Our Untapped Superpower: Connecting With Others, with Nicholas Epley

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Why do we avoid talking to people that we've never met?

[00:00:04]>> It is the paradox that I've become obsessed with. We underestimate how positively other people will respond to us when we try to reach out to them and as a result can choose to avoid interacting with people in ways that would otherwise be good for us. So, we avoid talking to strangers. That's Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He's the author of a new book called A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection. So, we find, at least in our work, that there's a social psychological misunderstanding.

[00:00:42]We misunderstand how other people will respond to us. We're more pessimistic than reality warrants. But as a result, that pessimism leads us to be avoidant.

[00:00:51]And when we avoid interactions, we don't learn that our pessimism might be wrong.

[00:00:55]And often times when we do go out of our way to talk to strangers, we make small talk and don't necessarily try to make a deeper connection. Stick to shallow conversations once we're talking because we think other people aren't that interested in having a more deep and meaningful conversation. And we're wrong about that. We underestimate the extent to which other people want to have the same kind of meaningful conversations that we'd like to have. So, what if talking to the person sitting next to you on the train on your commute home from work or the barista at the coffee shop could surprisingly become the most meaningful conversation of your day. We do have choices to reach out and engage with other people. Some of social connection is a choice. And how we choose to connect with others or hold back from them does have powerful consequences for our happiness and also for our health. And Epley has seen this repeatedly in his research. Having meaningful conversations can not only improve your well-being, but also your health and even your happiness. No research I've ever been involved with has changed the way I live my life more than this. Recognizing that other people are often delightful and happy to talk when you try. From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, the show where we explore the groundbreaking research and discoveries that are transforming our world.

[00:02:20]I'm your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs on today's episode, the power of social connection and how it could benefit our lives.

[00:02:33]If you appreciate hearing from experts in research and science who are shaping our world, please consider subscribing to the Big Brains YouTube channel. It ensures you never miss an episode and helps these important conversations reach a broader audience of learners.

[00:02:49]This is your second book and I'm wondering when did you come along and say, "I I've got to say something else and and what was it that you felt you had to say or that you thought we had to hear? the results we were seeing in our work. It's really the only big idea I've ever had about these ideas around social connection. I keep coming back to it over and over again. And I thought we were learning something that I felt like I just had had to tell people about.

[00:03:18]>> Your book opens with a story and about about a woman, Marinella Beretta. Um, and I wonder if you could tell us who she is and why you started the book this way.

[00:03:28]Yeah. So, Marinellis shows up in the first chapter of the book um about the uh which is the chapter about social social connection and this is an interesting case. Uh this is this happened in Italy where there had been a storm and um firefighters and police officers were just out going through the community just trying to make sure everybody was okay. and they they came up out of a house and they they looked inside and they found a woman there um who did indeed need some help, but they were way too late. They estimated the woman had died sitting at a kitchen table two years before. The quote from the mayor of the town that she lived in is is I I thought was so insightful. She said the tragedy of of this death is not that is not that nobody knew that she died. It was that nobody knew that she was alive.

[00:04:27]And that is such a distinctly modern experience to be able to now live in a world where you can be so independent on any given day. You could go through your life for years and not nec, you know, be so disconnected from people that folks might not know that you were no longer with them. And and that for most of human history, we lived in kind of small groups and you were around people and know you could go off, you know, into the wilderness or something and and be lost, but people would know you were missing.

[00:04:59]And now on any given day, you can spend your whole day without seeing anybody if you wanted to. You can get up and you can work from home. You can order your groceries online, deliver to the store, touch free, right? You entertain yourself at night, reading books, watching movies on Netflix, never have to have any social connection. We have we have choices about our social lives that we never used to be able to have. And I think our research suggests that that choice can sometimes get us into trouble. Well, you know, one of the things that that to me was shocking in reading this and then talking a little bit about some of the connecting tissue around loneliness and the numbers of not only older people like Marinella maybe feeling loneliness, but the numbers that were truly shocking to me were people younger people's feelings of loneliness.

[00:05:48]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they So just a couple of years ago the numbers flipped.

[00:05:52]So, it had always been that older people were lonelier than younger people. But during COVID and shortly after those numbers flipped, more young people reported feeling lonely than older people. And that is that's nothing that's nothing we've seen in the last 50 plus years where we've been surveying these these kinds of things. That is quite a shocking reversal.

[00:06:11]>> And we we're going to dig into this, but but this is not simply a matter of choice or not choice. There are direct health implications, mental and physical, that go onto this.

[00:06:21]>> Oh, there are. So there are consequences. It's the when I say it's choice or not choice that we do have choices to reach out and engage with other people. Some of social connection is a choice and how we choose to connect with others or hold back from them does have powerful consequences for our happiness and also for our health. And these are kind of staggering.

[00:06:39]Psychologists for decades thought that social connection was sort of a luxury good. Yes. Abe Maslo famously put it in his pyramid of needs up at the third level. like if you needed you needed food and and and safety, then you needed security and then you could start caring about belonging, social stuff. And you know, in the Harvard famous Harvard longitudinal study that looked at uh young men graduating from Harvard College in the 1930s and followed them over the course of their lives, they were measuring all kinds of things to predict long-term success. And the relational measures, how well connected they were to other people, relationship variables were kind of an afterthought.

[00:07:18]They just they had them. They just they just threw some in just because they didn't think any of that would matter.

[00:07:23]They measure ma m measured all these other objective qualities of these young men. And in the end it was only the relationship variables that really predicted the quality of their lives.

[00:07:33]And and for Maslo um also that his hierarchy of needs has never had really any empirical support. We have a collection of needs that matter for us and some of which are quite basic. But belonging um operates in the very same kind of way that the need for food or sex or other sorts of basic needs does too. When we are missing it, we crave it and it hurts us and our body sends us signals that this is a problem and you need to do something about it and it's a stressor and that stressor makes us unhappy and makes us sick. It makes us die younger even. Well, you you talk about that that that we are deeply social animals, but routinely you say we avoid being social. So, >> there's a disconnect there. Why is that?

[00:08:20]>> Yep. That disconnect is the thing that's obsessed me for pushing 20 years now. It is the it is the paradox that I've become obsessed with. I think we we have I think what is at least part of an answer to that that we underestimate how positively other people will respond to us when we try to reach out to them and as a result can choose to avoid interacting with people in ways that would otherwise be good for us. So we avoid talking to strangers. We find uh at least partly because we think other people aren't that interested in connecting with us and so we hold back and avoid. We stick to shallow conversations once we're talking because we think other people aren't that interested in having a more deep and meaningful conversation. And we're wrong about that. We underestimate the extent to which other people want to have the same kind of meaningful conversations that we'd like to have. We um we can do acts of kindness for other people that connect us with them, but we think it doesn't matter as much as it actually does. Express our gratitude uh but we underestimate how positively it'll leave people feeling. So, so we find at least in our work that there's a social psychological misunderstanding.

[00:09:28]We misunderstand how other people will respond to us. We're more pessimistic than reality warrants. But as a result, that pessimism leads us to be avoidant.

[00:09:37]And when we avoid interactions, we don't learn that our pessimism might be wrong.

[00:09:41]You and I are both talking from Chicago, and at least I have spent plenty plenty plenty of time on commuter trains, but you did an experiment with Juliana Schroeder on the Chicago trains, and I wonder if you could tell us about that and the data that you got and why it was a bit surprising. Yeah. So the so all of this work that goes into a little more social I mean my interest in social cognition and mind readading how we understand the minds of others is longstanding. But I I had this eureka moment one morning on the train when I was commuting in on the metra uh which I do every day when I go into work and was writing a chapter from for my last book for mind was and sitting there um describing how we got these brains uniquely equipped for connecting with other people made happier and healthier by connecting and and yet looked around on the train and here we all were ignoring each other. Right? And that's exactly the kind of behavior that gets psychologists thinking, why are we doing this? Like is it >> does this make sense to him? Why can I how can I explain what's going on here?

[00:10:43]Um and so we started running some experiments on the on the trains and and they were very simple. The the first ones that we did, we recruited one group of people and uh this is from the Homewood, Illinois train station. So just north of where I live, I'm in Flossmore on the far south side.

[00:10:58]Homewood is just north of us. It's got an underground entryway which is critical so that your research assistants when we're running this in February in Chicago do not freeze to death. Juliana did not want to freeze to death and so we went to that one underground and um we recruited people and randomly assigned them commuters randomly assigned them to do one of three things on the on the train that morning. either to keep to themselves in solitude, just focus on their day ahead, to do whatever they normally do, which is typically keep to themselves and focus on their day ahead. Or the third condition, we asked them to try to have a conversation when a person comes and sits down next to them, right? Try to make a connection. Okay? We then gave them a survey. This was back in the old days. Now we do this on surveys, but this was uh like 2011, 2012, right in there. And so they had uh they had paper surveys that we gave them. They open up the envelope at the end of their commute, pulled out their $5 Starbucks gift card, which was their incentive for participating, and then they filled out this survey essentially reporting how well the the commute had gone, how pleasant it was compared to normal, how happy they felt, how sad they felt. And what we found was that the commuters randomly assigned to try to have a conversation with a stranger actually reported having the best commute. And those we randomly assigned to keep to themselves and focus on their day ahead reported having the worst commute, the least positive. But when we recruited another sample of commuters and asked them to predict how they would feel, the reason why people choose not to connect became clear. Because when we asked people to predict how they would feel, they predicted exactly the opposite results. They thought they'd be happiest keeping to themselves and thought they'd be the least happy talking to a stranger. And their beliefs just weren't wrong. They were precisely backwards.

[00:12:41]But people were behaving that in in a perfectly rational way in alignment with them. They were following their beliefs about what would make them happy. It's just those beliefs were were off.

[00:12:52]>> Well, you talk about it as is the choice.

[00:12:55]>> Yes.

[00:12:56]>> Um what's the choice?

[00:12:58]>> The most important choice we make in our daily lives is the choice, the decision to reach out and engage with somebody to approach them or to hold back and avoid them. Our social lives depend on how we make that choice over and over and over again in our lives.

[00:13:13]>> Well, one of the things that I I'm willing to bet many of our listeners are familiar with was the whole idea of the 36 questions and and I wonder if you can tell us about walking into a room of hedge fund executives, what they looked like and what it felt like in that room.

[00:13:29]>> These questions came from Art and Elaine Aaron back in the 1990s. They developed a procedure in the lab to make people closer. It was a series of questions of escalating intimacy. They actually thought you needed a long runway to do this.

[00:13:42]>> I actually I think that's actually not true. Um and they also had a a bunch of other beliefs about what connects people. They thought you had to be similar to each other and really be trying to connect. None of that was true. All that mattered was are you asking meaningful questions? Are you discussing meaningful stuff or not? And so I was interested in in why if these deep conversations are better, just like if our commutes when we connect with someone are better, why are we so rarely asking people if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? Or can you tell me about one of the last times, Paul, that you cried in front of another person? I'm betting you've never asked somebody that or at least not that not that way. Why aren't if those are the things that connect us, why aren't we having those conversations, right?

[00:14:29]So, um I thought I would test it to find out a little like I did on the trains and I had run a lab study on this and so I had some I wasn't just coming totally out of the blue. You know, our undergrads when they asked deeper conversations, they underestimated how positively it would go and so they thought it would be more awkward than it actually was was that they wouldn't connect as much as they actually did.

[00:14:52]Um, and those gaps were bigger for the deep conversations than they were for smaller, you know, small talk. But to go out and run it in the wild is a different animal. And I was out speaking at a uh at a conference, a financial decision-making conference at a hedge fund on the east coast. And I thought, I'm going to run this here for real as part of my session. And right, the folks who were in the session, they they did not know what they were in for, right?

[00:15:17]These are all like pension fund managers, you know, Seale executives running these massive funds. They're here for, you know, quant jock upbringing. That's what they want. They want to have their math skills tweaked.

[00:15:32]And here was Tetyfey going to come in and have them talk about the last time they cried. So, they didn't know what what was coming. Um I started into my talk a little ways in I told him we're going to I'm going to run an experiment with you right now um to show you some of these effects rather than just tell you about them. And of course in my in my own mind I was like you know 51% confident maybe that it would work. And I thought, >> you know, I I thought this will probably work, but the the con the confidence I had on it was low and this could go really well or this could be a total nightmare. Like the worst talk I've ever done, but you you know, you never get anything without swinging. So, I put these questions up on the board. Um, you know what? Uh, if a crystal ball could tell you anything about your life, what would you want to know? You know, and and can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? I put this up on the screen.

[00:16:26]Tell people in just a minute. I'm going to pair him up with another person to have a conversation about this. And I'll never ever forget this. Toby Moscowitz, one of our faculty was sitting in the front row of this talk. And right next to him was some other guy WHO HOLLERED OUT, "AH, SHIT." as soon as he as soon as I put that up on the screen. I apologize for any young listeners here.

[00:16:43]That is the truth of what happened. And the whole the whole group just erupts in laughter, right? And I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be a nightmare." Uh, nevertheless, we continue. They go to a survey. They tell me how they think the conversation's going to go. They think it's going to be terrible. I pair them up. They start talking and I'm telling the guy who's running it. Let's let him talk for like 10 minutes or so, then we'll bring him back. Well, at 10 minutes, I mean, the room was on fire. Like, I've never seen a room switch like thising >> being kind of dull and dower >> to just coming alive. These folks were deep in conversation with each other. I said, "Okay, well, let's wait another five minutes. It was still going strong and then I'm struggling for the next minutes. Two minutes left and I probably said two minutes left, you know, three minutes in a row, >> right?

[00:17:35]>> But then once they were talking, they didn't want to stop.

[00:17:37]>> I mean, folks, >> tell you >> it tells people, it told me just like on the trains that our beliefs about these social interactions aren't just wrong, they're really wrong. People want these kinds of conversations. It's not that they don't. You ask people, "How deep do you want your conversations to be? how deep are the conversations you're having. They say, "I'd like much deeper conversations than I'm having." It's not that they don't want to have them. It's that they think other people don't want to have them, right? And they're really, really wrong about that. Once they actually take an interest in another person and they try having this conversation, they find other people are often just as willing and happy to open up and engage with them as as they as they would imagine they would um would be. And so so those are those those expectations are way off in ways too that keep us stuck in way too much small talk uh in our lives. This is a hypothesis we're just starting to look at. In fact uh as we're talking today the data just came in this morning for this master's project that we're working on uh where we hypothesize that people are actually more willing to open up and reveal things like secrets to strangers than they are to people that they know that they know well. I think there's a strong intuition that that's that that's likely true. Yes, >> I I suspect we will confirm that and we're going to try to understand why that is. I do think though that there is something that can be magical about strangers that people really don't utilize. You introduced a new term in this book. There's a few actually. One was homoialis, if I'm saying that correctly. And you think that that's better than homo sapiens. Tell me what homoialis means. It it highlights the inherent sociality of our nature. That's what really makes us special uh is our ability to connect with other pe people.

[00:19:21]That's the reason Paul why we have such big brains in fact uh is because it's required for a highly social species to be able to live in these complicated social networks that require you to know who to trust and who to approach and who to avoid and to remember who knows what and to create these cooperative alliances. that requires a lot of neural capacity and our great big brains show that. So you see the social nature of our beings etched into the size of our brains relative to our near nearest nearest primate ancestors. We're also supero in that we can care for non-kin in ways that other species just do not to the same degree. So I mean look all of these are matters of degree. other other primate species also think about the minds of of of other primates too but not to a level that we do and that's also true of caring um you know kin selection gets you a long ways uh in in evolutionary terms but we do things that no other primate species does at least to the same degree we care about strangers right we adopt non-kin into our family like you know we have done three times into my family and they become part of your family every bit the same teaching MBA students. You've lectured to hedge fund managers and others. I'm willing to bet at least one person in those groups thinks that money is going to buy them happiness.

[00:20:45]>> Sure.

[00:20:45]>> Uh and and and there is a famous study with with Conorman and Deon that looked at this question and maybe it was relevant to those groups. Can you talk about that study and and what surprised surprised you about it? So there are lots of data that look like the Conaman and Deon study or the that their paper.

[00:21:04]Um what what Conoran and Deon though did what they had that others don't was the ability to compare the effect of money on happiness compared to lots of other things. And that's what makes it interesting. So Conoran and Deon this is a 2010 paper. Danny uh Conorman and and Angus Deon were both Nobel Prize winners in economics although neither of them were economists uh themselves. Um, and what they did was they analyzed the Gallup daily well-being survey. So, every day Gallup surveys a few thousand people and basically ask, "Hey, how were you doing yesterday?" That's kind of what it is. They they look back yesterday and and they're asked questions about, you know, were you did you did you smile yesterday? Were you feeling happy yesterday? Were you feeling stressed yesterday? A bunch of questions about well-being, both positive and and negative. And they then ask a whole bunch of other questions, too, like how much money do you make?

[00:21:53]Um, did you feel alone yesterday? Is it a weekend or a weekday? Are you religious or not? These kinds of questions. And what Conor and Deon did was is they can then create they can they can find out how big of an effect does the amount of money that you make matter for your say positive a effect you know right? So smiling yesterday enjoy feeling enjoyment yesterday that's what the measure of well-being is. And they found that yes money does bring some happiness. Yes it does. Right. That is like a one item IQ test. Yes, absolutely does. Most of the effect is down on the lower end. It it peers out.

[00:22:30]It continues to rise logarithmically.

[00:22:33]What that means is very slowly, but all of the action is really down on the on the low end of this. Getting out of poverty, >> getting your needs covered.

[00:22:41]>> Exactly. Being poor really stinks.

[00:22:44]>> Being wealthy is better than than being moderately wealthy, but not not so much.

[00:22:48]Um and you know, so but the effect is there, but it's not it's not huge. Um, but then what they could do was they could compare the effect of being relatively wealthy or poor against being relatively high or low on a bunch of other variables too, like did you report spending the entire day alone yesterday?

[00:23:08]And you can now compare people who are relatively high or low in income and they did this by doing basically a median split on their data. Now you've got an index variable there and you can compare the effect size, the difference between those two groups between say the difference in people who reported feeling alone yesterday versus or being alone yesterday versus not being alone yesterday. And it turns out the difference in that alone question between being alone yesterday versus not seven times bigger effect on your reported positive affect yesterday than being relatively high or low in income.

[00:23:45]>> Yeah. Big number.

[00:23:47]>> So it's not that money doesn't matter.

[00:23:49]Of course money matters, right? Money matters. But the really big thing that matters is am I with other people or am I alone? What are my social relationships like? And time and time again it's a little hard to say, you know, is are social relationships more important than than than money.

[00:24:04]Certainly some analyses like this one show that they are and way more important. But but these are kind of apples to oranges comparison. The easy thing to say is that if I want to know how happy you're feeling in your life, how satisfied you are in your life, a really important thing, arguably the number one thing I want to know is what are your relationships like?

[00:24:25]>> How much time are you spending alone?

[00:24:27]>> That's going to matter. Well, I I think you've done a really great job of setting the foundation for the need and the importance of of social connection.

[00:24:36]Um, and you also get into the book that that there are some things that can be done. Um, if you if you people look at this and say, you know, I get it, >> but I I'm just uncomfortable with it.

[00:24:48]>> What do you tell them?

[00:24:49]>> Yeah. First place I would suggest to start is to change a little bit how you're thinking about happiness and well-being. I think this is really important. You can then look back to yesterday, say, and do what we refer to as a choice audit. Were there moments where you were keeping to yourself, just kind of wasting time, but you could have connected with somebody else? You could have picked up the phone and called somebody maybe when you were commuting home on, you know, in the car or you're sitting in a, you know, you're walking through the hallway of your office and you could have invited somebody to come to coffee with you and you didn't. or, you know, I'm riding on the commute on my way in on the train in the morning and I I could have said hi to Susan sitting next to me or Harold across the way from me. Um, but I didn't, right?

[00:25:29]And there you'll start to see things you can work on, little actions you can do.

[00:25:34]And that's where you start. The >> point of doing any of these things is is a fear of rejection. Um, and you tell a story about somebody that decided he was going to go with that sensitivity training on rejection and just make sure he never felt bad about it again.

[00:25:51]>> Yeah. Yeah. This is one of my favorites.

[00:25:53]I've gotten to known know this guy quite quite well. Uh, we've had a number of conversations. Gia Yiang is his name. He wrote he wrote the book called uh Rejection Proof, which I recommend to people and and there are videos online.

[00:26:05]If you go to rejection theapy.com, you'll see some of these videos. Yeah.

[00:26:09]He decided that um he he was an aspiring entrepreneur but was too nervous about being rejected. And he decided he was going to follow the cognitive behavioral therapy protocol of exposure therapy which means essentially throwing yourself at your fears and experiencing them over and o over again. Well, he did those things. He developed, you know, he he he did this over a hundred times. In fact, he videotaped them all and the videos are priceless. He's posted them online. He starts off being successful.

[00:26:39]He tries to get rejected and he does.

[00:26:40]First thing he does, he goes and asks a ask some as a security guard working outside a bank if he could borrow a hundred bucks. The guy kind of laughs and chuckles and says, "No, I'm sorry. I don't have 100 bucks to loan you right now." Um, and G walks away and he says, "You know, that wasn't that bad. I was rejected, but it like didn't hurt nearly as much as I thought it would."

[00:27:03]By day three, he starts to fail. And this one is beautiful. He's in Atlanta.

[00:27:08]He goes into a crispy cream doughnut store and asked a woman asked a woman behind the counter if he could get uh crispy cream donuts in the shape of the Olympic rings, right? And she doesn't remember what the colors are and and he's sits down. She starts writing down the shapes. He's sure he's going to get rejected, right? Just 100% she's going to say, you know, get out of here. We don't do that, idiot. Um, but no, she sits down like in her thinker pose. You ready? You see it on the video. She's trying to process this. She says, "Give me 15 minutes. I'll come back." 15 minutes. She comes back with a box of the She's almost embarrassed though because she thought she could have done a better job. But these donuts are beautiful colored, you know, five rings interlocking.

[00:27:53]It was amazing. and and and in the voiceover of his video he says something to the effect it's I quote it in the book but I don't have it top of mind right now something to the effect of you know and this is why humanity is worth saving >> right >> and and he continues right and by the end of it we actually analyzed all his videos he didn't know this he he didn't know this he was actually his his outlandish requests go to a a private um um uh uh airline, you know, private airirst strip airport and ask if he could co-pilot a plane. He's never flown one before. Yes, he can do that. He's in Southwest uh getting onto a flight and asks, "Can I do the safety announcement?" No, he can't do that, but you can get up and address the plane if you want. Um you know, he he he goes up to a house in Texas and asks the guy, "Can can you take a picture of me playing soccer in your backyard?" No problem. He walks up to a woman. He's got a a a rose, a potted rose. Can I plant this rose in your front yard?

[00:28:55]She's delighted by it. Just over and over again. And it turns out that his outlandish requests are accepted more often than they are rejected. He's actually accepted 51 times, 48 times.

[00:29:08]It's a no. But even out of those nos, many of them were very gentle. Almost none were negative. I think we detected negativity in only seven of the rejections. Most of them were super nice or you know they were doing things like couldn't do one thing he asked but they they allowed him to do something else.

[00:29:25]He goes into Costco and he asked to to speak over the loudspeaker to tell everybody how much he loves Costco and how how proud he is of all the workers and the manager says look I can't have you do that but we can sit down and have pizza here. So he comps him lunch and he gets to talk to the manager about how much he loves Costco. Right. So, Gia, he said that he did in fact lose his fear of rejection, but not because he developed thicker skin, but because he learned that other people are just way more helpful and kinder than he thought they were. It changed not himself, but his view of human nature.

[00:30:03]>> And he came to describe that to me later when we were talking about it. He said, "Nick, I've come to feel like I have a superpower that other people don't have.

[00:30:11]>> I'm just not afraid of other people."

[00:30:13]That's really cool, >> right?

[00:30:16]And of course, I got that from >> that. That brings me to what I think is your third virtue, which is honesty.

[00:30:23]>> And in talking about honesties, you do make a distinction between self-protective lies and what you call pro-social lies.

[00:30:32]>> Yeah.

[00:30:32]>> Tell me why that honesty is a virtue in your world.

[00:30:37]>> Yeah. So this this work here this chapter is really based very heavily on on work that my colleague a wonderful colleague at Booth Em Lavine has done but lots of other researchers as well. I talk about Michael Slepian who studies secrecy for instance in that in that chapter and we often think about lies in ways that are harmful to other people. They're selfish lies. I'm lying to you to protect myself in some way or I'm lying to you to mislead you in some way. But there's a whole another category of lies of deception um that are benevolent lies or white lies they're called, right?

[00:31:12]Which are meant to not actually hurt you, but to help you. So, you know, a student hands me this paper and I think it's terrible, but I don't think the student could handle that. So, I actually tell the student it's great.

[00:31:25]Right? Um this is a case where you have an ethical dilemma, right? where, as Emma points out, benevolence, the desire to be kind to somebody, and honesty, the desire to be truthful to somebody, come in conflict with each other. Right? And what Emma documents though is that who's the one who sits down with you and says, "Paul, you know, that that that talk you gave just wasn't as good as it could have been. We're going to make this better, right? We're going to strengthen you."

[00:31:55]And when people give those kinds of pro-social lies, um, they think they're being nice to another person, the other person is actually evaluating that more negatively. And what they misunderstand is that when they're truly honest with somebody, we have people have confront a partner in conversation about a difficult thing they're going through that, you know, they haven't brought up to the other person. Those constructive confrontations are received much more favorably than people expect beforehand.

[00:32:22]Emma finds that people spending a day being as honest as they can be in their relationships, they think that's going to leave their relationships worse off, in fact, it leaves their relationships better off at the end of the day and about on par with being as kind as you can be to other people. And so pe So one one barrier then to being honest is is is misunderstanding that it's often interpreted as kindness because it is kind. It is kind, >> right? To be honest with someone, >> if you're looking and trying to provide a guide of what meaningful a life of meaningful social connection actually looks like.

[00:33:01]>> Yeah.

[00:33:01]>> How would you describe that as as what ought to be something that becomes a goal?

[00:33:10]>> So here I'll talk a little more personal because I I don't have I don't have research on the totality of it. But I think what I think the picture that emerges from all of our data is is is one where you just walk around with a little more optimistic and empowered sense of what other people are like and how you can interact with them.

[00:33:33]The ability that you have moment after moment, day after day in your life to create connections with other other people. No research I've ever been involved with has changed the way I live my life more than this.

[00:33:47]>> Recognizing that other people are often delightful and happy to talk when you try. That I've got amazing power to lift people up with a kind word or an expression of gratitude or passing along a third person compliment or taking an interest in somebody else has just flat out made me a friendlier person, >> a a more decent human being, I think.

[00:34:08]>> Nice. And I I am a I am I I'm not only more likely to approach other people, I also think it has made me more approachable by other people. I know people's names >> because I I take an interest in them and I write it down because I care. I think that's what the consequence of this looks like. If you really come to realize the power you have to connect with other people and the impositive impact you can have on on other people and the likelihood that they'll reach back to you if you reach out to them first. It kind of changes all your relationships for the better.

[00:34:42]>> I love that. Really nice. Um the book is filled with all sorts of wonderful stories. There's one toward the end of the book about uh bit of a metaphor with Uncle Rufus and his cows.

[00:34:55]>> Yeah. Yeah. So, the key a key challenge here is taking behavioral science research and applying it in our lives, right? How do you do this? Right. The the pessimism that holds me back might not be the thing that's holding you back. Right? The opportunities I have to connect with other people might not be the same opportunities that you have.

[00:35:12]Right? Men and women live in different worlds. What a woman might do to connect with others might be different from what a man might do. So, all of those things are true, right? There's a lot of individual artistry to this. And uh I use this analogy of my of my my ne my great uncle Rufus's cows. He he lived across from my my grandpa and Grandma Floyd and Justine. And in the summers, I'd always spend some weeks up on the farm. And I used to love going over to look at Rufus' cows. Rufus was this stodgy old kind of farmer with his but with this huge heart. And his his wife, my my my aunt Betty, was just a lovely human being. And but every now and then Rufus' cows would end up on, you know, grandpa's side of the road. And the way they would do that is they would, you know, they'd walk along the fence and they'd kind of lean into the fence posts until they found one that was kind of in a low spot that was wet, that was soft.

[00:36:01]And then they leaned into it hard and pushed over, push it over, and that's how they got out. And I think that's a good analogy, Rufus's cows, for how we ought to test these beliefs in our life.

[00:36:12]Find the ones that you think maybe are likely to be the wobbliest, the bits of pessimism, you know, that your, you know, your co-workers don't want to have coffee with you or wouldn't want to sit at lunch with you or or, you know, the the the people, you know, who who are your neighbors might not want to talk with you. Find the easy ones and test those first, right? There are a lot of hard things that you can do, right? Hard relationships you can try to repair or hard conversations you can try to have.

[00:36:39]Start with the easy ones. you know, follow Rufus' cows, uh, and and test the easy barriers first and see if you can knock those over and then you can maybe get a little courage to go to the harder ones.