You 2.0: The Gift of Other People

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 1960s, Madison Avenue was trying to come up with a campaign for a major consumer brand. On a ranch in Wyoming, advertising executives discovered a cowboy who seemed like a perfect fit. His name was Darrell Winfield, and he came across as tough, masculine, self-reliant. His face was soon plastered on billboards across America, Asia, and Africa. Ads showed him riding across rugged landscapes, often in silhouette. As violins played hauntingly in the background, the slogan on screen read, This is Marlboro Country. The campaign to sell Marlboro cigarettes was one of the most effective in the history of advertising. It sold more than just tobacco products. It sold an image of the American West. In urban neighborhoods across the United States, and in crowded cities and poor villages around the world, it offered a seductive vision of independence, self-sufficiency, and freedom. The Marlboro Man told 2 great lies. The first caused untold sickness, disease, and death. Cigarettes are responsible for millions of deaths from lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. But our story today is about the second great lie. The Marlboro Man, and countless other media creations like it, suggest that our best lives are lived when we can be free of the cares, the concerns, and the constraints of other people. Today, we unpack how those themes have been woven into our lives, in the attitudes we have, and in the choices we make. It's also the start of our annual summer series, You 2.0. As we do every year, we will share ideas and wisdom that can help you to thrive and to grow. Unlocking the Science of Meaningful Relationships. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Psychologists and social scientists have have wrestled with the themes of connection and independence for decades. Human beings need one another and crave friendship and social approval, but we also value solitude, silence, and being left alone in peace. At the University of Chicago, psychologist Nicholas Epley has spent many years thinking about this tension. He has come up with innovative ways we can be the best version of ourselves. Nick Epley, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thanks, Shankar. Great to be here.

Nick, you live on the outskirts of Chicago, and you take a long train ride into the city to go to work every day. For years, you followed an unvarying protocol on the train. What did you do?

Oh, I just sat there and ignored everybody. I'd read a book. I'd listen to music. I'd scroll through my phone looking at the news. The kind of thing that everybody else does. You sit down, you leave other people alone.

So one morning many years ago, you stepped onto the train as usual, but something struck you for the first time. What did you find yourself thinking about that day, Nick?

Yeah, I remember this day like a lightning bolt to the brain. I actually had been on that particular day writing a chapter describing how we're made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with others, by, by being social. And yet I kind of looked up that morning and realized for the first time, it just kind of hit me, that here we are, highly social creatures with brains uniquely adapted for connecting to the minds of others, and yet we're all sitting here Ignoring each other. And that struck me as bizarre.

I guess no one really wants to be that guy that opens up a conversation that's an unwanted conversation.

Right. That guy that makes you want to put a pencil through your ear or wish you'd brought headphones with you. You know, that guy who drives you nuts. And so people sit there. And are quiet.

So on this day, you get on the train. You notice the contrast between what you're writing about in the book and what you're seeing in the train compartment. What happens next?

Well, I decided to run an experiment that day. I essentially enrolled myself in my own experiment, at least as a sample of one. And I decided I'd try to have a conversation with somebody that morning. I'd take an interest in somebody else. I'm not— I'm probably not the most inviting-looking person. I'm kind of a big guy. I'm a man. And so, typically, people will get on the train, and they'll take the seats that are open, eventually, until there are no seats left, at which point somebody will have to sit next to me. So, eventually, all the seats are taken, and a woman comes and sits down next to me. She's an African American woman in her probably her mid-50s or so, I would guess. She had on a bright red hat. I remember that very vividly. She sat down next to me, and I decided I'm going to try to get to know a little something about her. And so, I said the first thing that came to my mind, which was a joke, but a compliment at the same time. I complimented her on her hat. I said how much I liked it and that I had one just like it. And we both chuckled. I mean, it wasn't— look, it's probably not the best joke you've ever heard, But that got the conversation started.

Huh.

And from there, it just went. We talked about our careers and our jobs and what we did for a living, but also whether this was really what we wanted to do for a living. I remember her feeling sort of stuck in her job, and it wasn't quite what she wanted to do, and thinking about making a change. She talked a little bit about her family, how she needed to support her family. And, you know, the conversation went really fast. It was about a half an hour trip. It was over really quickly. I was struck by that. And as I got up to leave, I thanked her for taking time to talk to me. She seemed delighted to have talked to me. And as I walked off the train, I remembered 2 feelings. One, that it felt nice and was nicer than what I'd have normally done that morning, which was probably scroll through the news. But the other thing I remembered was that it was surprisingly nice. I was surprised by that, surprised by how nice it was.

There was another time in Nick's life when he found himself surprised by the effect of talking to strangers. He and his wife Jen were expecting a baby. Doctors had run some tests and told Nick that his daughter was likely going to have a genetic disorder.

I remember Jen met me in the breezeway of the house when I got home, and she told me that it was likely that our daughter had Down syndrome. And I remember it almost felt like I was hit in the chest. I kind of fell back against the wall. It was a shock. It was unexpected.

At first, all that Nick wanted was to be left alone with his shock and confusion. He couldn't bear to talk to anyone else.

Whenever you experience a shock like this, you look inward. It's a little bit hard to reach out to people. I'm not quite sure what to talk about or what to say. And so my first instinct was to try to figure this out myself, figure out what best to do. How best to approach this.

In time, however, Nick and Jen did reach out to other parents who had children with special needs. They quickly discovered that strangers were not only willing to talk, but had insights that felt surprisingly useful.

It was actually pretty stunning. Pretty much every person we talked to, at some point in the conversation, used the same word to describe their experience. They all, at some point, used the word blessing to describe the experience of having a child with Down syndrome, that they all considered it to be a major blessing in their lives, one that opened their eyes to—

A gift.

New way of living that they hadn't seen before, that gave them a new perspective on life that they hadn't had before, that brought their family together in a way they would not have guessed before. And for me, hearing these stories from these families, hearing what it was actually like, getting their perspective directly, was very reassuring for me to know that we could do this.

6 months into the pregnancy, Jen suffered a miscarriage. Both she and Nick were devastated. Again, they turned to others for guidance and perspective. In a few months, based on the experience of other parents who had suffered similar tragedies, They decided to do something they would not have dreamed of doing months earlier. They decided to adopt a child with Down syndrome. Jen had done some research and learned that it might be possible to adopt a child from China.

There's quite a community of people who have done this, and we had a lot of conversations before we moved ahead with this. But I would say not, not so much to reassure us that this was the right thing for us to do at this time, but rather to learn more about how this would actually happen and how long this would take.

And did you end up adopting a child from China?

We did. She's a blessing, Shankar. Her name is Lindsay. She is in first grade. She's 8 years old now. This was 5 years ago that we brought her home. We took all of our kids to China when we brought Lindsay home with us. And it's been the most amazing thing that Jen and I have done together in our lives so far. I don't think we would have gotten to the position where we were open, or yet even thought about bringing Lindsay into our lives without reaching out and connecting with other people to essentially be reassured that it would not just be something we could do, but that it'd be a blessing for us. I keep hearing those words. echoing in my mind over and over again that we heard from those families when we talked to them initially.

In time, Nick came to see there was a pattern connecting these different stories. He fully expected he would feel better when he rode the train in silence, but he felt better when he talked to a stranger. He wanted to withdraw into himself when he learned his daughter would have Down syndrome, But when he reached out to strangers, those conversations unexpectedly changed the way he felt. He was not someone who imagined adopting a child with special needs, but talking to other people who had done this revealed to him something about himself that he did not know. When we come back, why we so often seek to walk alone or in silence, and the psychology of what happens when we resist this impulse. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley received word that the baby he and his wife were expecting had Down syndrome, his first impulse was to withdraw from others and go it alone. But he eventually found great comfort and reassurance by hearing about the experiences of other parents. Over time, Nick came to see that this was not an isolated incident. Opportunities for connection present themselves to us every day. In his book, Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want, he explores why our assumptions about people are often off base. Nick, you became increasingly curious about a phenomenon that you started to call undersociality. What is undersociality, Nick?

So I'm kind of struck by what seems like a paradox that's right at the core of human life, that on the one hand, We, as human beings, are deeply social. We're made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting to other people, whether it's strangers or family and friends. And yet, there are so many opportunities in daily life where we could reach out and connect with other people that we don't take. We have a compliment that comes to our mind that we don't share. We feel gratitude to somebody that we don't express. We have somebody we could say hello to or talk to or even just smile to, that we don't. We have meaningful things we want to know about other people, and we don't ask them about it. We don't seem— at least it seemed to me— to be social enough for our own good.

So you started running experiments in the Chicago areas where you actually had commuters do what you did on the train that day. Walk me through one of these experiments. What did you ask your volunteers to do, and what came of it?

Yeah, so the very first one we did was in collaboration with Juliana Schroeder, one of my amazing PhD students at the time, who's now at UC Berkeley. And we went down to Homewood, Illinois, the Metra train station there, which is actually just one stop to the north of where we live in Flossmoor. And we set up a sign on the— way up to the train platform that recruited people to participate in an experiment if they were interested. And we handed them a $5 Starbucks gift card, and then we randomly assigned them to do one of 3 things on the train that morning. In one condition, we asked people to just do whatever they normally do on the train. In the next condition, this is our solitude condition, we asked people to keep to themselves, to just focus on their day ahead and not engage other people in conversation. And in the third condition, we asked people to do the thing that I did on the train that morning, which was when somebody comes and sits down next to you, try to have a conversation. We then handed them an envelope that had their Starbucks gift card in it and a survey in it. And we told them, at the end of your commute, fill out the survey, drop it back in the mail to us. And so off they went.

And what did you find?

So we asked them on the survey a few different things. We asked them, how pleasant was your commute compared to normal? How happy do you feel after this commute? And how sad do you feel? We collapsed these into a single composite, essentially, of how positive their commute was. And what we found was that people actually reported having the most positive experience when they talked to a stranger, and they had the least positive experience in the solitude condition, where we asked them to keep to themselves. The control condition, where people did whatever they normally did, fell in the middle, although in subsequent experiments, we found that Usually, that's more like the solitude condition. We conducted another experiment where we asked people not to tell us how they actually felt after doing these things, but to tell us how they thought they would feel—

Hmm.

—if they were in each of these conditions, essentially to predict how they would feel. And what we found when we did this was that people actually predicted that they would have the least positive experience in the connection condition and the most positive experience in the control And the solitude condition. And those expectations were just precisely wrong.

So you conducted a version of the same study in the London subway system sometime after this. My understanding is that folks in London want to talk to each other on the train even less than folks in Chicago want to do so. Tell me what you found. And I understand that this experiment was coming in the context of some debate about whether people should be talking to one another on trains in London.

Yeah. We were able, through a collaboration with the BBC, to actually run these experiments in a place that's not known for its friendliness, which is London. And in fact, not long before we ran this experiment, a London Tube rider, Jonathan Dunn, actually started a campaign trying to encourage London Tube riders to talk to each other. He called it Tube Chat, and he handed out buttons, and he started a Twitter handle and a Facebook page trying to encourage people to reach out and talk to strangers on the train. And absolute rebellion ensued. There was an alternate Facebook page that was started up, the Shut Up Tube Chat campaign, which handed out their own buttons that discouraged people from talking to other people. Rather drink a pint of bleach than talk to another person? Wear this button! They handed this stuff out. So it didn't seem like London was the friendliest place For us to be running these experiments. And it turned out that Londoners are human beings too. And just like we found in Chicago, those folks who we randomly assigned to be in the connection condition, they reported having the most positive commute. And those folks in the control and the solitude conditions reported having the least positive commute.

Now, hearing about these experiments, I'm imagining that some people will say extroverted people might enjoy talking to strangers. But what about the introverts among us? Does personality play a role here, do you think?

So we've measured this in these experiments, and we don't find that it does. And that's not unique to our research. Psychologists have been doing lots of experiments where they ask people to behave more extrovertedly or more introvertedly. And the very consistent finding is that when people actually do this, people feel happier when they act extroverted than when they act introverted. And that's just as true for folks who are consistently extroverted as it is for folks who are consistently introverted.

Hmm.

As far as we can tell, where introversion and extroversion matters is not in people's experience of social interaction as much as it is in their choices of social interaction. That is, extroverts choose to reach out and engage with others a little bit more often than introverts do. And as a result of choosing to reach out, they tend to be a little bit happier.

Hmm.

In many ways, it seems a little bit like physical exercise, that some of us choose to exercise more than others, even though all of us, regardless of whether we choose to or not, would actually be a little healthier if we exercised more often. Same thing seems to be true with our sociality as well.

So if you were to ask me, if I was sitting on the average bus or plane or train, how many of the people around me would want to actually have a conversation with me, I would not put that number as being very high. I would imagine that most people want to be left to themselves. Now, you've actually studied this. You've actually measured the impressions that people have about how much they think other people want to talk to them. What do you find?

So what we find is that this is the big barrier to reaching out and engaging with other people, or at least is one of them, is believing that other people don't want to talk to you, and hence you might be rejected, or this person might be uninterested. So on the trains in Chicago, and in a subsequent experiment we ran in buses here in Chicago, people thought less than half of the people on the train would be willing to talk to them if they tried. In London, it was even more grim. They thought only about 25% of folks on the trains in London would be willing to talk to you. Now, with at least believed odds like that, you probably wouldn't try to talk to other people either.

Hmm.

So I think that helps to explain in part why folks are reluctant to reach out and engage. They think other people don't want to.

Hmm.

And so you could get a whole carload of people Never trying to talk to somebody else because they think other people don't want to, and then never finding out that they in fact might be wrong about it.

So besides underestimating how much we will enjoy a conversation, how positive we'll feel, When we talk to strangers, we also underestimate how much we will learn from a conversation. What do you find on this front, Nick?

Bill Nye, famous science guy, once said, everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't. And Bill Nye is wise about that. Everybody's got a story for you. Everybody has been through interesting experiences that you haven't been through. But notice when you look at somebody, you can't see that. you see kind of a blank slate. We don't know what we'll learn. And so when we ask people before their conversations with a stranger to anticipate how much they're going to learn in this conversation, we find very consistently that people, they think they're not going to learn a whole lot. And after the conversation, they report learning significantly more, both about the person they're talking to, personal details about them, but also about things in general, whatever it is that you happen to be talking about in the conversation. Hmm.

Later in the day I interviewed Nick, I was at a restaurant with friends. Sitting at the next table were a group of people, and one young man had his son with him. The kid might have been 3, and I thought he looked adorable. I should tell the dad how cute his kid was, I thought. Then I said, Will it be weird for me to tell a stranger I thought his kid was adorable? Nick said something along these lines happened to his own daughter. The two of them were in their kitchen, looking out at the sidewalk in front of their house.

And there was a woman who came down the sidewalk who just had this fabulous hair, just this beautiful, beautiful Afro. She just looked spectacular. And Sian commented on it. And I remember standing in the kitchen kitchen there, telling her, go to the front door and tell her how amazing she looks. And I don't think I could have budged her with a crowbar out of that position. She was just— it was— it just felt so weird to go up and say something like that to somebody, a compliment like that. And I think that's another one of these examples of undersociality. We have a kind thought come to mind. We could pass it along. We'd make them feel great. And yet, yeah, it feels a little weird.

Mm-hmm.

To do that. And so maybe we don't.

And again, when you put people in a study and in effect force them to compliment other people, what do you find?

So in these experiments, we ask people who are out together at some public place in Chicago, we ask one person to write down a compliment about this person that they're with, or sometimes 3 compliments depending on the experiment we're in. that they have, just for whatever reason, never shared with this person before. We then ask them to predict how the person's going to feel when they read this compliment or these compliments. We then bring the person they complimented back to read that compliment, and they report how they actually felt about it, and also how awkward or weird it was, which was often the barrier, right? It's going to be weird to do this. And what we find very consistently is that hearing compliments, even though we know they're going to be positive, to the other person, when people actually hear them, when people actually read them, they're even more positive than we expect they'll be. And in fact, this isn't just our research, but great work by Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bones. They found a similar thing concurrent with us, that when people compliment strangers, they feel better than the compliment givers expect too. The effect seems to be pretty robust.

So there's another form of compliment that many of us are reluctant to offer. And this involves not strangers, but people in our lives, people we're very close to. And that is the idea of the repeated compliment. So maybe you thank someone for doing something nice for you, but they do it again the next week and the week after. And after some time, you start to say, well, maybe the repeated compliment, it'll sound like it's too much. You've done research along these lines as well about repeated compliments. What do you find, Nick?

Well, the fear, of course, is that you'll start to sound like a broken record. If I tell my wife how great she looks and how wonderful her cooking is and how wonderful she is with the kids and how great she is in friendships and whatever. I just— you keep giving somebody compliments, eventually it's going to tire. You're going to adapt to it. And it's reasonable to think this because we do kind of adapt to a lot of stuff. In one experiment, we had people write down 5 compliments to somebody who they were with on a given day. And the next week, we shared one of those compliments each day with the next person.

Hmm.

And before sending those compliments out, the people who wrote them anticipated how positive the recipient would feel receiving those compliments. And we also asked a separate group of people to anticipate how the recipient would feel when they got these compliments. The observers who imagined complimenting this person every day thought the recipient would get tired of it. You know, I get it, you love me, enough. It turned out the recipients, though, they liked it just as much as the day before. We didn't see any consistent decrease in how positive they felt receiving the compliment, in part because each one was unique. And when stuff is different, you don't adapt to that. It stays good all along.

So you're someone who likes to walk the talk. And so you took this research finding back to your own family. And you proposed a new Christmas tradition.

Tell me what the tradition was that you proposed and how it went Yeah, so anybody who is familiar with the Christian tradition will be familiar with the concept of an Advent calendar. It's a thing that you get where you open a little tag every day and there's chocolate behind every day up until Christmas, starting December 1st. Well, this year I decided we would try something else in the family. We would do a compliment calendar in my family. Oh, that's nice. That followed the same sort of Advent tradition, but instead of opening up chocolate every day, it would be a compliment every day. So I asked everybody to write down a compliment about everybody else in the family that they could pass along, and they did 4 of these so that we could stretch it out through the month. So they wrote it down on a piece of paper. I folded that up, bend it over into a ring, and then strung it together into a chain. of these rings. So, every day, you'd tear off one of these rings, open it up, and there would be a compliment.

And how did it go? Did the family embrace the idea? Did they love it?

There was not great enthusiasm at the start of this, I would say. They were pretty confident that this is not going to go well, and I think I'd rather have chocolate instead of these compliments. But once we actually did it, it was great. I still have some of those compliments from that first year we did it sitting in my office at the house. I look at them every day when I'm working at home.

I want to switch gears to another kind of social interaction that we often avoid. You had an extraordinary teacher whom you loved very much Tell me a bit about him, Nick.

So I've been a professor since 2001, and even before then, you know, I was in graduate school for 5 years and was in college for 5 years before that. I've seen amazing teachers over the years, but the most amazing teacher I've ever seen, and the best one I've certainly ever had, was a band teacher at Cedar Rapids Prairie High School in Iowa, which is where I went to high school. Craig Aune is his name. And Mr. Aune was the most passionate teacher I've ever seen. We would march on the field in competitions, and you could hear Mr. Aune yelling from the stands with his own voice, not amplified in any way. And he was just so enthusiastic and encouraging, particularly for a bunch of kids, particularly like me. I was not the easiest kid to teach. I did not care to be in band much at all. I was mostly there to have fun and screw around. And he didn't care. He brought the best out of us, no matter what.

Did you have a chance to tell him that?

You know, I never have. Part of it is that I took him for granted when I was in high school. And it wasn't obvious to me just how amazing he was until I spent so many years watching other people being amazing teachers in their own right, but still not reaching that level. So it wasn't until I got older that I really appreciated just how great he was. And by that time, he had retired, and I wasn't sure how to reach out and express that to him.

You once ran a study where you asked volunteers to send a gratitude letter to someone in their lives. I'm assuming, as in the previous examples, most people misperceived the effect this letter would have on the recipients.

That's part of the thing too for me with Mr. Ani is that it's been so many years that reaching out, out of the blue, Just feels like it's going to be weird. What often gets in the way is our concern or anxiety about how the other person might respond. What exactly will I say? Will I get the words just right? So the depth of appreciation that I feel for Mr. Ani is so intense. Am I going to say that right, or is it not going to do it justice? So there are all these fears or anxieties that we have about how well we'll be able to do this that sometimes hold us back. And what we find is that when we ask people to actually do this, whether it's my MBA students here at the University of Chicago who I've asked to do this in a class demonstration for years now, or just folks out there in the world we ask to do this, people tend to underestimate how positively their recipient is going to respond. They recognize it'll be great, but it turns out this is like One of the best letters you'll ever receive in your life.

Nick's research shows that we systematically underestimate how much we will enjoy connecting with people and how meaningful our outreach will feel to others. But no matter how many times we see this, No matter how many times the data confirms this, it can still feel as though we'd be better off keeping to ourselves. When we come back, how to combat our false intuitions. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Nicholas Epley is a psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research suggests that every day we have a choice to make. Do we strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to us on the train or plane? Or do we keep our eyes fixed on our phones and laptops? Do we offer compliments and gratitude to the people who matter in our lives? Or do we assume that they already know how we feel? Do we keep our views on sensitive topics to ourselves or open ourselves up to difficult but meaningful conversation? Nick, you said that we face what you call approach or avoid decisions all the time in social life. What do you mean by this? And what is your advice?

So I think of this as the choice, not just every day of our lives, but depending on where we are and what we're doing, sometimes every hour of our lives, every 5 minutes of our lives. And these choices, these social choices, often involve a tension between the desire to approach, to connect, but also the fears we have that sometimes lead us to avoid other people. This approach-avoidance dynamic is fundamental to our motivation, We see this across species. This is kind of how motivation works, is a tension between these 2 systems in our own brains. And what we find in our research is that the inputs into those 2 motivational systems tilts us more towards avoidance than I think would be optimal for us.

So you say that we can push back against being undersocial by actively looking for what you call affordances. opportunities to become more social. You recently identified an affordance for social interaction when a pear tree on your property needed picking. Tell me the story, Nick.

Yeah. So I've got a little orchard behind our house. We've got one tree in particular. It's an Asian pear tree. It just pours fruit. We get wheelbarrows full of Asian pears in the fall. And they're great, but they're also a pain in the neck because there are like 500 of these things. And so most years, We'd pick all these pears, and then we would have, you know, wheelbarrows and buckets full of Asian pears that we would try to eat for months as best we could. And then there were hundreds that we would try to give away to people.

Hmm.

This last fall, though, we invited essentially the whole neighborhood over for a pear-picking party. And I have a tractor that's got a bucket on it. We brought that to the house, and I was lifting the kids up into the tree in the bucket, and we had a ladder. up into the tree that kids were climbing up, and everybody had buckets. We spent hours, kids playing with each other on our trampoline. We just turned it into a party. And it turned that experience that otherwise would have been kind of arduous and isolating into one that was really, really fun.

So when it comes to strangers, not neighbors, not friends, not relatives, but strangers, the hardest part of reaching out is often the moment of reaching out. Talk a moment about how we can get over that hump.

An illustrative example comes from this great experiment, one I just love, from Gillian Sandstrom, Erica Boothby, and Gus Cooney, where they had people play a scavenger hunt over the course of a week. They were shown a whole bunch of different challenges, people that they were to identify and were asked to go out and have a conversation with. So top hat was one. Find somebody with a hat. Go have a conversation with them. Manscaped, find somebody with a beard, go have a conversation with them. And what they found over the course of this week was that people enjoyed these conversations more than they expected. And over the course of the week, they learned, but they also found more opportunities for engaging with other people over the course of the week than they had at the beginning of the week. Once you start looking for social affordances, ways to reach out and connect with people, once you start taking an interest in other I think opportunities start to emerge, opportunities you wouldn't have thought of before. And that, I think, involves or requires just changing your mindset a little bit. Once you start taking an interest in other people, paying attention to them, opportunities to engage will crop up. You'll notice a shirt that you can compliment somebody on. You'll notice that somebody's got a sticker on their backpack from a place you visited that you can ask them about. You'll realize, like I do in the morning when I'm walking, that if I see somebody's door open, that's a chance for me to say hi to them and just lift up that start of their day just a little bit more. You'll start seeing things that you hadn't seen before. I certainly do in my own life. So that's one, I think, important first step.

So when we do manage to get over the hump and talk to strangers, we often restrict ourselves to small talk. We talk about sports. We talk about the weather. You say that this can sometimes be a mistake. And in fact, you've run experiments on making a choice between small talk and deep talk. What do you find, Nick?

Well, like many of these social situations where you have to think about, do I reach out and approach this person or avoid? Once you've decided to approach somebody, once you're having a conversation with somebody, you have to decide what to talk about. So when you ask people, The word small talk and hate are often in close proximity to each other. Nobody likes small talk, and yet we find ourselves doing a lot of it. And what we find in our work is that stems not so much from not wanting to have deeper conversations. When you ask people to generate topics of conversation that are deeper than they normally do, they come up with some pretty good stuff. They'll ask people, what do you regret most in your life? Or what do you want to be known for? What are you most proud of? They come up with meaningful stuff. That doesn't seem to be too hard. Instead, the barrier seems to be anxiety about what will happen if I actually open up and ask this deep stuff.

Hmm.

And this, again, is misplaced fear to some extent. We find that they think it's going to be more awkward than it actually is. They think they'll have less in common with another person than they find themselves to have. And they think they'll enjoy it less than they actually do.

Have you ever had these conversations or attempted a conversation or attempted to launch into a deep topic and been rebuffed, Nick?

I can't think of one. I've asked other people this too, and people often can't think of them. So it's not that I can't imagine it happening. I can imagine it happening. But let me give you an example from My train ride just the other morning. There's a man sitting on the second level of the train on the side. I'd seen him before, once before, and he looked just sharp as could be, wearing a bow tie and a suit. He was killing it. And I told him that. I said, you look awesome today. Whatever you're doing, you're going to nail it. And I asked him, would you be up for talking this morning? And he said, yeah, of course. And I introduced myself. And then I just said, tell me about yourself. Why are you here and what are you doing? And it turned right away from kind of a trivial conversation we could have had—

Hmm.

—to having him tell me about difficult upbringing he'd had on the South Side of Chicago, this program he'd gotten into that really turned his life around, difficulties he had. with his father towards the end of his life, this amazing job opportunity he got at Northwestern on the north side of town. And it happened because I took an interest in him. And when you take an interest in another person, you're really genuinely interested in them, they tend to open up back to you. I cannot think of a time where I've tried to really connect meaningfully with somebody in conversation, and they've said no.

Hmm. And you actually recommend that when people have these conversations, they try and reach for a deep question sooner rather than later.

Yeah. So psychologists have long shared the intuition that I think most of us do too, which is that deep stuff, Finding out what really matters to somebody or what's really important to them, that you cannot really only talk about that to a friend, that you can't engage new folks with that quickly. It takes a long runway, right? It's like a 747 taking off. You just, you gotta run slow along the ground for a while before you raise your intimacy level. You know, it's It's like taking the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building. That's what we think of it as.

Yeah.

But I don't think that's quite right. I think you can press the elevator to a more meaningful and deep floor pretty quickly, get right up to the top without beating around the bush a lot. And I see it happen over and over again in my conversations. You take an interest in somebody, you ask about something they really care about, they're happy to talk to you about it, typically.

So once at a gathering of high-level financial folks, you decided to see what would happen if you asked the executives to have deep conversations with one another. How did the exercise play out, Nick?

Yeah, so this was the very first time I tested experimentally In a very public setting, what happens when people go deep quickly in conversation? I was at a conference at a hedge fund in Connecticut, standing in front of a room of just a little over 50 people, all, like, super serious banker types. They were all, you know, wearing suits I could never have afforded. I kind of thought I'd been brought in as the sideshow for this math-heavy, quant jock kind of thing. Decision-making conference, and I decided that I was going to run an experiment with them where I had them have a deep and meaningful conversation with somebody else. That instead of doing the slow runway up to something deep and meaningful, we were going to start right away with something deep and meaningful. And so I told them, "In just a minute, I'm going to pair you up with somebody else in this room." They didn't know each other, and I put four questions up on. The screen. Things like, if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? If a crystal ball could tell you anything about the future, what would you want to know? And the last question I had up there was, can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person?

Wow.

Yeah. Wow. So as soon as I put these up on the screen, it felt like You know, somebody just sucked the air right out of the room. These people were not enthused, right? These were like my kids here, and we're going to do the compliment calendar for Christmas this year. They did not want to do this. A guy in the front swore. He said, oh, and then issued an expletive as soon as he saw the words up on the screen. Everybody else started kind of rumbling and grumbling. I felt like I was in a canoe. right at the top of a waterfall, and I was just seeing over the edge, and this was gonna go downhill fast. I was, you know, I tried to play it cool on the outside, but I was nervous as could be on the inside. I pushed forward and told them we're gonna pair them up, and we did, gave them cards with these questions on it and let them go. And I was just a nervous wreck about this. Most of these people, you know, like 85% of them were men, super serious older folks who did not come to this conference to bare their soul to some other person. But after a few minutes, the room just— it was like I'd flipped a switch on their backs or something. They kind of started coming to life. They were laughing with each other. And I was going to let them talk for 10 minutes, but at 10 minutes, the room was very loud. Everybody was talking. They were having a good time, and there was no way I was going to get them out of those conversations. About 5 minutes later, I started shouting into my microphone that we had just a few minutes left. I finally was able to corral them at about 20 minutes by doing a trick I heard from my kids' kindergarten teacher, counting down very loudly from 5. When you hit 1, they usually are quiet. And so I had to do that. And what was just startling to me Was the shift in the feeling in that room from the start of it, which was just absolute dread, to the end where I could hardly pull them apart. There was one group I saw where one of the 2 guys was in tears. I saw another guy hugging another guy at the end of their session. Everybody was shaking hands as they left. The whole mood in that room brightened. That move from dread to delight at the end. I'd never seen anything like that happen, that kind of switch. After the conversation, I had them tell me how it actually felt, and the gap between the expectations before and the experiences after were massive.

Nicholas Epley is a psychologist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He's the author of Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. Nick, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thanks, Shankar.

If you have follow-up questions for Nick Epley that you'd be willing to share with members of the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas@hbr.harvard.edu. That email address again is ideas@hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty, and please use the subject line Connecting. If you want to write out a question, please be sure to tell us how to pronounce your name. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Quirrell, and Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love the ideas we bring you on Hidden Brain, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. It's where you'll find conversations you won't hear anywhere else, along with our segment, Your Questions Answered, where we bring back guests to respond to your follow-up questions about their work. To try a 7-day free trial of Hidden Brain Plus, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain or support.hiddenbrain.org. We truly appreciate your interest in our work. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.