173 - Juliana Schroeder: Mistakenly Seeking Solitude (REAIR)

0:00Welcome back to the Stanford Psychology Podcast, where leading psychologists share their most recent work. This week, I was excited to chat with Juliana Schroeder, Associate Professor in the Management of Organizations at Berkeley Haas. She studies how people think about the minds of other people and how they are often wrong trying to understand what others are up to. Her work has been discussed in outlets ranging from Vice to The Atlantic and Forbes. In this episode, we review Juliana's recent exciting work on under-sociality. Talking to other people is often meaningful, not just for extroverts, and yet we hesitate to talk to others, making overly pessimistic predictions about how awkward and unpleasant such interactions would be.

0:42This leads us to quote-unquote mistakenly seek solitude. Juliana discusses what we can do to motivate ourselves to talk to others more, why that is so beneficial and why she herself struggles to do it. Hope you enjoy our conversation.

1:22This week on the Stanford Psychology Podcast, I am so excited to be talking with Juliana Schroeder and to have a conversation about conversations, really. Thank you so much for making the time. Thank you for having me. How did you become interested in conversations? How people talk to one another, what mistakes they make when they talk to one another? How did you first become interested? I think conversations are fascinating. I think Dan Gilbert called them the bread and butter of social relationships. How do people build relationships? And a lot of my research is on also theory of mind, the way that we think about what's going on in other people's minds.

1:56And how do we make judgments about people's mental capacities? And how do we assess their mental states? And if you think about that, how do we do that? The way that we do it is through language. I mean, that's a huge piece of it, right? How do we read someone? You have to actually talk to them. Or you could read their nonverbals, like the way that you're nodding at me right now, Eric. I'm reading you through that. I'm getting some little glimpses, some insights into your mind. So the dynamic of a conversation between two people, sort of this intimate thing, which is how they build their relationship and how they come to be able to read each other's minds imperfectly, but you know, better than nothing is like really fascinating.

2:36And I think you can make like easily an entire career off of just studying that. You're saying we're better than chance, basically, at guessing what other people are thinking and what they're feeling, but we're also not perfect. And you talk about some mistakes that we make. So you seem to be saying we're not perfect at understanding one another. Yes, I actually just reviewed some of the research on this in terms of what's been called accuracy of mind reading, right? How accurate are we actually? And I think a lot of it depends on the comparison point. So I think you're exactly right to say that we're sort of better than chance.

3:08And so like a lot of domains, like think about being able to detect whether someone's lying, you know, oh, there's been a bunch of meta analyses about that. And you would, you know, think that there's, we have some ability to detect and what the meta analyses have kind of pegged that number at is like 50 54 % chance of being, right? But now that statistic obscures a lot of information because it turns out that a lot of that is driven by truth bias, that people are particularly likely to guess that another person is telling them the truth. And so they tend to get that right sometimes. And then if they're trying to guess whether or not someone's lying, they're actually below accuracy on that.

3:43So that's 54 % is driven by a truth bias, essentially. But you see in lots of other domains as well. And people are trying to guess whether someone's being sarcastic or whether they're trying to be funny. So trying to read some of their complex intentions there. Basically, yes, they're a little bit better than chance, but they're not great. So it leaves a lot to be desired. There's all sorts of interesting factors that can push that around a bit. So even the medium by which you're communicating with the other person. So for the fact that we're talking with our voices now, that's giving you better insight than if we were writing to one another.

4:17And I have some work on the way the medium affects conversations. And you have some work on what you call under sociality. And you have a paper on what you call under sociality. What is this word? What does it mean? That's a good question. When we talk about under sociality, what we're talking about is that there are many cases in which people are less social than would be optimal for their own reported well-being. All right. And so and that's why we call it under. sociality. It's also, of course, possible that sometimes people are over social, they're too social for their well-being. But we don't see that that sort of as we don't see it as much of as a problem.

4:58Because whenever people are in those types of contexts, where they're being forced to network all the time, like you think about MBA students in a business school, where they're like, often kind of doing all this networking, right? They can kind of recognize when they're sort of feeling tired, and they're sort of like feeling like they're being over social and they can pull out of that context. But the problem with being under social, which is that you don't engage in the first place, is that it becomes this wicked environment in the Robin Hogarth sense of people don't learn from that. So they don't learn that they could have had a better experience if they had been social because they just don't do it.

5:33And then they can never update. And so because of that, we see it as more of a problem that's more pervasive and comes up in a lot of different contexts. And people don't ever like sort of update. So they don't know that they could be more social. Like you actually need to run experiments where you force people to be social so you can get the counterfactual of like what would have happened if they were social. We've done some research on this ourselves and we've like looked at, we've reviewed some of the other research on it. And we see this kind of under-sociality occurring in lots of different contexts, like from people being willing to start a conversation with others to people like being willing to engage in acts of kindness, like giving compliments to others, showing gratitude to others, just providing social support, even like providing feedback, well-intentioned, like pro-social feedback or advice.

6:21And these are all contexts in which people will tend to underestimate the extent to which others will appreciate their gestures and the extent to which it will make them happy and then tend not to engage in it as much as we think they could for their own well-being. There's a big unspoken assumption here, which is that being social is good for our well-being and health. I can see that, okay, smoking is bad, eating bad food is bad for our health and well-being, sure. But being grateful to someone and saying something nice and giving a compliment, really, does that matter for us? Yeah, there's a ton of research on this, that being social in lots of different forms and instantiations, whether having close relationships with your family to just being married compared to not being married, to having roommates and living with people versus living alone, all these different ways it's been measured.

7:15The more social version always has better is associated with better outcomes. And we say that being social is correlated with being happy, healthy, and wealthy because it's been correlated with emotional well-being. So people report that they feel happier when they are more social, sort of state-based, and when they're more socially embedded in their networks, sort of more trait-based. People have better physical health outcomes. So like Julianne Holt-Lunstead has done some really nice meta-analyses where she finds that social measures are as associated with like physical health outcomes, like even things like how long you live, you know, mortality rates, as much so as things like smoking cigarettes, and like obesity, and like other things that you would very clearly associate with physical outcomes, kind of showing that if anything, sociality is as implicated in physical health as some of these other things.

8:11And then finally, wealthiness, yeah, people that are richer tend to be more socially integrated in their environment. So which is not to say that all this work is causal, right? You know, forcing people to be social doesn't lead to these outcomes. But there is some work that's done experiments in which they do exactly that they like force people to be social and then try to measure some of these outcomes. This is some of the work that I've done. So a lot of the other stuff is like correlational. So they look at just associations that exist in the data. I think the stuff that's the most compelling is the experiments where you randomly assign people to be social or not, and then look at different outcomes.

8:45And we've done this in context where you might not really expect being social would necessarily have a positive impact. So for example, talking with a stranger, like on public transportation. So we've done experiments where we go on trains and buses, and we've done it in airplanes. Now, we have people talk to a stranger in one experimental condition, or just do whatever they want to do, which is usually not talk to someone in another condition. And then after they've had the experience, whether it's the trip, the bus ride or the plane ride. Afterwards, we ask them, what was that experience like for you?

9:21How happy do you feel now? So we ask about their mood and things. And what we find is that the people that talk very reliably, when they were in that condition, they report having a better experience and having a more pleasant mood by the end of the trip. Now, clearly you were just studying extroverts, right? Introverts would not benefit from this. we we've looked at the role of personality in in quite a few studies and it turns out that people's personality and particularly the extroversion matters a lot for their predictions about the experience extroverts think it'll be a much more pleasant experience if they talk to someone compared to introverts so some introverts are like that would be horrible that would be a terrible experience but when you run the actual experiments and actually ask people to be in the different conditions, what you find is that introverts and extroverts have very similar outcomes.

10:16If anything, at least directionally, we have some evidence that introverts report even more pleasant experiences than extroverts. And this doesn't just come from my research, like Will Fleece, who's a personality psychologist, has done a bunch of studies where he looks at like a lot more longitudinal, like daily diary studies, where he has people engage in a certain behavior for multiple weeks, like two weeks at a time. And he asked people to behave in extroverted ways. And he asked both extroverts to do this and introverts to do this, right? So everyone becomes more social and they also become more extroverted in other ways for the purpose of the experiment.

10:50And what he finds is that, yeah, so extroverts, they're happy to do that. They're happy to engage in extroverted behavior, but like surprisingly, so are introverts, right? So at least in the short term, in terms of what they're reporting for their mood, they're also reporting that they're happy to engage in that behavior. Now, that's not to say that there couldn't be sort of like long-term consequences for introverts where they feel, you know, maybe more drained in terms of their energy levels or something, which hasn't been necessarily empirically captured. But it is still interesting that they at least report like in the moments that they too feel happier when they engage in that kind of behavior.

11:25Yes, I'm somewhat introverted. And I have a lot of friends who are very introverted being in grad school. And we love to throw parties. And then the day after to just not talk to anyone and just relax. But during the party, it's great. And it's not like introverts don't like people, right? They just get exhausted from social interaction more easily. Yeah. I love that. You might have sort of like a refractory period afterwards where you kind of like recover. Yeah. Actually, one of the one, you know, the one personnel, like I said, we measured all the personality characteristics, the big five, you know, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

12:00And the one that we find actually affects people's experiences the most is not extroversion. It's neuroticism. Neuroticism affects people's experiences the most, particularly because when people are in solitude, and they're neurotic, they have really bad experience. So if anything, sort of there's this interaction effect that we found in a couple different experiments in which highly neurotic people that kind of need to be in a social situation, almost to kind of buffer them against themselves and their own neuroticism. So that was like the one personality trait that seemed to matter. Yes. And this is where we get to the mechanisms of why it is so hard for us to start these conversations with strangers.

12:41So let's say, you know, I have been familiar with this work for a couple of years now. And yet, every time I am on a plane, on a bus, on a train, and I see all these strangers, and I know it would be good for me to talk to them, I really don't want to. And I don't know if it's my anxiety or if I just think I don't know what to say and who knows what kind of person they are and if they will say something mean. Let's say I get on the bus and I might say hi to the bus driver and they say hi, then that's a little bit good. But if they say something like, I just get on the bus, which I did college in Berlin, then that's really the norm.

13:16It's really unpleasant. And those are the kinds of interactions I recall afterwards, kind of. And maybe those negative effects that weigh more heavily than the positive effects, maybe they make us more cautious. I think it's a great question. And I think you're ahead of the game, Eric, because I think most people actually mispredict what the experience will be like. So at least you kind of have the kind of knowledge about the research that you know that this experience has the potential to be good. Like you've seen that in the experiments. But I think a lot of people, like they don't even want to start a conversation because they expect it that it'll be bad.

13:49Right. And then, you know, why do they expect it to be bad? I think there's a lot of different reasons. So one that we found a lot of evidence for is that people are really worried about the process of starting the conversation. And in particular, they don't think that the other person will want to engage with them or talk to them. So, you know, this is, I think this shows up in some contexts more than others. Like we talked about public transportation, when you're sitting on a train, do you want to talk to a stranger. I think that's a context where people are very concerned about whether the other person would want to talk to them.

14:18And I think we find evidence for pluralistic ignorance there in the sense that people see others not talking. Maybe they have their headphones in, maybe they're looking on their phones, right? And they infer, oh, that person must not want to talk. And so, in fact, what we find in our experiments is that everyone says they're like somewhat willing to have a conversation that kind of put themselves at the midpoint of the scale in terms of openness. but everybody thinks everyone else doesn't want to have a conversation, right? So there's kind of a gap in terms of beliefs. And so I think what people are doing is they're inferring others' attitudes from their behavior, when in fact, their behavior is really more due to the norms there, right?

14:56So the norm is like not to have loud conversations in these types of contexts. And so that doesn't mean that people don't want to talk. It's more like they're just kind of following the norms, or they're just trying to distract themselves by looking on their phone. That doesn't mean that they don't necessarily want to talk to you, right? So I think that's something that comes up. And people are also very concerned about, related to this, very concerned about being rejected. So a lot of I think the fears come from the start of the conversation. Will the other person want to talk to me? Are they going to reject me?

15:23And one of our experiments, people estimated that more than 50 % of others would not be willing to talk back to them. So if they were to try to start a conversation, half the people would just refuse to talk to them, which I think is wildly off base. I think that in our actual experiments, people report that they can almost always strike up a conversation with the first person they approach. It's like 95 % of the time they can start. And if that doesn't work, they go to the next person. But 95 % of the time, the other person is responding back to them. So I think people are underestimating the role of the norm to just reciprocate in a pleasant way when someone approaches you and says hi to you.

16:04And some of these, they don't have to be long conversations either. Some of these are just short conversations where people are sort of exchanging pleasantries. In our experiments, we have a really wide range of conversations that are just like five-minute pleasantries versus people that talk for a full hour on their entire commute and exchange phone numbers and become connections. And what's interesting is that people's self-reported happiness by the end of the trip doesn't correlate that strongly with the length of time that they talk. It's more like the fact that they talked at all is what sort of makes them happy.

16:37Another thing that we think might be going on, and Eric, this is, you just opened up like a rabbit hole. Please go ahead. Another thing that might be going on is we find that people seem to focus a little bit too much on their own competence as opposed to how others will perceive their warmth. And so you, Eric, for example, might be really focused on like, am I going to be able to make conversation in a way that's really clever? Like, am I going to be able to say the right things? Am I going to start the conversation with just the right line in my head? And then we see this for other types of like pro-social gestures as well.

17:11Like when you're thinking about paying someone a compliment, like, am I going to be able to say just the right compliment? I don't want to offend them, blah, blah, blah. And so people get inside their own heads a little bit kind of with some of those questions. Whereas from the recipient perspective, I think the recipient really just They don't really think about, oh, was that exactly the right way to start the conversation? Instead, what they're thinking about is like, oh, that person was trying to make a nice gesture. They were well-intentioned to me. They're friendly, essentially. And so I just appreciate as the recipient, I just appreciate that you were being sort of friendly and warm to me.

17:45And so I think that's another gap that comes up, which is the person who's thinking about initiating the conversation isn't recognizing enough how much another person will just appreciate their friendly gesture. gesture. And instead, they kind of get into their head in terms of thinking about their competency. I feel this most strongly when a friend comes to me with a problem they have. My boss said something bad about me or my partner broke up with me. And the first thing I think is, how am I going to solve this? What is the right thing that I have to say to help them overcome this problem immediately?

18:16To help them regulate their emotions in whatever way. It's hard to know that and it's not my decision to make. All I have to do is really to be there. And oftentimes when they just talk about it and I listen and I don't even say anything. That's already helpful because you're signaling, I'm here for you. I'm helping you. And that's enough. We don't have to know what to say. Yeah, I love that. And I also think that, you know, if you get too caught up with like, I might not have exactly the right thing to say, you may say nothing at all. And then, you know, the, you know, I think that's worse than if you were to try.

18:46We actually have a paper that we just wrote on like constructive feedback. So this is like feedback that could help someone solve their problem. So things like, you know, you have a stain on your shirt, you might want to think about changing your shirt before you walk into that meeting or, you know, and people and you of course, there's like a moment of awkwardness, or it's like telling the person that there's something bad. But but it's really valuable in the long run for the other person, right? Because if you had a stain on your shirt, when you want to know that before you walk into the big meeting, or if you're turns out, you've been mispronouncing the client's name, like, wouldn't you want to know that before you talk to the client again?

19:20But this is that's another contexts where people feel like, Ooh, I probably shouldn't give that feedback because it'll just be uncomfortable and painful for the other person. And they're not realizing how much like the other person is going to value and appreciate it because it would really help them in the long run. I'm still thinking about how people believe that no one will have anything to talk with them about that. No one will want to talk to them that, you know, on public transport, what are we even going to talk about. I know you have other research on how people think the beginning of a conversation that'll be fun, but then we kind of run out of topics and we don't know what to talk about.

19:55And then it'll be awkward afterwards. When in social psychology research, there is so much work on what is called the minimal group paradigm, where it turns out it really takes very little for people to form a social bond and have grounds for a topic, right? I'm German. I live in California, whenever I run into someone from Greece, I'm like, hey, we're European. We are basically the same, which really we are not, right? But it's like, we're constantly looking for the smallest cues that we have something in common with people and then immediately form a certain, you know, minimal bond with them.

20:29And it seems like that would be easy for us then to leverage that. And maybe that's part of the function of small talk, right? To play around a little bit and see what you and the other person have in common. And yet we think, oh, there's all these people and who knows what they're thinking about. I have nothing in common with them. And that's a really isolating experience that makes people really lonely. Yeah, we actually Nick Epley, one of my colleagues, my prior research advisor, and I had a hypothesis that was just like that, but we didn't collect empirical data on it. But the hypothesis was essentially that people would not realize how quickly they find common ground in a conversation, which is like, you think you're like hunting for a needle in a haystack, like, oh, how am I going to find, something in common with this other person.

21:10But in fact, all of conversation is built around the idea that you're going to zero in on the stuff that you have in common right away. And in fact, like in these experiments, we ran with people talking to other strangers, almost always they start off with something that they think will lead to common ground. Hey, here we are on this train together going into downtown Chicago. Do you work in Chicago? So they just start asking questions that relate to what... And so you narrow in immediately on kind of common ground. Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah. And all our friends used to be strangers, right?

21:44It's not like we pick our friends by having some sort of, I mean, maybe some academics do that, some sort of pro con list for each person and how they match our values and goals. No, right? You just sit next to someone in college in the lecture hall and you ask them, do you know what this professor is talking about? No, no idea. We should get together and talk about it. And then a couple years later, your best friends and, you know, this is how it happens. Just talking to people and then you never know what's going to happen. Right. The really interesting thing about studying conversation is that it's sort of this game theory problem, which is that, you know, at every single step of the conversation, from the start of it, to the middle of it, to how do you end it?

22:21You have this challenge of like, you have to try to read the other person in order to have sort of the best possible experience for both of you. It's called a, it's, we call it a coordination problem, which is like that there are some reasons why the other person may not reveal everything honestly to you. So maybe they really want to leave the conversation, but because they're trying to be polite, they're not going to directly say that. And so then you're having to guess and you don't have perfect transparent information. And that can lead to all these weird things happening of each person trying to guess what the other person is thinking and getting it a little bit wrong.

22:58And so then things happen where it's like, okay, I think you don't want to talk to me because you're reading your phone. And therefore, I'm not going to talk to you, even though you actually did want to talk to me. So there's sort of an error that happens. Or I think you want to leave the conversation because I see you looking toward the door. But in fact, you're just distracted for a minute. You don't want to leave the conversation. But now I'm going to end it because I think you want to leave it. So now I've ended it. And then as you so nicely point out, all relationships, you start as strangers and you have conversation to build up the relationship.

23:28And so then there's sort of this question of like, you know, how long to continue the conversation or how many conversations to have with the other person, which is kind of the middle of the conversation piece. And I have done some work on that piece. And there, what we find is the error that people make is that they tend to think of, they think that conversations will run dry, like they'll run out of material to talk about a lot faster than they actually do. And the psychology there is that it's hard to simulate a conversation accurately because conversation by its very nature has like a million ways in which it can branch out, right?

24:07Especially if you don't know the other person, right? Like how can I possibly simulate a conversation with you, Eric, if we haven't talked many times before, because I just don't know like what, how you're going to respond to me. I don't know what the future is going to look like. I don't know what you have in your mind yet. Right. And so like, I have to talk in order to sort of figure that out. And so because of this, like when you ask people to try to simulate a conversation like how is it going to go like how long should it last and so on they think oh well i don't know like it'll i guess i'm gonna i'll say everything i have to say i have no idea what the other person is gonna say and then we're gonna stop talking right but that's not really what happens and so actually we have some evidence in that paper that's just referring to that suggests that because people just think of conversations kind of like one-dimensional way they can't really fully incorporate all the richness that is inherent in a conversation they think that it's going to get boring, they're going to lose interest or the other person will lose interest.