Vanessa Van Edwards felt like an outsider missing social cues, so she tested whether universal human truths feel personal. She gave identical fortunes with seven broad statements to friends at a party. Each woman rated how accurately they described her, with most giving top scores and one rating a perfect 10, convinced the words were written just for her.
Chapters
Right in the beginning of the book, you say that despite how different we all are on the outside, our inner workings are quite similar and they're also quite predictable. So could you talk a little bit about what that means to you?
Yeah, so I used to think that human behavior was mysterious. And I think that's because as an uncool kid, I always watched the cool kids and was like, what do they know that I don't know? For most of my life, I just have felt like I missed a memo. Like someone, somehow everyone got this memo about how to have conversation and how to have a first impression and what to do with your hands. And I just never got that memo. And so people were very mysterious to me and complicated. I was worried that people were quite complicated. And then as I began to dive into the research, I realized that we're actually much more similar than I would have thought. And I'll give you an example. So I did a little experiment. This is maybe about 6 or 7 years ago now. And basically, this experiment was based on the idea that there are universal human truths that everyone thinks they're unique to hold. So everyone has these universal truths about themselves, but they think they're the only one who has them. And so what I did was I wrote up a little fortune based on these 7 statements. It was like, you know, you're the kind of person who loves change, but only when you have a nice steady home base to go back to. That's a statement that most people would agree with. So I made this little fortune and I brought all of my girlfriends over for a little party. And at the party, I had an envelope with each of their names on it sealed. So everyone had an envelope when they walked in. I said, okay, I'd like everyone to grab your envelope. And at the same time, we're going to open them. And I've created a fortune personally written for you. Now, what they didn't know was the fortunes were all exactly the same, right? So I had everyone open up these envelopes. And read the statements quietly to themselves. And I said, okay, I want you to hold up on your hand how close I got, 1 being I'm totally off base, you don't even know me, to 5 being I got you, like I know you deep in your soul. And every single woman there held up a 5, except one of my friends held up a 10. And by the way, my friend who held up a 10, like, started to tear. She— I felt so guilty. She said, Wow, Vanessa, like, we're really new friends. I just, I had no idea that you knew me so well and so deeply. I was like, oh God, like, I felt so guilty. And so I was like, well, guess what, everyone? All of your fortunes are exactly the same. People were so mad. They were so mad at me because they were angry, one, that I had tricked them, but two, they were like, but this is me. But this misfortune is me. And so I think that once I began to realize that there are these universal truths about human behavior that we can learn and study, it gave me a lot of the confidence I had been missing my whole life.
