#799 - David Robson - The Science Of Building Genuine Friendships

28:24So it's much better for you to kind of identify like when and how you're going to go about that. So it could just be that you're telling yourself like when I'm at the supermarket and I see someone struggling to carry their groceries, I'll just offer to give them a hand. Or, you know, I'll just, instead of just asking, like, straight for my coffee, like, I will just try to ask the barista, like, how they are, you know, how their day is going, like, just make some kind of small talk. And what the research shows is that when you do that repeatedly, even over quite a short time span of, say, five days, even by the end of that five days, people are already changing the way they perceive those interactions.

29:06So they no longer expect those interactions to feel awkward and they expect to enjoy them and then they do enjoy them. So you know, I think it's just something that we do have to practice kind of day after day and recognize that you know, it's a learnable skill. It's like learning a musical instrument like you have the potential to be sociable. You just have to put in a bit of work to practice those skills. Wow, five days to start to reframe that. I suppose so much of what people are worried about is some odd catastrophic outcome. I'm going to ask the barista at Starbucks how their days going and then the police are going to come in or they're going to laugh at me or it's going to be weird or whatever it might be.

29:55So it's almost like I guess exposure training. You know, it's just... years, it's like overcoming any kind of phobia. So I mean, you can't ever guarantee that there's never going to be someone who is unfriendly. But like what I love about these experiments where they've got like, you know, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people to enact these behaviors is that it is so rare for people to have a really bad experience. Like in the first couple of studies, like just no one reported having hostility kind of thrown back at them when they tried to talk to strangers on like the Chicago buses and trains or on the London Underground.

30:37People, even like the London Underground has like a really bad reputation for people being really unfriendly and isolated and not wanting to make conversation. But like people responded much better than anyone had expected. And I think like each person maybe on the train is kind of sitting there, you know, summer happy in their own thoughts, others are kind of feeling a bit lonely, and they're just waiting for someone to kind of strike up the conversation, but they're not brave enough to do it. So a lot of people are actually super grateful when you're the one who kind of takes the first step and kind of, you know, open job after speak.

31:15Why is overcoming egocentric thinking so important? Yeah, I mean, so this is one of the kind of barriers where like we, I guess the work on like the personality myth kind of shows that like we're all better at making connections than we think we are, but that doesn't mean that there's not room for improvement. And so egocentric thinking is one of the ways that sometimes we do needlessly create kind of misunderstanding between people. So essentially, all neurotypical people have the capacity to... they have a fury of mind, which means that you can kind of put yourself in another person's shoes and take their perspective and recognize, you know, like that they might have different opinions or knowledge from what you yourself have.

32:09Now, the problem is that even though we have that capability, it's quite hard cognitively to do. So, far more often than I think scientists had expected, people don't apply their theory of mind. They act super -ecoscentrically and just assume that like the other person that they're talking to can see what they can see, knows what they know, thinks what they think has the same beliefs can understand their intentions even when they're super ambiguous and what they're saying. And you know, I think we're quite robust in our interactions. So there's a lot of correction that goes on in any conversation when you're kind of, you know, there's a bit of misunderstanding and then like it soon comes out with like by asking the right questions or just by kind of elaborating that allows the two people to kind of fully get on board with what they're saying.

33:03But just by being conscious of this fact that you might be thinking egocentrically and just kind of checking like does the other person actually understand what I'm saying like are they familiar with the terms I'm using? Do they have a completely different political opinion that I just haven't given them a chance to express? You know, just doing those kind of little like safety checks in your conversation can just like smooth over the conversation so you're not making those kind of fundamental errors. Yeah, what else did you learn about the art of conversation? Presumably a lot of what we're talking about with regards to human connection is going to be mediated through it.

33:39So it's a pretty key skill to develop. Right. Yeah. It is. So I mean, asking questions is fundamental something that is kind of well known is that you should ask more questions when you kind of meet someone for the first time, like don't talk about yourself. But I think what we often misunderstand is the importance of the follow up of questions. So you can go into a conversation and you could just be like asking, it could be like an interview almost you're like, what'd you do? Where'd you come from? Do you have a wife? Like, you know, like, what's your favourite sport? Like, fine. Like, you're showing an interest in the other person, but it does feel a bit formulaic.

34:16Whereas, if they tell you something, like a bit quirky, and then you like drill down on that and you just follow up by asking like, what they meant or like, why that thing is so important to them, like, you know, what joy or pleasure they get out of this activity that they've just described. Like, those are the ones that really matter. And so you look at like, people and speed dates. And like, the amount of follow -up questions that people ask, like, really predicted whether they would actually be selected for a second date. I mean, like, if you asked enough follow -up questions, it doubled your chances of getting a date, basically.

34:51So, So it's well worth bearing that in mind. The other thing that we should really bear in mind is, like, it's good to ask questions, but we also need to be quite generous with what we're telling the other person to. So self -disclosure, like revealing your own kind of deeper thoughts and feelings is super important as well. And we have this kind of bias in our conversation where we think it's always safer to just talk about, like, you know, the superficial stuff. you know, like those kinds of questions I was talking about earlier, like what profession do you do, where did you grow up, what did you do at Halloween, you know, that kind of stuff.

35:30But actually, when scientists have forced people into these conversations where they like, too strangers after us, like super probing things, like do you have an intuition about how you're going to die? Or like what is your, what is the most embarrassing thing that you've done in your life? Or what's your biggest mistake and why would you wish that you could correct it? You know, not the usual kind of stuff that we would talk about like within 20 minutes of meeting someone, but that is called the Fast Friendships procedure. And like, I mean, the name says it all, but I mean, it really puts people on this Fast Track to intimacy.

36:09Like within about 45 minutes, those people feel closer to each other than they do to some of their oldest friends, which is kind of amazing. Just take us through high level what the fast friends procedure consists of. Yeah, so I mean it's kind of asking those probing questions, but I mean basically it was developed by Arthur Aaron at Psychologist in New York and essentially he just got these participants to kind of total strangers to sit down with 36 of these questions that got progressively more kind of intimate. Like there's nothing kind of dodgy or sexual there. But I mean it's just you know asking people like to kind of to look inside themselves and reveal something that they might have felt to embarrass or vulnerable to talk about.

37:01So fears, dreams, you know another one that I love is like if you had a crystal ball and it could tell you anything about your life or your future, what would you want it to tell you and why? So it's kind of getting people to really tell something that might have been secret beforehand or something that they've scared about, potentially. It's just kind of ambiguous prompt in that it's not forcing someone to go in any particular direction, but what you choose is super revealing about what's going on in your kind of in a life. And yeah, so then he kind of tested like how people, how close these participants felt at the end of this 45 -minute conversation and compared that to people who just went through kind of normal small talk on, you know, like, what's your favourite film or, you know, could be, I mean, what talking about your favourite film could be super revealing, but most people just I'm going to go into enough detail or depth to really make it sufficiently profound to kind of build that connection.

38:14So the people who went through the fast friendship procedure, yeah, they at the end, like he tried to get them to estimate how close they were to each other with this psychological test of the relationship strength. And then he compared that to how people normally feel about like their old friends from their childhood or from university. And he found that already the kind of average friendship between these two strangers was roughly at the same level. How funny. It's, you know, when you see those Netflix documentaries and it's some person that was part of a famous historic event, they caught a ball at a sports game or their daughter went missing on holiday or they did whatever.

39:00And they're always in some dusty warehouse somewhere. And I always thought when these people were being interviewed, I was just presumed that they'd told this story a million times that so many people were interested in their story and that had asked them these questions. But then you see on these Netflix documentaries, people get very emotional and tear up and struggle to complete their sentences and stuff like that. And that made me think, well, actually, they probably haven't had that many people to tell this life story to how many people in your normal day to day existence actually decide to go to that place and give you a canvas to talk about deeper things that maybe you don't usually think about or talk about, maybe you've never talked about it before, not because it's like shameful, but just it's a bit odd or no one's ever seemed to be patient or giving me the space to be able to do it.

39:56And yeah, that kind of made me think, like, you know, this is evidently one of the biggest things that's happened in someone's life. And it's still so emotionally charged. I have to assume that that's because they haven't got that. This isn't the hundredth time they've said it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, so like when you kind of question people about stuff like the fast friendship procedure, most people, when you ask them like, why you'd know of us about talking about these topics, like what you've, like the psychologist would be like, you've told me that you think it's going to be awkward, but why do you think it's going to be awkward?

40:30And then like people just assume that it's, that no one cares, like no one wants to hear about their inner life or this kind of event that was so profound for them. And I guess it's almost because that event was so important for their life, that the rejection would hurt so much more or if they told it, the other person was just like, oh yeah, anyway, you'll never guess what happened to me yesterday. Like, maybe that will happen in some case. It's like, with all of these things, there's no like hard and fast guarantee that it's gonna go in the way you want. But the numbers are really in your favor.

41:08Like these conversations on average gonna be so much more rewarding for you than you expect. That's what the research shows that if we were just a bit braver, we would find like so much more reward from all of our social connections. The other thing to consider is who says that a person's negative response to you opening up is a you problem. Like you want to be around people to whom you can have deep conversations and talk about important things and play with new ideas and open up parts of yourself that you do typically. And it's so strange, there's ability to make ourselves the bad guy in scenarios, especially socials.

41:51Oh, that's because of me. I'm so awkward. I was so stupid. I'm so clumsy. That you're, I'm gonna second, like if someone had said to you this thing, would you have been interested? You know, actually, yeah, probably that'd be pretty cool. It'd be pretty cool to find out about, you know, that this thing that they've held with them from childhood that's very powerful to them. I would have been interested. I would have asked questions. Okay. And why did that other person not? Well, I don't know. They're just socially ungainly. Okay. So it's not you that's done the social for part. It's actually them in their response to you.

42:23This is a them problem, not a you problem. Yeah. That's exactly it. I think like, um, also, it could be, and I think this comes back to the, uh, egocentric thinking that we were talking about. Like it could be that the of a person really was interested in what you were saying. And they assumed that you knew how interested and how much they cared, how interested they were and how much they cared. And they just weren't communicating that correctly because of this egocentric assumption that it must have been written all over their face. And so that's what comes out of that research on egocentric thinking is that we were really bad at judging how strongly our emotions are being communicated because we feel them quite strongly.

43:06We assume that other people will also be able to read them. And that's true in all kinds of situations, like if you're lying, you assume that the other person can tell when you're lying, but you're not really giving away so many tales that they can. Like if you find, if you're at a dinner party and you find the food pretty disgusting and you feel like super self -conscious because you're at the host is going to kind of see that disgust all over your face. Like scientists have actually set people up to have that exact experience. And like, it's completely undetectable. Like you can't, no one can guess better than chance, whether someone's eating something disgusting or whether they're eating something, you know, really delicious.

43:49And so I think that's happening here in these conversations that sometimes like people just aren't letting you know what you really need to hear. but they might still be feeling it. So there's no point in us beating ourselves up over not getting quite the response that we expected because we just don't really know what that person was feeling often. How can people express appreciation more effectively? Yeah, I mean that's so yeah, that is something that we can all do to strengthen our connections is to just avoid this ambiguity that people have. Like we are generally not very good at saying compliments, because we just don't do it enough.

44:32I think there was some, I can't remember the exact statistic, but like we bite back the majority of the nice things that we think about other people, because we assume that they know already, or we think we're going to be so clumsy, we're going to sound like really ingratiating and falling. sick of fun. Fawning is yeah, you think it's going to be awful. So so we just think like okay, I'm just not going to say anything at all that will be better. And again, it's like you're protecting yourself like as by expressing a compliment or appreciation or gratitude or kind of making yourself a little bit vulnerable.

45:10But like those fears are totally unfounded like people, they just really love to hear good things about themselves as you would. And like as, is it gain, it's like, like you said, like if you just turn it around and think, well, like, would I want to hear that, like, I look great today, or that I said something really smart, like, of course you would. So I'd just, you know, the other person wouldn't. And so, yeah, just we can do it more often, expressing gratitude and appreciation. And what the research shows is like it benefits the other person a lot, but it also benefits the person expressing those good feelings.

45:47So actually, once we've said something kind, we feel better ourselves. And it even like is good for us physiologically, like it actually reduces our stress response. So those this study, there was inspired by Shock Tank, the TV program where students had to come up with a product, give a presentation like impairs. And the researchers told like, just one person in each pair, like just, you know, express gratitude to the person who is helping you with this. And then they measured like how they responded to the, to giving the presentation itself, like how the kind of blood pressure, the cardiovascular system responded.

46:30And what they found that both the person expressing and receiving the gratitude tended to show like a more muted stress response. So they just, they were still like, kind of charged and excited, but they weren't going into fight or flight, essentially. Wow. How cool. Yeah, that's something that I've noticed since moving to America, you may say that Americans have too much enthusiasm, and that may be true. But I think that Brits have the equivalent scarcity as Americans have abundance. And when I first moved out here two and a half years ago, I got invited on a really big podcast, it was Tim Pools show on the day that the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict came down.

47:18So it was going to be, I think there was 300 ,000 concurrent live viewers at one point. It was fucking insane. And I got invited to go and be on the show and it just happened to be the day that I was there. I'm like, I guess I'm commenting on the Kyle Rittenhouse thing now. And I'd only been in the city for two weeks, maybe three weeks. And I'd made some friends before, but largely these were just friends that I'd got. And in between me leaving the apartment, the Airbnb I was staying in and going down to get picked up by the car that was coming to get me, two different guys rang me that I'd met over the last sort of three weeks.

47:52And both separately, both basically said the same thing. Hey, man, just wanted to let you know, I know you might be a bit nervous about tonight, but you're going to smash it. Like, I've got pizza and me and the misses are going to sit on the couch and we're going to watch it. It's going to be so cool. How are you feeling? I'm really happy for you." I was like, this is such a lovely gesture from someone that didn't need to do it, from someone that you kind of barely know. And it felt really alien and that was one of the big, oh wow, you know, that, you can say that, you can behave in that way. The sort of zero sum, puritan tall poppy in me sort of bristle a little bit and didn't really know how to take it, but yeah, it's a really big deal.

48:33I suppose the other side of expressing appreciation is self -compassion, and you looked at self -compassion too. Yeah, so I think self -compassion is like super important in kind of all the things I'm talking about, because it's like you were saying that we often, like if there's any awkwardness in a conversation like we just tend to put the blame on ourselves. Like if you have met a stranger and there are like, you know, you say a few clumsy words or there's that kind of weird silence where, no, for if you know what to say or like you don't quite know when to finish the conversation like you think like that was wholly my fault.

49:15Like I should have been more socially fluent and able to just like seamlessly kind of, you know, exit that conversation and go on to the next one. You know, the other person's feeling exactly the same way. So that is the moment called the liking gap, which means that when we both have a conversation with a stranger, like each person tends to go away thinking that they liked the other person more than the other person like way. So that shows up in the data. Yeah, yeah, it's really consistent. and the liking gap. Yeah, so that in itself, I think, should leaders just, you know, once we know those statistics, like we can just stop like beating ourselves up so much, like, because actually, so what's happening there is that it's like we, again, it's like egocentric.

50:06We're so conscious of how we've behaved. That's like kind of burning in our minds, if we think we've said like a faux pas. So we assume that it was equally important for the other person. But they really aren't taking much notice of that. They don't really care if you are like the perfect conversationalist who's always got something like super witty and aposite to say. What they are more likely to do is just think about the overall kind of emotional tenor of the conversation. Just vibes. It's just vibes, man. It's always been vibes. Exactly. Was I laughing a lot? like did they kind of validate what I was feeling like, where they're curious about me?

50:47You know, that's what really matters, like your warmth, not your confidence. So we can all be just a bit more forgiving of ourselves. And like sometimes we will say a faux pas, but most often we won't, and it's just not worth the kind of mental energy to become too fixated on that, because even if you did the other person, like so that's the other thing that even when you make a definite faux pas, like you turn up to a dinner party and you're the only person who hasn't brought like wine or cake or anything. You ask people to judge how they would to rate how they would judge another person for doing that, like how negative they would be.

51:24And then you get them to rate how they think the other person would judge them with the same thing. And consistently people assume that the other person is going to be twice as negative as they would be to the same thing. Even if you make a faux part, it like really is and such a big deal, like it's just, it's so forgettable. Isn't it interesting? You know the fundamental attribution error bias. Somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's because they're a dangerous wanker. You cut someone else in traffic. It's because you need to really get to work because you're late and there's an important meeting.

52:01We often attribute other people's actions to their personal motives, whereas ours are more to do with external events and we're know, we were able to not be as culpable. And it's like a reverse fundamental attribution error in social situations whereby we will always be the awkward, clumsy social faux -par victim. And everybody else is a competent, smooth James Bond talking person that won't forgive us, but that we would forgive them. It's a very odd way that we sort of turn the bar stool upside down. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's crazy, and to leave because like if you ask people like how smart are you compared to the average person like most people overestimate how intelligent they are or like how could a driver are you or 70, you know, people say that they're better than right.

52:55Exactly. And yeah, if you ask people how smart do you think other people think you are? So you're kind of shifting that to like to a question of social judgment, Then people are really under -confident. So it's like we're constantly kind of thinking the best about ourselves, but also assuming that other people are thinking the worst about us. Wow. How interesting. Yeah, I am. I learned a lot about this comfort with vibes and imprecision. Even though I'm quite obsessive about precision when it comes to speech. When I started the show, I thought that my goal was to be kind of a ruthless indexer of information, kind of the ultimate blinckist app for whoever I was speaking to, and it was just to break down all of the different things in this new book or whatever, and then that would be it, and it had to be said in the most precise and accurate way possible.

53:54And then as you go on, when I think about the sort of conversations that I enjoy listening to or the ones that I enjoy having, it's more just about vibes. It's was it fun did it flow well was it charming did we have a laugh did everybody feel comfortable and casual and and that's really What it is and in an equivalent way I did a live tour toward the back end of last year so it's standing up on stage in front of between 500 and a thousand people and I'd seen a few friends do performances much bigger ones comedians and stuff and their mics would break or the lights would go out or someone from the audience would yell something and you might think, oh that's going to ruin the flow of the show or that might get them off their game or oh my god how awkward that the mics died and it made me so much more warmly disposed to them to see how they dealt with something that went wrong and they did it in a charming way or maybe they said something wrong they forgot the line or they tripped over or they spilled water on themselves.

54:56And all of those, there was no such thing as a social faux pas. There was simply dealing with an occurrence in a charming or an uncharming manner. And if you dealt with it in a charming manner, even if you did it to yourself, it made me like, it's called what's it called the Pratfall Effect, which when someone messes up, if you end up liking them more, as long as they can kind of style it out in a not totally socially ungainly way. So yeah, oddly social for pause can be a breeding ground for perhaps social excellence in a way. Yeah, totally. I mean, I totally think it's like you said it's like how you respond to the era The like the perceived era is more important than like the era itself And you know like even stuff like a you know like people really overestimate like how important like showing a few nerves They're gonna be like in an interview you or on stage.

55:52But when you question like observers like, you know, what did you think of this performer? And you know, like some of them might have been like touching their face a lot because they were nervous or like, you know, biting their nails, whatever. Those people were actually considered to be much more likable than the people who gave like a super smooth performance. And I think it's just so relatable. Like you see someone who is feeling probably like how you would be feeling. And even if you don't show it on the outside, like you're going to have those nerves. So like your empathy is just kind of kicking in and you are kind of rooting for them to do well.

56:29And we see that more generally like this phenomenon called the beautiful mess effect, which is a bit like the prepful effect. But this is like we try to hide like our kind of failures and errors and vulnerabilities. Like, you know, you don't want to tell people if you're feeling like you look a bit shit today or you've got some kind of complex about part of your body, or your feet, foot's come back or something. Right, exactly. Or you're like, you know, you like made a real fuck up with your job and it's like, you know, it's really embarrassing. It's like a schoolboy error that you have to end up to.

57:08And people assume that like confessing those vulnerabilities is going to make them look week people are going to feel a bit repelled by that. But actually people often, like far often, far more often than you think, they're going to appreciate your kind of courage and honesty and authenticity for just owning up to these things. We much prefer someone who's honest than someone who we think is hiding something. So there's this study looking at giving giving people kind of profiles of like potential dates. Like weird profiles, I don't know like how they set this up exactly to look like natural, but like the potential dates had to like say whether they'd ever done like some pretty immoral acts like had they ever hidden an STD from previous lovers and like had sex with them anyway.

58:05People who said they had done that were considered to be a better potential date than people who refused to answer the question. So obviously someone who had never done it was preferable, but at least admitting to your immoral behaviour was much better than just trying to avoid the question completely. What about the novelty penalty? What's that? Yeah, so that is, I mean, it's like so familiar for most people, I think. Like, you know, when you've been on like, you've had an amazing experience like, you, you know, been on a great holiday and you get home and you want to tell like all of your friends about it.

58:50And then like your 10 minutes in and you can see their eyes glazing over like you're just not getting the interaction that you want. That's the novelty penalty because essentially people often prefer to hear stuff that is already a bit familiar to them, rather than something that is totally new. And like the researchers found this in this kind of kind of quite complex setup where they gave people like YouTube videos to watch and then they got one person from the group to describe the video. And they found that people much preferred hearing about a video they'd already seen compared to hearing about a video that they hadn't seen.

59:33And it's totally bizarre because it's like you'd think it would be boring to you to hear a pete back to what you just observed. But the problem is we're just like maybe our storytelling skills just aren't up to scratch. So we're leaving a lot of gaps in the narrative. So it just isn't that obvious. Why should I care about this? You forget to say what attracted you to that experience and why it was so personally important. You give the kind of maybe some of the relevant details while skipping the emotional content. So that's what we need to do. I think to be better conversationalist, to avoid the novelty penalty as to, again, like lean into that self -disclosure and not be afraid to say kind of why something matters to you.

1:00:20To get a bit of personal investment, I had a guy called Mr. Ballin on the show a couple of weeks ago, he's probably one of the best storytellers on the internet. He does strange dark, mysterious sort of true crime adjacent stuff. And it was really cool. He explained, he does this story, he does a number of stories, does one of them. And then he explains his approach to storytelling, using the story that he just told and breaking down why he said things in this way. And a really cool insight that I learned from him was the power of omission. So when you're telling a story, there's one about a lamp, this guy who is in a marriage for years and years and years, and then this lamp in his living room starts to behave very strangely and it turns out after a he's a protracted story of all of this stuff that he was hit in the head during a high school football game and was knocked out for five seconds but lived an entire different life and then came back around and was no longer married to this person for two decades didn't have his kids didn't have his dog didn't have his house didn't have anything and had imagined this entire other life that he felt he'd lived for you know decades and second.

1:01:38But he doesn't say that bit until the very end. So, you know, there's this sort of ever escalating anticipation of he's getting sort of stranger and stranger and stranger. But if he'd opened up the story by saying something like, I'm going to tell you a story about a guy who was hidden the head in high school, like, you know, that completely punks the game and takes you to the end before it started. So just thinking about how

1:02:06consciously and dexterously he looks at the art of storytelling, not just conversation, but of storytelling. And yeah, what are you including? And what are you excluding? And maybe saying, you know, and this is how it made me feel. And this is why it was really important to me, like create some fucking stakes in whatever it is that you're talking about. Why should someone care? Yeah, exactly. And I think so what we kind of maybe underestimate is that what people will care about is like the emotions that we're feeling and like, you know, if they're connected to us, they kind of want the best for us.

1:02:44So if something was super important, they kind of really want to understand that, but what they don't care about is like your kind of journey tour from the airport or like, you know, like maybe they don't even care much about the details of the location itself that you've been to if you're on this amazing holiday, what they really care about is like, like, you know, did that fundamentally change your perspective on your life? That really makes you feel. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What is important about truth and lies and secrets? So, this really surprised me. And it's the fact that, like, honesty just is almost always valued.

1:03:27even if you're delivering bad news to people, even if it's not necessarily like reflecting well on yourself. Even if it's the kind of situation where you would normally tell a white lie to save someone's feelings, like kind of sugar coating some negative feedback. There are very few situations where telling a lie is ever gonna pay off, which seems kind of like amazing and I kind of assumed to the like, things like white lies are kind of a social lubricant like you just need them to kind of get along each day. But these researchers in the US kind of, they set people out on a mission to kind of either be as honest as they could be in every single interaction for a few days, or to be as kind as they could be in interaction, in every interaction for a few days, or to just carry on as normal.

1:04:21And what they found was that the people, the wellbeing of the people who were kind or honest were pretty much the same, actually. But what was especially noticeable was that the people who were being like sometimes brutally honest with people tended to report that their interactions were far more meaningful. Like they felt that they learned a lot more about those people and that those people learned a lot more about them when they were, you know, like saying some uncomfortable truths compared to people who are going around like with the specific intention of like trying to be as kind as possible and to make people feel as good as possible.

1:05:01So that, yeah, I mean, that's changed the way I deal with like a lot of my interactions now. Like it's not a pass to like be kind of just like rude and nasty like because there's, I think in almost every case, there's to be a kind of telling the truth or like a pretty blunt and nasty way of telling the truth. So it's always better to kind of try to frame what you're saying in a way that can be constructive, that will help the other person to learn from what you're saying rather than just being like too over generalizing in a way that is not helpful for their growth. So yeah, be specific. Try to be constructive.

1:05:42Try to offer advice or your own time and resources to help them to deal with the kind of negative feedback you're giving. But overall, people will appreciate far more the negative feedback that can be useful over a white lie that isn't going to help them to learn and to grow. How can people overcome the discomfort of telling people the truth even if it's going to be painful for the truth tell. So I think that is just practice actually. I think like we're a bit like with the kind of overcoming the awkwardness of talking to strangers, I think it's about recalibrating our expectations and you can only do that by kind of repeatedly performing this action and recognizing that the outcomes on average far better than you expected.

1:06:31And over time, you just naturally start to recognize that the kind of little bit of awkwardness that you can face is worth it, but the kind of rewards at the end. Yeah, I suppose it's the same sort of exposure training thing that I can tell the truth and the whole world doesn't blow up. Right. Or maybe I can do it again. Yeah, yeah, it's exactly that. And I guess I start out with like small kind of, like the low hanging fruit, I guess, is one way that I would deal with all of these social dilemmas is that, you know, you build up maybe something that's going to be much harder. I wonder if there's a, I spoke about this a couple of months ago.

1:07:12So there's a website still up called a hundred days of rejection and it's a kind of exposure therapy, social exposure therapy and each day you do something, you ask the barista at the coffee shop if you can have this for free. You see if a stranger will give you a hundred pounds, you do, it's just a sort of ever -changing group of different things and some of them are so toiling, like so awful and painful to do. I think so much of what you're trying to do there is just teach yourself this thing that you are adamant is going to be socially explosive is probably totally fine. And you know, with the truth as well, I suppose the other side is that if you're holding onto secrets for too long ultimately you're the one that's going to pay the price.

1:07:59Yeah, sure the other person, you know, might be upset about it, but it's you that's got to to vacillate about this complex house of cards that you've built up, trying to keep said secrets away from someone, and you can relinquish that by just saying it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think you'd read about this in one of your newsletters actually. It's like, it is better to have like an authentic meaningful connection with someone who likes you for who you are than to kind of, no matter how good the relationship seems to be, if you know that you're hiding something really important and you're always scared that they're going to reject you for that thing that you're hiding.

1:08:39Like that in itself is something that is going to lead you to feel that kind of existential isolation. So you don't actually, you're like surrounded by people but you don't really feel like emotionally connected to them. So yeah, I totally agree with that. And actually, then there's lots of good research anyway showing that when you keep secrets and you mind like you on going to these awful things that you're hiding. You actually experience it almost like a physical burden. When people are primed to think about a secret that they haven't told the people they love, they actually physically overestimate how steep a hill is going to be to climb.

1:09:18Or if they're throwing a ball into a target, they'll over -frore because they assume that their strength is as great as it would have been. No way. As it really is. Yeah. So it's like embodied cognition that changes the way you navigate the world, like everything feels more tiring than it should be. Hang on. So someone that is holding on to a secret, when given a ball that they need to throw it a target, on average, they overthrow the ball, compensating for a perceived weakness. Yeah. And that is a what was the term? It's like embodied cognition. Embodied cognition. Dude, you find the best studies.

1:10:03It's so much fun. Yeah, how crazy to think about that, yeah, there's sort of inner fragility that they have manifested in themselves, this shame that they probably have about not being able to say this thing. Oh, well, my real world strength must be equivalently, feeble, therefore I must throw the ball harder and they end up over throwing it. Yeah, and so what happens then is if you get them to like reveal the secret to someone, even just one of the researchers, then like that embodied cognition kind of vanishes. So they suddenly start to be more accurate in their movements or in perceiving the kind of physical challenges ahead of them.

1:10:47So you're saying baseball players and cricketers should be as honest as possible because it's a performance in answer. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Who knew? I won't, I learned a new word from you, which was confolicity. Ah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Yeah. Or, mit Freude is the kind of German equivalent. So it's the, we have Shadon Freude, which is our kind of joy at someone else's misfortune. But mit Freude or confolicity is our kind of joy seeing someone else is happiness and success and achievements. And this is so relevant when we think about celebrating our own successes. Like we tend to hide a lot of our achievements because we don't want to seem like we're bragging and we assume that the other person is going to judge us harshly for kind of talking about our promotion or like that kind of professional award we want or even just like a personal best at the gym.

1:11:45Like we hide these kinds of things much more than we should because we assume the other person is going to feel envious of us. For what the research shows is that like when people find out that you've kind of had these good events in your life and you decided not to share them, it's actually super insulting because you're treating them a bit like a spoiled kind of kid who has to kind of win up monopoly like every time you play it or they'll have a tantrum like it feels incredibly paternalistic to find out that like your best friend or your colleague or your brother didn't tell you about something good in their life just because they thought you might react badly.

1:12:22So it drives it drives a wedge in our connection in that way because it's just fundamentally like offensive to be treated in that way. But then yeah, we're also missing the fact that most of these people would feel con felicity. Like rather than being obvious, they're just going to be happy for you and sharing in that happiness is just another way for you to be able to bond and to kind of share an emotional experience that kind of confirms that you share the same values in life. Well, the other thing as well is if you share something which is genuinely meaningful to you and that you're proud of in a charming way, obviously you can show it down people's throat and in which case the negative response is probably you deserved it.

1:13:10But if you do it in a charming way and someone doesn't take a thing that's meaningful to you positively and it doesn't positively reinforce it. Hey, guess what? That person shouldn't be in your life. Like they suck as a friend. They suck. And the same as the, you open up to somebody, you try and tell them something that's really meaningful or something that's shameful or something that you're scared of and they don't respond in the right way. That's not a you problem. That's a them problem. Yeah. I mean, to me, all of these things, it's like a classic case of someone being a frenemy, like an ambivalent connection.

1:13:46Like, if they're not responding to you when you're like opening up to them, whether it's about failure or a success, or just like a really meaningful experience, then yeah, like there's something kind of, there's something going on in their life that is wrong. But you don't have to feel embarrassed about the fact that their response was inadequate. It is, I need to do a little bit more thinking about this sort of reverse fundamental attribution era, which is what you're kind of developing is a kind of self -confidence in social self -confidence that I will make errors, but I know that I'm coming into this, playing the rules of the game remotely, appropriately, and trying to put my best foot forward.

1:14:31And it takes basically all of the pressure of you socially. And you go, look, I didn't mess up. Like, I just, you know, I did the thing. It's this person that's incapable of receiving or returning in an apt manner. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think that's ultimately it. Like, we should be able to expect from the people in our social networks that they are going to respond positively to you sharing your life with them. And yeah, so it's like, is having that confidence to realize that if they're not going to do that, then maybe your social network is better off without them. Or at the very least, you just don't have to value their opinions so much.

1:15:15But I mean, the good news is that we overestimate how likely it is that people are going to react in all of these negative ways. Like most people who really have your best interests at heart, they're going to be like they're going to respond in the way that you would want them to. What is there to say about envy then? If, if con felicity and feeling joy in other people's successes is something that's good, what did you learn about envy? So I mean, I think it's perfectly possible for someone to feel like a bit of envy and con felicity at the same time. And like that's how I feel sometimes like, you know, my friends who are authors and if they have like a huge success.

1:15:56Like I'm like genuinely really delighted for them. I would never want to take that away from them. But I would also like it for me. Yeah, that's it. And actually, though, there's nothing wrong with feeling MV. So scientists kind of say there's like a malign MV where like you want to take that, tear that person down. Well, that is obviously an unhealthy reaction. them. But benign envy when you're like when someone else's success is just making you realize it's reaffirming what your goals are going to be for yourself and it's like a source of inspiration. Like that is totally something that's a totally natural reaction and it's something that you should be listening to and then you know putting into action.

1:16:41I think it's, you know, envy can be a really strong form of motivation. You don't have to put yourself in competition with that particular person, but it's good for you to just identify like, yeah, I still want to achieve that goal. And the fact that this other person has achieved that goal has just proven that to me, there is probably going to be as good as I expected to be. Isn't it cool? I really like this idea of being able to balance being happy for your friend's success with wishing that you could have it as well. I don't think that that's something that's negative. Neil Strauss guy that wrote the game on the show a couple of weeks ago, and you told me the title of his new book.

1:17:18And I think a good rubric for whether or not a title is great is does the person that you tell it to think, fuck, why didn't I think of that? And like that's the kind of envy energy I think. And the title of this book is the power of low self -esteem. And I thought, God, that's so cool. That's so, it's like this oxymoron, it's intriguing, it's short, I love it. I was like, God damn it, like why did I think of that? And you know, that's, I don't think that I would judge myself for that kind of envy. And you can even with this, you know, going back to the transparency, the openness, the honesty thing, I think I said it to him at the time.

1:18:03And you know, that almost calling out the emotion and going, bro, I mean, God damn it, I wish that I'd said that. That's so smart, that's really, really cool. I'm really happy for you. that's going to smash it. That's all of the things that we've just spoken about in a single sentence. Right exactly. I think that's a totally healthy reaction that I think sometimes, like in the past, we would feel a bit embarrassed about saying that we feel like envy for someone. But it's like, you know, that's also kind of a mark of that person. It's a low -key compliment. Yeah, I think it is a compliment. Yeah, like, and I would take that as a compliment myself.

1:18:38someone said they were like a little bit envious of me like as long as I knew that they were also feeling happiness for me as well like I would totally take that as a compliment. Yeah envy, envy with happiness, good envy with negativity, dangerous need to be careful. Right, yeah, isn't it? Why is asking for help important? So a lot of us kind of, and it's again because we're scared of seem like vulnerable and weak. We're just scared of asking for help. We assume that we're going to, you know, be perceived badly for that. But also we think we're going to be a burden on the other person that they're not really going to want to help us anyway.

1:19:18So we're kind of struggling alone. It makes our life a lot harder. But a little bit like when I was talking about when you don't share success, because it's because you kind of assume the other person's going around badly and they feel insulted by that. Well, actually, people feel a bit the same if you don't ask for help when it would be totally natural for you to do. So like, if you've got a really good friend who would be able to like take you to the hospital when you're ill and you pay loads of money for a taxi, like, they actually feel a lot worse for the pack that you didn't ask them, like it's an insult to them.

1:19:56So we, by asking for help, it can actually be a really good way of cementing a relationship and making that person know how valued they are. And that can even be true, like not in those kind of emergency situations, but even just with the kind of little things in life that you could maybe do for yourself, but like it just feels good when someone else is going to help you out. So like asking someone to cook your favourite meal for you, just because you know it's going to feel like super comforting to have it from that person rather than doing it yourself. There's a Japanese concept called MI. They describe that kind of favour request where you could, you're perfectly capable of doing it, it's a little bit inappropriate to ask for help, but you ask anyway.

1:20:52The idea in the Japanese concept is that actually that can enhance lots of relationships and make people feel kind of especially good about themselves and like, you know, they enjoy caring for you. And that's what the research shows. And it's not just in Japanese culture, it's also in American culture by asking for favors, you're underlining the close nature of your relationship and people actually like you more for it. And amazingly, that even happens with strangers. So if you kind of scientists set up this experiment, where they gave people these to court maths questions, and at the end of the test, one person had finished before the other one.

1:21:37If one of the participants asked the other to just help them with the remaining questions, that actually increased the bond between the two participants. and you didn't see that increase in the bond if the teacher was the one who kind of told the participant to kind of to offer that assistance. You actually had to ask for it yourself to underline how almost like how much you respected that other person for how smart they were and how much you appreciated the help and that's that. Yeah. It's a low -key comment on their competence. Would you mind helping me carry these bags out? You look like the sort of person that is sufficiently physically robust that you can carry some bags with me.

1:22:20Hey, man, would you mind taking me to the hospital? I consider you to be the sort of person who is sufficiently thoughtful and cares about me enough, you're as efficient, a good, helpful person that you will do this thing for me. And I suppose as well, Well, I'd heard about some studies around this topic, but not as precisely if you just explain them. But I seem to remember something to do with doing a favour for someone is not seen as favourably as asking for someone to do a favour for you. And I think that part of that, if that's true, part of that is implicit in the I asked David to do me a favor is that, well, in future, you know, the debt cycle has begun between the two of us.

1:23:08So, yeah, implicit in me asking you to do me a favor is that I will do you a favor, as opposed to just coming out and then doing something for you that you maybe didn't ask, which then places the debt in your house. I hang on a second. I know you just, you know, unnecessarily brought around some food for my bird feeder. But what are you going asking me to do next week and I didn't kick this off in that way. Whereas by requesting the other person to do it, they have the option to not enter into this never -ending, vicious, regifting loop of favors. Yeah, exactly. I think you're showing to the other person that you fundamentally think they're a decent person.

1:23:57And like you said, like there is an element, I think, of this kind of feeling, we don't want to feel in debt, but we don't mind giving generously and not expecting anything in return to another person. So I guess, again, it's this kind of asymmetry. We might do a favor totally altruistically, not expecting anything in return, but we're worried about the fact that we might need to have that kind of, yeah, to cash in at some point. The debt will be called, yeah, exactly. What role does the gratitude gap play? Yeah, I mean, that's really important in that just we... So basically, like when anyone does something kind of altruistic, like they can benefit psychologically and even physiologically from having performed that act of kindness.

1:24:52Like, I call it in the book, it's fitch easy, but it's like the gift of giving. So actually people who are generally altruistic in their lives, they might be volunteers or just they are super helpful with running earning an errands for their family, all of that kind of thing, they live a lot longer than people who are a bit more selfish in their lives. If you're always looking after yourself rather than offer people, you might expect that those people would be prioritizing their own health and so would be healthier, but now actually prioritizing the people around you actually has these kind of knock on benefits for your own health and well -being.

1:25:27So like being a generous person is really good, but you have to be able to see some benefit from what you're doing. Like if someone does an altruistic act and they don't see that they've actually helped the other person, they experience none of those benefits of having done the deed. In fact, it just makes them feel kind of used and stressed out and frustrated. And the problem with the gratitude gap is that we maybe just don't express our gratitude as much as we should do because we assume that the other person knows how... It's self -evident, of course. It's so great for the thing that you...

1:26:15Why wouldn't I be? I don't know, but say that. is exactly that. And so we're not giving them the full benefits of what they've done to help us, even though we probably do secretly appreciate that. What is a tactic for overcoming the gratitude gap? So just expressing gratitude more explicitly, I think is always important. But also we should be careful about how we express gratitude. Like any kind of sign of gratitude is probably going to be perceived pretty well, but you can make it a lot more powerful if you change the way you frame it. And what a lot of us do mistakenly when we talk about gratitude is we do tend to make it kind of emphasize too much the benefits for us, which as I've just said, it's fine to say, you know, to show that the actors had a good effect on us that has been useful, but what makes it even more beneficial to the other person and makes them feel especially good about themselves is when you kind of turn that reflection back onto them and talk about the specific qualities that you appreciate about what they've just done.

1:27:25So like you were saying with that friend who's given you that kind of lifted the hospital or the airport, it's really good for you to tell them that they've saved you a lot of time and money and they've made your journey a lot more comfortable. But it's even better than to say to make it explicit the fact that you appreciate the fact that they are the person, they are the kind of person who would do that. You recognize that they are generous and giving and yeah like that they have your best interests at heart like you really appreciate those qualities. So it's the combination I think that's powerful.

1:28:08Often we kind of focus just on one or the other, but it's much better to kind of to say both like the effect on you, what you value in that other person. What about healing bad feelings?

1:28:23Yeah, there's we are like a not very good at dealing with like disagreements, like I think we all know that fact that kind of rifts can easily happen between people who are super close and often over the craziest things that become kind of amplified in importance and it's only when you know months or years have gone by that you look back and you're like why did I let that small disagreement you know come to dominate what was actually a great relationship. There are a few different ways that we can overcome that kind of overly microscopic attitude to our, and kind of a forensic attitude to kind of the rights in the wrongs of a situation.

1:29:10And one of those is just to kind of take a distance perspective that helps you to kind of zoom out from the situation and to recognize what is really important. And so, you know, often then you'll realize that, you know, you're arguing over something that fundamentally might need to be discussed, resolved, but it's not so important that it's worth actually destroying what could be, you know, a very fruitful, authentic, genuine relationship for months or years to come. And so psychological distancing can work in many ways, but, you know, it could just be imagining what an objective observer would think about the situation at hand.

1:29:50So maybe imagining that you were actually talking about this with like a marriage counselor or whatever, or just like some friend or relative who isn't directly kind of biased towards one person in the disagreement or the other. It could just be imagining that you're looking back on this situation in 10 years time. And you know, what do you think would really stand out as being important? When years have passed and this situation has long since been finished and over, there's a study looking at married couples. So newly words. For the first year, like the researchers did nothing, they just questioned them how often they were about how often they were disagreeing and how much they liked each other.

1:30:36and like they had quite a few discriminants, these mirrored couples and they're kind of liking for each other over that first year, like kind of went downhill quite line -off dramatically, but at the end of the first year, they did not like each other as much as when they first got married, which I think is quite relatable. But then at the end of this first year, they got people to do this self -distancing exercise and what they found was that those participants, their relationships satisfaction was stable. Like, they still had these kind of disagreements, but they resolved them a lot more easily.

1:31:14Whereas people who hadn't been taught the intervention, they just continued on that downward trajectory. So actually that one small psychological intervention, I think could save like a lot of marriages. Just take people through the self -distancing thing again just so that they've got it as easy takeaway. So essentially it's like, you know, like even in the heat of the argument, but definitely afterwards, when you, you know, you're both kind of thinking about what's just been said, it's to try to look at the situation from some, some new perspective. So rather than just thinking about how you feel like in the present moment, it could be imagining that you're looking back on that situation and 10 years' time when enough time has passed that you can be a bit more objective about what's just occurred.

1:32:07So literally just thinking like, how will I feel about this in 20, 34? Or just imagining that you're like an objective observer. So just thinking, what would this neutral party think about this disagreement? and my arguments, like his or her arguments, like what would they, how would they have praised this? And what importance would they lend to all of this? And it really works, like people really do, just to like take that kind of step back or step into the future, I'm recognized that actually, it helps them to just recognize what's important and what isn't essentially. So it doesn't mean that like you're just instantly gonna forgive the other person, but it means you can be more constructive and what you say, you're not going to be so petty to kind of, you're not going to resort to kind of those knee -jerk insults that you might do if you're still really immersed, purely immersed in the feelings of the fight itself.

1:33:10Yeah, your 13th law in the book is something that I landed on after. We probably did maybe between 300 and 500 life hacks on this podcast over the space of six and a half years. And it was a huge series and it was how to make a good toasted sandwich or this new protein powder we'd found or a great meditation app or some new time blocking technique or whatever. You know, everything that we wanted. And the number one hack that I had is basically the same as your 13th law, which is text your friends when you're thinking about them. So, you know, a lot of the time you'll just be going about your day and some memory will pop up or you'll wonder, I wonder what such and such a person's doing.

1:33:55And this person that has no idea that you're in their thoughts, arises, you think something nice about them and it goes away. And maybe in some calmic way, they do end up benefiting from it. But I've just taken to using that as a trigger to immediately text that person. And honestly, one of the most like, simple texts ever if you can't think of something cool. But, hey man, just thinking of you hope everything's well. like that's a singing your praises, you know talking about them over dinner saying I really love that he's got this new song out or he did you see that thing that he did or he just got married or he's got a kid I'm really happy for him or whatever it might be and it's so good it makes me feel so good to do that and yeah text your friends when you think about them is just out of 500 life acts it's my favorite one.

1:34:43Yeah me too I mean and I think it's like again it's like this kind of liking gap phenomena and it's like all of these different psychological barriers that we've spoken about is that people tend to be quite resistant from doing that because they are kind of worried that it's going to be really awkward and the other person, especially you know you haven't seen someone for a while it's difficult to know exactly what to say so you just avoid saying anything at all and you let the kind of friendship like fizzle out even further. But the research shows you know when you send those messages like people genuinely really appreciate it.

1:35:19They're going to enjoy receiving that message a lot more than you assume they're going to and you're going to feel a lot better, like you said, than you might have assumed that you do. Friendships change all the time, but actually just keeping people in your thoughts and in your life. That's one of the best things we can do to craft social connection that we crave. Is there a favourite study from the book that we haven't spoken about yet that you found? Yeah, we've covered such a lot.

1:35:53Yeah, so I guess one thing that I do kind of love and it's just such as bizarre but amazing study. So basically like what the research shows is that for any, the foundation of social connection is this thing called shared reality. So we know that there's this phenomenon called homophilia or homophilia and we're kind of like people who are similar to ourselves, similar music days, similar religion, same world view on politics, people who speak the same language or dialect came from the same place. Those things are important, but what really connects people, I make you like, actually want to be best friends with someone rather than just vaguely know them as an acquaintance, is knowing that they have the same inner experience of the world.

1:36:52So, did they find the same thing funny? do they laugh at the same time, do they get kind of the same chills at the same time in the same song, a lot of these intense visceral reactions to the world. And so there are psychological studies that kind of just try to prime that and they're really dumb kind of imaginative questions like, if Jennifer Aniston was like a household object, would she be like a screwdriver, a cocktail shaker, or like a pencil case. And like the answers are like pretty much meaningless, but if you tell someone that they both chose like a toothpick for Jennifer Aniston, like they sense that they have this kind of shared in a world, and that makes them like that of a person a lot more.

1:37:44And I just love that. But actually, there are these tiny little clues that we're experiencing all the time that are just helping us to bond. It's bizarre, but it really works. Like, I mean, and obviously that is such an artificial kind of experiment. I'm not saying that we should all play these kind of imaginative questions to connect to strangers. But I think it shows how actually how much of our kind of connection and clicking with someone can really depend not just on those kind of big similarities in your background education, all of that. But like, you know, it's just those kind of immediate, impulsive responses to the world around us.

1:38:25And there's actually then like a bunch of neuro -scientific research that shows that there's a literal truth in the kind of feeling that someone is on the same wavelength as you. And, you know, like these researchers in the US got like a bunch of like a class of students to watch like a series of YouTube videos, some of which were like, you know, music video, comedy, documentary, whatever, and scan their brains as they were doing so. And I found that just from the similarities in the brain activity as people responded to those videos, they could predict who was friends with who. And it was really because they had this very similar streams of consciousness.

1:39:04Yeah, their interpretation of framework is similar to someone else. This isn't necessarily happening between the people. It's that they are similar kinds of people. So when they get a shared stimulus person, AC and F all move in the same way. Well, why? Well, it's because they've conditioned themselves. And quite likely if you're going to observe the YouTube video in that way from all of the kids in the school yard, you're probably going to get on with the ones that think like you and talk like you and have the same sort of views. Right. Yeah, yeah. You click exactly. And so, you know, it's like, I think like, you know, sometimes Sometimes again, because we're so reserved, we can avoid allowing people to kind of see inside our stream of consciousness.

1:39:48So if you're like too cautious about revealing what you think or feel, there's just no way of constructing that shared reality. No, the other person just doesn't know if you're thinking in the same way as them or not. So I think that's why things like self -disclosure are so powerful because you're just offering many more opportunities for you to recognize, and what way do you use a reality coincide? Oh yeah, David Robson, ladies and gentlemen, David, I love your work, I love the fact that you're digging into all of these fascinating psychological studies. James Smith shamelessly repurposed a bunch in his book, and then I've been using them on my life to us, so I very much appreciate that.

1:40:29I've been subscribed to psych .org, psyche .org, for ever since we last spoke. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing, get a new book, etc. Yeah, so there's my website, www .davidrobson .ma. You can kind of pre -order my book or order it anywhere where you get your normal books. I am a certain bookshop .org, whatever wherever you go. But I do have links on my web page as well. I'm on Twitter or on X at Dundescore and and the score, Robson. My Instagram, which I'm just kind of trying to build up, is David A. Robson. So yeah, I love hearing feedback.

1:41:10I love having questions, so get in touch. I'm looking forwards to seeing what you do next, mate. Thanks. We have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with liberty mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally Doug. Uh, Lemoo? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com. Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.