175 - Nicholas Epley: A Little More Social

27:36But then, you know, as I was open to hearing more, he started telling me more about his story. It turned out he lost his son in a protest. He was shot in the neck and killed. He went back to Iran and tried to get his body back. He was in Doha running a successful business and went back to try to retrieve his son's body. He had four kids. He was running a successful business out of Doha. They told him not to go back. All of his friends told him not to go back and do this. He went back. He was arrested at the airport, was put in prison for six years. He's shown me the scars on his hands and arms while he's driving that he incurred there.

28:11He ended up having to sell everything that he owned to pay off the Iranian regime a ransom to get him out of the prison. He came to the U.S. requesting asylum. He tried three different times to get it, was finally granted asylum on the last time on the day that his wife died in a hospital. right now if i had never asked if i never inquired about what was in the mind of this man i never would have learned all of this we ended up embracing a hug in the back of his car in the trunk when he was pulling my stuff out both of us in tears at that point right very meaningful connection there that told me a story i never would have imagined would come out of this guy before.

28:58And I will not forget this. I keep talking about this story, which happened just a couple of weeks ago. And I never would have known what I had missed if I had not talked to him. And that's the problem with calculations based purely on efficiency. At the time, we know that not walking 100 feet down the street is going to be a little bit easier than going down and ordering in person or sitting there having a conversation with somebody else, but we don't always know what we're missing. And a lot of these pushes towards efficiency, erasing some friction. The friction is also often social friction that we might not even be using in a way that is optimal for us and the person we're interacting with.

29:43And we won't know what we're missing. Even when it's gone, we won't know what we're missing, which makes it hard to calibrate our lives. I think accordingly, It's a little bit like the question you asked me at the beginning. How do you know you're under social? You don't necessarily, right? Until maybe, you know, it's years down the road and you're feeling lonely and you have a sense that you have no friends and the country is divided because nobody talks to each other anymore. And you believe that people you don't talk to have overly extreme views, which sounds a little bit like the United States right now.

30:18i can imagine that if i had been in your shoes hearing my uber driver share this story my first reaction almost could have been oh no i shouldn't have asked because now he has to talk about it but the thing is i would guess he was already thinking about it this is not the kind of thing you just oh right that happened right and then you remember and so it helps people feel yeah so these kinds of things the things that people are willing to talk to are likely the things that they are already thinking about. When you open up to people, and our data don't suggest that you should be intruding on people all the time or forcing them to have interactions that they would, for whatever reason in that moment, prefer not to have.

30:58That's not it at all. Our data suggests that you're underestimating how likely these interactions will turn out if you try. If you open up and welcome people, invite people into a conversation or an interaction or an engagement in some way with you, right? And so whenever people respond back to that invitation or something, you're not forcing it out of them. It's likely what they're thinking about. And when it comes to hard, difficult experiences, these are things people think about or think about all the time. My colleague, Linda Ginzel, she's told me this many times because we went through a similar experience.

31:35Linda and her husband, Boaz Kezar, who's a psychologist here, a very well-known social cognitive psychologist and a linguist as well. They lost their son, Danny Kesar, at two years old in a crib accident, which prompted them to open Kids in Danger, which is a consumer safety, product safety organization that ran for 20 or so years, 25 years, I think, trying to improve consumer products for kids. Linda told me that that loss was very hard for all the obvious reasons, but also So people didn't connect with them very much afterwards. They didn't know what to say. And so when some trauma like that happens, you also get avoided.

32:16And Linda would say, people wouldn't want to talk to me about it as if I'm not thinking about it, but she was thinking about it all the time. My wife, Jen, and I went through a similar experience. We lost a baby on July 11th, 2016, six months into my wife's pregnancy. Daughter had been diagnosed with Down syndrome at three months, which we knew meant she was at high risk for death over the course of that pregnancy. But when we lost our daughter, people would avoid her on her way to school to drop the other kids off at the elementary school. Other parents, other moms she knew would not, they just seemed to avoid her a little bit, not come up and talk.

32:52Not because they didn't care or were mean, but because they didn't know what to say and they were worried that bringing up would make us think about something we weren't already thinking about. You're thinking about it all the time. So inviting people into a conversation is simply that. Not forcing them to think about things, but allowing them to just share their thoughts with you. And that's often surprisingly rewarding. And you learn things you never would have guessed maybe before when you invite people into a conversation with you. Again, thank you for sharing. There's something really pernicious about this idea of, I'm just not ready to connect with this other person.

33:29Maybe I'm tired, or I've been stress that work lately, or it's so easy to keep making these excuses. And I think I see this manifest in our culture in so many different ways. So even if you look at dating, you hear things like, you should be happy and content and independent before you go on a date. And sure, you shouldn't hope the other person is going to solve all your problems and put them on a pedestal. Be too dependent. Sure. I wonder if from a perspective of under-sociality, that is the advice that you would give for example or if maybe we're not meant to be i mean in the words of one of our faculty advisors here at stanford hazel marcus you can't be yourself by yourself think about this often right it's really hard to conceptualize ourselves to understand ourselves truly in the absence of other people but sometimes we frame it that way at least in our weird culture so hazel is one of the best social psychologists in the business and is wise and I would be an idiot to disagree with that.

34:29I think that's likely exactly right. And it speaks to a question that I've been talking with one of our first year PhD students here at the University of Chicago about, Maya Ingram, about the possibility that we actually come to know ourselves better through conversation. Right? So there's this old idea in psychology going back to you know, 1902, 1936, about the looking glass self, that we understand who we are by seeing how we are seen and understood by other people to some extent, that they tell us the kind of person that we are in some way, because they see us out there in the world, right?

35:12And Mark Leary and Roy Baumeister have a very influential theory that self-esteem is a monitor that's tracking how well you're doing in the social world. We care about what others think about us or other people thinking well about us. We think well about ourselves. Other people think poorly of us. We're also then thinking poorly about ourselves. We gain our sense of self a little bit by thinking about ourselves through the eyes of other people. And that makes a prediction, which is that when we are in conversation with other people, or if you had a conversation with a stranger, it makes a prediction that you would be more certain about who you are.

35:49You would have more confidence in the type of person you are after the conversation than before. So I don't have a great answer to your question about whether the dating apps or whatever have it right that you have to be sure about yourself before you reach out and engage with other people. But my prediction is that that seems wrong to me. And then in fact, it is through interacting. It is through connecting with other people that we become ourselves and that we come to know ourselves, right? I'm a different man because I've been married to an amazing human being, my wife, Jen, for 30 years, right?

36:26And I come to understand who I am in my relationship with her, right? So you think about the kinds of traits that we embody. I hope I'm a kind person, right? I hope I'm a generous person. I hope I'm an honest person. And you only come to know yourself in those ways through interactions with other people. The other thing that I think is interesting is that when you look at the opposite end of the spectrum, you take people and you put them in solitary confinement, for instance, they will often say anecdotally that they lost themselves. They get very disordered thinking after spending so much time alone, not being themselves anymore by themselves to Hazel's point.

37:12not to compare solitary confinement to doing a phd but i've seen very small versions of this i think i can relate and i'm sure many of our listeners have spent many hours by themselves sometimes trying to solve a problem i would do this in my phd just solving my personal problems or solving an academic problem trying to test an idea and it's so easy to just go down these rabbit holes and then i talk to one person no matter who they are and they immediately tell everyone this makes no sense eric what the hell are you doing or of course everyone knows this my grandma told me this it's like okay everything's possible but it's just so alluring this idea especially in academia i think that we as individuals come up with these ideas and then we tell the world about it and it's just so weird even in social psychology so amos tversky props to the stanford psych department famously used to say that people waste years by not being able to waste hours.

38:07And what he meant by that was that, you know, and in his career, what was really so productive for him were the afternoons that he would spend talking with Danny. And they had very different working hours. So Amos liked to, he was a night owl. He would spend all night in the psych department when nobody else was around. Danny was more of a regular daytime person. He would work in the day and then would go home in the evening, like a more normal person compared to Amos in that respect, but they would waste entire, quote unquote, waste entire afternoons in conversation with each other. And that's where their work came from, right?

38:42This is not to say that we don't need to spend time by ourselves, right? I just finished writing a book. That's an awful lot of time by myself. But there were also lots of conversations along the way and presenting other people with the work. But one thing we do find in our research is that people underestimate how much they're going to learn in conversation. That's a pretty reliable result. And it doesn't mean you should spend all your day in conversation. You do have to get time done, you know, things done. And sometimes you need to do that alone. But wasting some hours in conversation, to Amos's point, may not be much of a waste at all.

39:18Earlier today, I was talking to a friend about how I was going to do the podcast with you. And she was like, oh, cool. What's his research? And she had a very immediate reaction in the form of my question and her words when does it end does it ever end and so i asked her to clarify and i was like what do you mean she was like well sometimes i just go to events with wonderful people they're wonderful events too tired or i just go because of fomo i guess another way of asking this question could be is over sociality a thing Yeah, that's a good question. It's hard to find evidence for that, I would say.

39:56What we would expect to see if people were being maybe over social is regretting their interactions more often than we actually see them doing. It's not that it's zero, right? If you have a distribution of expectations that are overly pessimistic compared to experiences, right? It doesn't mean that you are never going to have an unpleasant interaction with someone. certainly you will. But it also doesn't mean that there's not some increased degree of sociality that would become problematic for you. You'd spend all of your day in conversation and none of it alone getting stuff done. However, the kinds of mistakes that get corrected are the over-social mistakes where you tried this thing or you did too much and now you're exhausted and you need to dial it back.

40:44That you learn from. The ones you don't learn from are the other end of the spectrum. So I guess I would have faith in your friend if they were out there trying and actually engaging with other people routinely to get some sense of what reality looks like to get somewhat calibrated over time. I think I have, after taking this research to heart, really changed in the way I live my life in lots of ways. I miss fewer opportunities to engage with people that I otherwise would have overlooked. But I also don't necessarily overdo it either. I'm not talking to people all the time. That's not what our data suggests either.

41:19Well, I will start inviting my friend to all the parties and she has no excuse. Okay, towards the end of our conversation, I want to zoom out and talk about you as a person, as an academic, who is doing all sorts of interesting things that are not required of you as far as I understand. Your job description, for example, writing books. This is not your first book. You have written two books for the general public. and I am curious, what surprised you the most about your first book writing experience? And is there something you learned writing the second book that writing the first one did not teach you?

41:56So the first time I was surprised that I couldn't do it. And that was really why I wrote that book. I owe a debt to Stanford University for this because I birthed the idea of the book. I wrote my proposal when I was on sabbatical at CASBIS, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, just up the hill from campus on the DISH property. That was where I wrote the book proposal and that's where that started. And really, that first book was trying to see if I could do it. And I wasn't sure. And I could do it. And I wrote a book that I was proud of and that I thought did the science justice.

42:33What I learned with the second book was that writing the first one didn't make the second one easier. For me, it was actually much harder. After the first one, I told my wife, I'm not going to do this again. Honey, I promise. Like, that was so hard. It's been hard on us, the family. I'm not going to do that again. The second one, though, and it wasn't even that many years after. Six years after the first one came out, I was back at it getting a contract again. And I didn't really want to write the second book in the sense that I remember the first one was so hard. But I kind of felt like I had to.

43:07I thought I would regret it if I didn't share these data in a book form. It's something bigger. If I didn't tell these stories from our data, if I didn't share this with people. Because I do think that learning about this research, learning about these pessimistic mistakes that we make about each other changes how you live your life. Moment to moment, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, it changes your character over time. So I thought I would regret not writing it. But I was a little more optimistic that, you know, this time through, I would get it done. So I got the contract in 2020 with a year and a half deadline, which is the same deadline I had before, which I kind of made.

43:45I was maybe six months late with the first one. But this one, you know, I started writing in 2020. Pandemic hammered us. And that was terrible. And then it just, it took a long time to get this story right, to get the book right. Because there's a lot of nuance to it. There's a lot of, yes, but what about this? What about that? What about these mistakes, other kinds of mistakes? There's a lot of nuance about it that made it hard to write. And I guess I went into it being a little more optimistic that having written one would make the second one easier. It was not. It was really hard. Still really hard.

44:22what's so cool about the idea of under sociality is how broadly it applies and how many different spaces i could see benefiting from learning about this concept from architects designing third spaces to kindergarten teachers right all sorts of and i always love asking professors about how they get to be psychologists outside of the ivory tower because there's all kinds of use cases for us to have an impact without writing papers or even writing books. And so I have a sense that you've been doing some consulting work or maybe run some public facing workshops or done some other speaking to organizations that might not have heard about this idea otherwise.

45:05So if you could just shine some light and maybe highlight a specific place you've spoken at that really stood out to you. Yeah, so I do a lot of public speaking, in part because our work is not that it's not hard, It's quite accessible. People can get it. And in my public speaking, the thing that I've really enjoyed in the last few years, particularly talking about this work, is that I've been able to take my job as a scientist to these public facing engagements in ways that I think are really impactful for people. that really change the way people think about the work in the moment that they are in.

45:39So when I run, when I do a workshop, so for instance, I've done this now with over 5 ,000 people where I have people have deep conversations with each other. I'll do that when I give book talks now, for instance. That's one where I'm brought in to give a keynote address or something. And I will start, I've been doing this now for quite a few years. and I will run the audience through an experiment. I will tell them early on in the session that in just a minute, I'm gonna have you, I'm gonna pair you up with another person in the room. I'm gonna have you have a conversation with this person. And I put some questions up on the board that they're gonna talk about.

46:16And they're meaningful questions. They're things like, can you tell me, what are you most grateful for in your life? Please tell me about it. If I was gonna become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? Can you tell me about when the last times you cried in front of another person? So all of the social psych nerds, listening to this podcast will know that those questions come from the Art and Elaine Aaron Fast Friends procedure. They're on the deep end of that spectrum, slightly modified. And when I put those up, I also put a link to a survey up on the screen.

46:45People go to the survey and they report how they think the conversation is going to make them feel. So last week, I did this for the Committee on Evolutionary Biology here at the University of Chicago. A couple of days before that, I was in my daughter's high school doing this with all the AP psych students. I did this for 600 market researchers here in Chicago at a conference. All of our incoming MBA students at the University of Chicago now do this with us on the second day of their orientation. Fill out the survey. They then go to have the conversation. Dread is washed over the audience by then.

47:17They're all regretting that they came to this session, eyeing the door, wishing that they hadn't come. They then go off and have the conversation. And then at that point, it's a struggle for me to get people to come back. When they come back, They then report how the conversation actually made him feel. Before the conversation, they also tell me, what would you rather do right now? Have this conversation or take a break? So measure their choice. Afterwards, they come back and they say, what would you rather have done right now? Had this conversation or taken a break? And the gaps between their expectations before and their experiences afterwards are massive.

47:51Just massive. And you can so clearly feel it in the room. I have people talk about what their experience is like. I've seen people cry in front of their fellow MBA students talking about how meaningful this conversation was, how they just told somebody something they have never told someone else before right here, how this was the best conversation that they have ever had in that moment. I can then show them the data from all of their peers because we pull it down off of a Qualtrics survey and pop it right up there on the screen. I've now given this away to almost 100 psychologists who are teaching psychology out at universities around the country so that they can go off and do this themselves.

48:31And the value of taking science, our science out into the world like that, is that you get people to feel it, right? I'm not just telling them about an effect or showing them the data. They're actually feeling it. And we all kind of know as psychologists that you don't really think your way into feeling different. It's the opposite. You feel your way into thinking differently. And the best way to communicate to an audience is not just showing them stuff, right? Not just showing them on the screen things, but allowing them to actually feel it, right? And so this is super powerful at the individual level, I think.

49:09I do that a lot. At scale, at the collective level, we have to do something else. So you mentioned the kindergarten teachers and the urban planners and things. Here, I wrote the book and I do my speaking, my public speaking and workshops and things like that. I do that to reach individuals. I wrote the book as a psychologist about psychology to reach individuals where they are. That's the work that we do. If you move this to public policy, though, and we want to think about how do we change a school or a community or a workplace or a city or a state or a country, then you need to start thinking differently.

49:54You're not going to do that through the level of individual beliefs. Policy often circumvents individual beliefs to say design spaces where interaction is just easy. The University of Chicago's business school does this, I think, very well. So the office I walk into every day, first room I walk by is this massive atrium at the center of the business school here at Booth that invites people to sit down because it creates all these spaces where people can sit in community with each other and conversation with each other, right? Those are designing spaces that just make it almost a requirement that you interact with other people.

50:32It circumvents your belief by creating situations or contexts where people just naturally connect with each other and interact. And that's the way you think about intervening at the policy level. We're running up against time. We'll ask one final question. And I talked about how you help the people around you implement these ideas. How are you personally implementing this in your own life with your family? How are you trying to be less under social? It's changed the mindset that I have walking around in the world. I know that other people are more open to engaging with me than I had thought. That avoiding other people is not kind, but unkind.

51:12And I also know that I feel empowered in ways. I'm not afraid of interacting with other people. I don't have that sense of awkwardness or aversion to reaching out and inviting someone into a conversation or interaction with me. I'm not reluctant to be honest with my PhD students, for instance, in my meetings with them. I talk about my personal life and I talk about meaningful things with them. I don't create a barrier between us because I know it'll establish a better relationship that'll just be better for us. Day to day, I'm almost always talking to somebody on the train. This morning, it was Ellen who I hadn't seen for a while.

51:45She works at the University of Chicago Press. She sat down next to me this morning. Molly was on my other side. Molly works at the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. Now my challenge is, who do I talk to on the train? Because I've kind of got a bevy of friends there, right? My buddy Harold Pollack, who I normally ride the train with, wasn't with me this morning. But that's the challenge, right? Who do I engage with? When I walk to the office, I'm often talking with someone. If I sidle up next to somebody on the sidewalk, I'll have a few block conversation with them. And when I get into the building, I make a habit of walking through with my head up, saying hi and smiling with people saying hello to folks, which has allowed me to get to know so many more people in the building.

52:22I keep thank you notes readily on hand just at my office desk so that when I have a kind thought about somebody, I can go and share it. And when I need spares, I just reach to my right here and I grab a whole bunch of thank you cards. I've got them sitting right there, right? And so I've noticed a lot of the red flags in my mind that are doubts about other people that would keep me from connecting with other people. And I think I've tested them enough to learn where I would commonly be making mistakes. And I think that's the way we take this and put it into practice in our own lives. Our data don't, I mean, this is the challenge of going from psychology, behavioral science to individual practice.

53:05I can't tell you, Eric, exactly how to put this into practice in your life. I don't know what red flags are going off in your mind that are telling you to avoid other people because it's not going to go well. What we found in our research though, is that by testing some of those flags, right, finding places where those flags go up and testing them reveals one context after another, after another, after another, where those flags are miscalibrated and then to reveal places where we're overly pessimistic. And I think we want to do the same thing in our own lives, right? Is to take those flags that go off and just test them, right?

53:45You think it'll be weird to say hi to your barista or ask them how their life is going, or to say hello to the stranger who sits down next to you, or to reach back to a high school friend and tell them that you'll always remember that time they were kind you when you really needed it and you don't know why you've never told them that, but you think about it all the time and you are so grateful. And you'll send that letter and you'll find out that what had been holding you back was a little bit wrong and get a little more calibrated. So again, our data don't suggest you should be necessarily doing all of these things that we've studied in our research because I don't know what's holding you back.

54:19They do suggest that when the flags are going off in your mind, don't take them for granted. The other person doesn't want to talk or the Uber driver has nothing interesting to say or this act of kindness won't make any difference or my partner will respond negatively to me being totally honest with him about something. And instead, test that. Because my prediction is that you'll find a lot of those flags are wrong. Well, this is my turn for saying thank you for making the time. This was a really fun conversation. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. It's good to be talking with you again. Thank you for listening.

54:57Following Robert Cialdini's advice here on this podcast, let's see if I can convince you to take about five seconds of your valuable time and leave us a quick review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or elsewhere. This podcast has been a labor of love by several wonderful young folks here in the department, and we have been surprised by the ever-increasing reach the podcast has had. with tens of thousands of new downloads and thousands of new followers every single month in nearly every country around the world. Help us make even more people excited about psychology by leaving us a review or subscribing to our no-spam, all-fun sub-stack at stanfordpsypod to connect with other listeners or shoot us an email with your thoughts or suggestions at stanfordpsychpodcast at gmail.com.

55:46Thank you and have a wonderful psyched day.

55:52Thank you.