Positive Social Risks | Dr. Jamil Zaki x Dave Asprey

I'm just deeply opposed to a world that's designed for safety because then we would never trust anyone, because that's safest. Except that that kills you. According to the evidence in your book. It makes your life suck and then you die early.

Yeah, that's right. And, you know, a lot of my lab these days is studying what we call social risk taking. And, you know, risk taking almost has a bad rap in our culture. It sounds like a bad thing to do, which I think is terrible. Yeah, you know, I think reflect on the fact that risky behavior is almost a pejorative, you know, like an insulting thing to say that somebody's, oh, this person's engaged in risky behavior. That's speaks to something really broken in our public conversations. And, and it turns out that social risk taking, things like striking up a conversation with a stranger, disclosing what you're going through, your struggles to a new friend, trying to support somebody, expressing gratitude, all of these being vulnerable, being vulnerable, all of them forms of vulnerability. There's a whole bunch of, of data from the last 10 years or so suggesting that we are too risk averse, that our risk calculation in the social world is, is miscalibrated in ways that are really clear and very hurtful. So my friend nick Epley at UChicago and lots of other people study under sociality. And it turns out that if you ask people, hey, you know, what would it be like if you struck up a conversation with a stranger on your commute today? Or if you thanked that third grade teacher who made a difference in your life or complimented somebody, People are like, oh, man, that would be incredibly cringe, awkward, incredible. Would not be fun. It would not be nourishing for me. If you then force a separate group of people to have those interactions and say, well, how was that? They say, it's amazing. It was so fulfilling. It was not awkward at all. So we really don't know how good interactions with each other will be. And part of that is because we're too cynical about people. So at Stanford, my lab and I surveyed thousands of undergraduates and we asked them two types of questions. One about themselves. How empathic are you? How much do you like helping peers who are struggling? How much would you like to meet new friends on campus? And then we asked, how do you think the average Stanford student would answer these questions? And we discovered not one, but two Stanfords. Right. The actual community was full of warm, caring people who wanted to connect. But in their mind, students, average peer was cold and prickly and judgmental. Or at least more than the reality. And students who didn't know how much others wanted to connect, took fewer social risks and ended up more socially isolated six months later. So there's this cycle where we don't realize how much others want to connect, and we think we're alone. We think that we're the only lonely people who wish for more, stronger relationships. And because we don't realize that about each other, we stay alone to our own detriment.

A while ago, I had the. The surgeon general on the show, and he. The only book he's ever written was about the epidemic of disconnection with people. And the number of close friends we have has gone down dramatically. And something like, don't quote me on exactly these things. It's a memory. But something like 30% of people report having not even one single close friend. And this is because we fetishize safety.

Yes.

Instead of, I choose danger, I'm going to go out and say, hey, like, nice shoes or whatever. It doesn't matter. And if the person responds negatively, it's probably because something's wrong with them. It's not because something's wrong with you.

Or they're just having a bad day or whatever.

They oatmeal for breakfast and their blood sugar was crashing. Who would have thought?

I called. I call these social shark attacks. So, you know, shark attacks are one of the most terrifying, at least for me, one of the most terrifying things that could happen to a person. But they are extraordinarily rare. The thing is that they're so vivid that they live in our mind and shape our behavior in ways that are totally unnecessary. You don't need to avoid going into the ocean because you're going to get eaten by a shark. That basically never happens. But. But people do all the time. They're fearing something that they don't need to fear and trying to be safe in a way that actually ends up hurting them. And, you know, I think that this. You see this all over our social lives. You see it in our parenting as well. You know, we. We have. Not you and I, Dave, but. But a lot of us in our generation have raised our kids to try to keep them as safe as possible, not to help them explore the world. And that has led to a generation that is much less trusting and more anxious than in previous. Than in previous decades that the good news here. And I do want to give some good news. I mean, again, somehow studying cynicism has made me much less cynical, because the idea is that we're wrong about this. We overestimate the risks and underestimate the opportunity. And so we don't take enough risks. Right? We don't take enough risks in our social lives. But all you need to do to shift our risk profile to something healthier and more optimal is not lie to people. It's to tell them the truth. You know, at Stanford, we had a campaign, an advertising campaign that we ran, where the target audience was Stanford undergraduates and the product was also Stanford undergraduates. We targeted certain dorms, and we put posters all around those dorms, just showing people the real data about what their peers said. Did you know 95% of your peers would love to help somebody who's struggling? Did you know 85% of the people around you want to make new friends? And we paired that with some psychoeducation, where, again, people learned only the real data. And we found that people who learned what their peers were really like were, first of all, happier, they were more willing to take social risks, and they made more friends over the subsequent six months. So this is a vicious cycle of mistrust, de risking and. And missed connections that can be remedied not again by lying to people, not by only showing them the good stuff or being Pollyannish, but by showing them real data.