the way I think about asking for help. I am not a person, maybe like many men or many people, who are worried about seeming maybe weak if they ask for help or incompetent if they ask for help. This has changed the way I think about asking for help. I now think of it as being unkind if I don’t ask somebody for help that they could give to me, because I would create a stronger relationship there and I would give them a chance to feel better for giving me a helping hand, and it makes me more open to asking for help when I need it.

[52:48] AJ: Part of this is this attempt to hide our flaws. Our analytical clients want to appear as super competent because they feel they get a lot of value through their competence in their information, work, knowledge, job, in their career. They’ve seen this loop play out again and again. And therefore, the asking of help or showing that things are messy or flawed, in their mind, may lose status, may lose the connection they have with people that matter.

[53:16] Nicholas Epley: That might be true in the moment, just kind of a glimmer of the moment, but not as much as people expect. But over time, notice that asking somebody for help encourages them to help you, to do something for you, and makes that person feel more connected to you. Ben Franklin knew of this, right? He knew of this years and years ago. He had this famous story he told about wanting to encourage this other person who was somewhat antagonistic towards him, to shift his mood and break the ice between them. And so he went and he asked if he could borrow a book from this person.

[53:55] Nicholas Epley: He didn’t really need it, but wanted to ask for help from him because he knew that if the other person helped by lending him the book, the other person would like him a little more and feel a little more positive about him. This has come to be known as the Ben Franklin effect. In fact, in psychology, asking for help actually connects other people to you more, makes them like you more.

[54:18] AJ: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Nick. Appreciate it, especially with the quick turnaround. Where can an audience find out about your latest book?

[54:25] Nicholas Epley: So if you search for A Little More Social online, you will find it. It’s available everywhere you look for your books. If you happen to like my voice in this podcast, I did the audio recording for it as well, which is pretty fun. I’ve also been doing LinkedIn a little bit. I don’t do a lot of social media because it makes me unhappy and miserable. But I have started doing LinkedIn, and there I tell some stories about folks who are living a little more social in their own lives. And that’s kind of fun. So those are the places.

[54:51] AJ: Well, thank you again.

[54:53] Nicholas Epley: Absolutely. Thank you, AJ.