Mind Reading & Instant Connections | Dr. Nicholas Epley

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29:12That's$15 a month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes when the network is busy. Capable device required. Availability speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. Yeah, and we've seen the rise of the shorthand, the slash S in written communication in these formats to denote sarcasm and the emojis and trying to add an extra color to what we're typing. What's fascinating to me is how poor we are at predicting what that future behavior or reaction will be in that moment. So there was a violent attack of someone in a car that was posted on Reddit.

29:52And if you actually look at the comments, the comments were all, man, I would have ran that person over. I would have got out of the car and gotten violent with them. I would have reacted in such a bold way based on what was happening to them. And the person replied to these people that in the moment I froze. And we have this idea and this prediction in our mind that if someone is racist in front of us or someone is violent in front of us or someone gets in an accident in front of us, we, in our altruistic state, will rise to the occasion and be the most heroic version of ourselves. But that prediction is actually quite faulty in reality.

30:31Yeah. So, and again, this gets back to our conversation earlier about how we were guessing not just at the minds of other people, and we can often get that wrong, but when we're thinking about ourselves in a different context, how might we have behaved if we were in a different situation? We also are doing the same thing. And imagine that we would be thinking or feeling about it at that point in the same way that we are right now. So one example that I sometimes mention, not long after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Mark Wahlberg, movie actor, tough guy, he was actually supposed to be one of those planes.

31:13And he was interviewed by Men's Health Magazine. And he told, you know, after all of this goes down, we know what was happening in those planes. We know what was going on. We understand the risk that was, all this stuff is clear to us now, right? Just like my sarcasm is clear to me when I type to you and I therefore assume it'll be crystal clear to you. We know all of this stuff after the September 11th attacks. And And what Wahlberg thought was, if I had been on those planes, what he said in the interview, if I had been on those planes, it wouldn't have gone down like it did. There would have been blood in the first class cabin and me saying, everybody sit down, things are going to be okay.

31:55Something to that extent, right? It's easy for us to imagine that when we are sitting here cool and calm and collected and we know that there's an emergency out there, that we would rise to the occasion and feel about it then exactly the way we do now. The fact of the matter is, when you're in those situations, there are often very different emotions than the one you're feeling right now, which doesn't give you a good guide. The best guide to how you're likely to feel in a situation is how others feel who are actually in the situation that you are not in. For a lot of our clients, when they are ready to create change in their life, they know where they're at, and they're frustrated, and they are ready to make a change.

32:38They know that if they continue doing the same things, they're going to get the same results. However, there's also the people who will hypothesize all day of how they will handle whatever events, whatever situations from their couch because they read a book, they listened to this podcast, they know how to do it. It's like, okay, well, when you're able to do that consistently in real life, right? Not in your mind, all right? You let us know what those results are. Because those people who are ready to make change in their life, they've already played it out in real life multiple times and did not like the results and realize it's time that I have to make changes in order to get the desired results.

33:27It's the ego part of our mind that for whatever reason clouds and distorts our abilities in our mind. One of the things in the book, there was a lot of studies that pointed out these limitations or where they're at. And perhaps you could explain a few of those for our audience now. Because I think the best way forward is to let go of your ego, which is also to let go of that theory of mind part of you don't have the answers. You certainly don't know what other people are thinking. and it's obvious that you certainly don't even know your own thoughts. Again, we want to be a little bit careful here.

34:14Accuracy is a nuanced concept, right? So our married couples, for instance, when they were in the lab, they were better than chance. They could guess how their partner felt a little better than they could with strangers, not wildly so, but a little better, and they were better than chance. So I don't want to say there's no accuracy at all. What we know is that there are certain mechanisms we use to understand each other's minds. Those mechanisms give us some insight into what's going on inside the head of another person, which as far as we can tell, other species on the planet can't do anywhere near to the extent that we can.

34:52But they lead to predictable mistakes. So take egocentrism. My tendency to assume that the way I'm representing things right now in my own mind is also the way that you are representing them. I think this is a funny joke. I'm going to assume you think it's funny too. I think this instruction to you, if I'm a boss, is crystal clear if you're my employee and it's total mud and nonsense to you, right? That can create some accuracy, right? If it is clear to me, it probably makes sense there is some clarity to you, but it can create a predictable error, which is I tend to assume that your mind matches my own more than it actually does, right?

35:30So there are a whole category of mistakes that look like that. Once I know a little more about you, right? So John, I know you're in Florida. AJ, I see you're wearing a sharp looking suit. You look like a businessman, but maybe, you know, have a little fun on the weekends. You got the long hair. So I think you've used a surfboard before maybe, right? Once we have a little more information about somebody, once we kind of know, have a sense of what groups they might be part of or kind of what they're like, we can use stereotypes, right? Abstracted knowledge about the groups that they belong in. Those stereotypes also contain some accuracy, right?

36:12So if you meet a tiger, right, you're probably right to be more afraid of a tiger than if you meet a rabbit, right? There's some accuracy to that. If you meet a Republican, you're probably right to assume a certain set of beliefs compared to if you meet somebody you know they're a Democrat. The problem with stereotypes isn't that they're inherently wrong. The problem is, at least when it comes to groups, they tend to be defined by the things that differentiate people from each other, right? So men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Well, you know, the things that create the category men are the things that differentiate them from the category of women.

36:48But what we miss in that differentiation are all the things that are shared or in common with each other. And so what stereotypes tend to do is they tend to exaggerate the differences between groups on the dimensions that make them central. So for instance, women, people, sorry, overestimate the extent to which women have more empathic ability than men do. They're right. The stereotype is right. Women do tend to be more empathic than men, but on tests of empathy, for instance, people tend to assume that gender difference is three times bigger or so than it actually is, right? So we get groups exaggerating, stereotypes exaggerating group differences.

37:28And then the last mistake I describe in the book is when I can actually see what you are doing, when I actually watch you, right? I get on the train, for instance, in the morning here in Chicago to go to the office. When I can actually see what you're doing, I sit down next to you, you're not talking to me. I can make inferences from that behavior. I can work backwards from what I see in you to what I presume is on your mind. You're not talking to me. I assume you're not interested in talking to me because if you're interested, you would be talking to me. The mistake that creates is that we assume, we tend to assume that people's behavior is a simpler representation of their mind than it actually is.

38:13So, right, John, if you sat down next to me on a train or a plane, you might not talk to me because you don't want to talk to me, but you also might not talk to me because I'm not talking to you, even though we both like to talk. So that intuitive behaviorism tends to lead us to assume that others' minds are just simpler. There's just less going on than there actually is. When it comes to male and female empathetic skills and being able to feel in that manner, you mentioned it's only a few points. It's not the giant divide that we tend to think it is. At least I think that divide would be more convenient for all of us if that was the case, but because it isn't, it makes things a little bit more fuzzier.

39:00However, we do know the voting patterns and we certainly have seen those graphs of men and women, the demographics and voting across the country. So even those couple degrees and empathetic talent skills drastically change that voting demographic. So my point there being that it doesn't take much to wildly alter the results of that empathy. So there is some truth to that. There are things where a few percentage points really does matter. There's no doubt about it. And what's more, if one of the reasons why it's so easy for people to come up with examples of differences like in terms of gender is because if you have a small difference between two distributions, right, even if the means are just not very different from each other, at the extremes, they are going to be quite a bit different.

40:01The tails of those distributions are going to become or be quite different. So the most empathic people are more likely to be women than men. Those differences are going to be big. And the least empathic people are more likely to be men than women. So at the tails, at the extremes, small mean differences can be big. But when it comes to gender, for instance, most of these distributions overlap almost completely. Gender, just to stay with that for a minute, is the only individual difference dimension that I know of in psychology where somebody had to propose a theory that the two groups are not actually that different from each other.

40:47Janet Hyde, the gender similarities hypothesis, right? That mostly our theories are about differences with that one exception, right? But let me give you another example about these stereotypes. Let's take politics. You mentioned politics, right? So this is a place where friction causes a real problem. You have, I'm sure, heard and probably observed that political polarization is increasing in the United States, and it has been for at least the last 30 years or so. What has really been increasing, though, is not so much the differences between people who, say, vote Republican or vote Democrat, if you ask them about their beliefs on a bunch of different things.

41:29Those are actually staying pretty much the same. What has really been diverging are people's beliefs about what the other side believes. Perceived polarization. People have increasingly come to see members of the opposing side of the political spectrum as increasingly extreme in their beliefs. And we've been getting more and more and more wrong about what each other believes. But what's driving polarization in part is not actual changes in people's beliefs, but my beliefs about what the other side believes. And the motivations behind it. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. The motivations behind it. I think that's the nuance that gets missed is we are trying to drive our team on whatever side you're on to take action.

42:17And the easiest way to drive them to take action is to hold up the extreme tail end of the other side is this is what we're fighting against. You can't say, well, look at how similar we are. I need you to show up on November 2nd and I need you to hit that card in my favor. But it's a lot easier to motivate someone to show up when you go, hey, you know, the tail on the other side, that's who we're fighting against. Exactly. Exactly. So I ran an experiment for the book. There were lots published in the literature, but there was one that I was particularly interested in and had to deal with perceptions by Republicans and Democrats.

42:54This was about 10 years ago I ran this experiment. This was about preferences for distributional wealth. So I gave people two different countries they could live in, in theory, one where wealth was pretty unevenly divided and one where wealth was pretty evenly divided. And it turns out, true to stereotypes, Democrats said that they would rather live in the country that was more equally divided in terms of income, and Republicans said they would be a little more interested in living in the one that looked maybe more like a meritocracy, where there was a little more uneven wealth distribution. But those two groups differed by only a couple percentage points.

43:39people thought the gap was about 50 percent right so this is the way in which stereotypes can provide some accuracy some insight right we often will get the direction of effect wrong but it can get the magnitude really wrong and that magnitude really matters right if i believe the other side has a particular view but they're you know really extreme you know really crazy uh you know gun control nuts or really crazy gun advocates, right? Well, that's scary. That's what pushes motivation, right? AJ, when you hold up those tails and those tails are increasingly misperceived. I always think about where do we go when the marketing around painting each side as radicals and extremists and crazies, when all of that finally just wears out and no one's buying it anymore.

44:32How do they motivate everyone after that? Because we're already at the other side or loonies and that's it. I remember when I was a kid and I don't know if I'm older or younger than you guys, but we're in the ballpark, maybe at least within a decade or two of each other. I remember when I was a kid thinking, all these people sound kind of the same. Yeah. It wasn't so carefully titrated by polling and identity to get the one or two percent of, you know, try to push one or two percent of people who aren't paying attention to pay attention. They all kind of seem sort of the same. And it kind of, it mattered who you elected, but, you know, both were, were, were highlighting.

45:16It was pretty easy to see that, you know, in general, they would be similar. So my hope is that we would go back to a lot more boring elections. all right either of them could drive the ship fine i think we'll be on that but that's so

45:35yeah we'll see well to your point johnny what i i think is funny and all of that again is the horseshoe theory because then even at those ends the overlap and the similarity becomes the extreme left hate the government as much as the extreme right and they end up agreeing on more than they actually disagree on, even in the extreme cases of what they're fighting for on both ends. What I'd love to touch on, and this is, again, this perspective taking that I know a lot of members of our audience take and ego comes into it, is this feeling that when we share with others in order to build a connection, we have to go slow.

46:15We have to follow a progression of questions and divulging information to forge deep connections. And if we go too fast, the other person is going to judge us negatively. Our ego will take a hit and it's actually going to fray our ability to build connections with people. And I know we talked at the very beginning of this around loneliness before we hit record and this epidemic that is upon us. Everyone's feeling lonelier than ever. And we talked to a lot of our clients who they want a formula for building connections fast, but their fear is if they ask the wrong thing or they say the wrong thing too fast, the other person is going to have a much more negative view of them and it's going to make connection even harder.

46:58And I know you've done some great work in this area around how we forge connections, how we ask the right questions, how we divulge the right information that actually makes it happen a lot sooner and a lot faster counterintuitively to us than we believe. I think, again, the part about our research and at least our perspective on these kinds of problems that is interesting and at least seems important to me is comparing people's intuitions about how they ought to behave in these contexts compared to how they actually ought to behave. Again, putting our kind of intuitive mind reading to the test.

47:38And we find just in lots and lots and lots of different ways. We've been doing this work actually since, but largely since we published MindWise over the last decade or so, that people just underestimate how positively others respond when you reach out to them in a positive way to connect. People are overly reluctant to sit down and have a conversation with a stranger, like on the train or a bus or a cab or a plane because they assume the other person's not that interested in talking to them. And they're just kind of wrong about that. And they fail to appreciate that if you reach out to somebody else in a positive way, they tend to reach back, right?

48:19If you walk around smiling at other people, what do they tend to do to you in return, right? They smile back. And yet we have a lot of these theories. We look at other people. They're not smiling at me, right? So this is kind of the intuitive behaviorism problem. We infer what's on their mind from what we see them doing. They're not smiling at me. I assume they don't want to smile to me. They're not very happy at the moment, right? And that can create, a lot of these mistakes can create barriers that keep us from opening up and connecting to other people as optimally as we could in ways that actually keep us overly lonely, I think.

49:00So deep conversations are one example. We're a little overly reluctant to start a conversation with strangers, people we don't already know well. And once we're talking, we tend to stay overly shallow. We tend to assume that we might want to get to know somebody. We might want to connect with them. We might want to understand their minds a little better. We might want to know a little bit more about what their background is like, what their life's been like, how they got here, you know, have a really meaningful, interesting, deep conversation. And yet we're a little worried about how they might respond if we do that, if we ask them this deep question.

49:36And we just find that people are really off about that. Just like we underestimate how positively a stranger will respond if you reach out and say hello to them. We also seem to underestimate how positively others respond when we actually open up to other people and take a genuine interest in them. So what we do in some of our research, and I do this now with all of our incoming MBA students at the University of Chicago, second day, at least we've done that the last couple of years, second day of their orientation, they get a session with me on becoming a boothy, right? Becoming a University of Chicago MBA, which is all about the importance of being open and honest with each other so that we can figure out what's true about things, right?

50:17University thrives on free expression and on open inquiry and understanding. That's what makes a university a university. We're fighting against, yes, I see John's eyes going up there. We're fighting against norms that are pushing in the opposite direction. We're trying to be different at Chicago in lots of ways. And so I tell them, you know, in just a minute, I got 300 students in a room. There are 700 total, but, you know, I do this over a couple of sessions because we don't have room big enough. I tell them in just a minute, this is their second day, second day of orientation. So I'm going to sit you down in just a minute with another person, pair you up with another person here.

50:55And you're going to have a conversation, not a shallow one that talks about the weather and where you're from and what you want to do when you're here and all the standard safe stuff we talk about, but that actually tries to understand this other person and create a meaningful connection with them. He actually tries to reach in to their mind and touch them, right? Learn something meaningful. Questions like, what are you most grateful for in your life? Tell me about it. Or if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? Or can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person, which Charles might have mentioned to you when he was on your show?

51:34or what are you most nervous about starting this MBA program at Booth? And before the conversation, we ask them to essentially to tell us how they think this conversation is going to go, right? So we ask them to imagine how they're going to feel at the end of the conversation and how the other person is going to respond. Mostly they think this is not going to be very good. This is going to be weird and awkward. And the other person is not going to really care about what I have to say. And this isn't the right place for this. And in fact, when we asked our students this year, would you rather have this conversation or take a break?

52:1425%, roughly about 24 % of our MBA students, most outgoing extroverted people on the planet, you might imagine, about a quarter of them said, I would rather take a break than have this conversation with this other person. Right? We then pair them up. They go out and have this conversation. They then come back and tell me how the conversation actually went. Now, they knew exactly what questions they were going to discuss. It's not like there's no surprise here. It's not like, you know, they knew exactly what the context was going to be. And yet when they come back, they tell me the conversations went way better than I thought they would.

52:48I thought they'd be really awkward. Turns out, telling somebody what you're grateful for and hearing it from them, not awkward at all, right? Opening up and sharing what you're nervous about and having them do the same thing, not awkward. It just isn't weird. Mostly, mostly. And certainly is nowhere near as weird as they think it will be. And at the end of this, when we ask them, now that they've had this conversation, would you rather have had that conversation or taken a break? Remember, about 25 % beforehand said, I'm out of here. I'd like to take a break. After the conversation, it's less than 2 % say they'd rather take a break, right?

53:27Have taken a break. And so I think that suggests, AJ, that these theories we have in our minds, these beliefs we have about how much we can open up and reach out and take an interest in other people and genuinely get to know another person, ask them stuff that we really want to know about and answer things that they would want to know about us. We've got a lot of psychological barriers in our own mind, walls that come up that keep us from reaching out and engaging. And of course, if I think AJ having this conversation with you is going to be bad, I won't have it. I won't do that. John, I'll stay in the shallow end of the conversation pool with you because if I think I'll go too deep, it'll be bad.

54:14And then of course, we don't learn that our beliefs might be wrong. I want our listeners to take that in because a lot of them are always going to side on conversations that are analytical in nature, problem solution oriented conversations that they can easily breeze through and not have to open themselves up to any scrutiny. However, sure, you might be able to solve somebody's problem, but you're not connecting with them. You're not sharing emotional space. And all the questions that you had brought up are medium disclosure. They're talking about dreams, talking about things that are our experiences.

54:55So we have to talk about how we have felt or how we will feel or what gets us fired up. We have to share. And for our clients, when we discuss with them that the analytical conversations are not going to do on a date, they're not going to do in rallying your teammates teammates to get them to buy into a project, right? That the conversation is going to be, needs to be you to be vulnerable and others to go, I feel that way too. Or if that's the way you feel, I need to support you and help you through this. Now our connection is being made. And what you said there, and I want all of our audience to hear that, that those conversations that you fear because you have to open yourself up, usually, percentage-wise, are always going to go much better than you think.

55:56And for our clients who go out there and implement the emotional bids and the rapport building that we talk about on this show and that we work through in the X Factor Accelerator, every time they apply it, they're so surprised at the results because they actually gave it a shot. There's another thing I want to mention here, another important psychological mechanism and a subtlety that produces these gaps between, you know, how we think we can behave in these situations and reality, particularly in social situations. Psychologists have identified two kind of main dimensions that we evaluate ourselves and other people on.

56:39One is competency, right? How good are we at this thing? These are all the technical skills and what are the facts here? That's all stuff focused on agency and how smart you are and how to do something and so on, all competency. The other dimension is warmth. How nice and friendly and trustworthy and honest and kind and caring or nasty and mean and awful are you, right? That's warmth. That's most aligned with morality. And what's interesting, to go back to our conversation about egocentrism earlier, the way we think about ourselves is different than the way other people think about us. I take my warmth for granted.

57:14Like I'm not questioning whether I'm a moral person. I'm trying to do something. So John, if you're working for me, we're going to sit down and I'm going to tell you, look, I got to get this stuff done, XYZ, go off and do this thing because that's what I'm focused on, right? But your perspective on me is different. You focus on competency, yes, but you're also concerned about whether somebody's decent and trustworthy and somebody you want to be around and you're questioning that, right? When you walk up to somebody on the street, what's the first thing you want to know? Can they solve a complicated math problem?

57:46Or are they going to kill me, right? You couldn't give two farts about their competency when you first meet somebody, right? Or you go out on a date with somebody, right? Do you really care whether they're a talented writer and really able to do stuff? No, you want to know, is this person going to hurt me? Can I trust this person? Trust and warmth is primary in our evaluations of other people. But what we're focused on is our competency. And of course, you can see the mismatch there. Absolutely. I sit down to have a conversation with you. I'm thinking about what am I going to say? And you're thinking, does this guy seem nice?

58:26And when you smile at somebody else, you seem nice. Of course, they tuck back to you, right? But if you're focused on competency, you might not do some of these things. I'm going to say, I'm going to ask the wrong question, right? I might say the wrong thing and you miss opportunities to connect. And we often ascribe people's behaviors directly to us. So one of our favorite examples in class, John's wearing his favorite red shirt. As you can see, if you're watching the video, he's walking down the street, very prideful, had a great day, great interview with Nick and passes a group of women and they happen to snicker as they go by.

59:03John keeps walk in and now that snicker is rattling around. No concept of what they are actually laughing about, but clearly he is now having a bad day because he thinks, what did I do? Something's in my teeth. That's a judgment of me. When in reality, they may be sharing a story of a silly joke the Uber driver said when he dropped them off for the restaurant. And yet we have this It's happening all the time when we're around strangers, looking at what's their body language, what's the signals they're sending. Oh, they're frowning. They must be frowning because of me. And it's creating all these barriers in our mind to connection that keep us from even getting to those deep questions that keep us from even taking that chance and that risk on one another.

59:50and it also happens in the digital world where we're seeing people post about things going on in their life and we're like, we don't want to bother them. Oh, they're having such a great time and things are going so well for them and I don't want to be a bother. I don't want to take time away or they can't be interested in reconnecting with me and create these barriers mentally that then put us in this state that's just awful for our health. We need as social creatures to have deep relationships for our personal well-being, for our longevity. And yet we're using all of these signals and ascribing them personally to ourselves.

1:00:26And then we're robbing ourselves of those connections. So there's a concept in psychology that I think is the most liberating of all phenomena in the field. And it was identified by my PhD advisor, Tom Gilovich. It's known as the spotlight effect. And this is people's tendency to believe that others are paying more attention to them than other people actually are. So in the famous experiment that he did on this, he brought people into the lab and they were in a conference room. These are college kids, okay? These Cornell undergrads. And they come into a conference room. There are a handful of other students sitting there.

1:01:02But before they sit down, the experimenter pulls you aside and asks you to just put on a t-shirt, just put on the shirt before you go into that room. And the shirt is emblazoned with a big picture of Barry Manilow on the front. Now, you know, you might be a Manilow fan, but come on, most people aren't. And that's a little embarrassing if you're a college kid to be wearing around a Manilow shirt. People then went and sat in the room. And once they were in there for a minute, the experiment says, oh, sorry, you've been in, you know, we got to have you do something else. You're coming too late. Pulls the Manilow shirt wearing person out of the room, at which point they ask the shirt wearer to predict what percentage of people in that room will be able to identify that it was Barry Manilow on their shirt.

1:01:48They think about half of the folks in the room will be able to do this. They then ask the people in the room, hey, there was somebody here just a moment ago, and they had an image of someone on their shirt. They give them multiple choice test, right? Chance is 25 % out of these four. Can you say who was on this person's shirt? and they can't above chance levels. 25 % roughly get it right, meaning they had no clue. They weren't paying attention to you at all. It's easy to walk around in the world thinking the world's about us and paying attention to us. And when we see signals for them to assume that it's about us, and other people just don't care about you that much.

1:02:29You're the center of your own world, not other people's. That is the most liberating phenomena I've ever come across in the entire field. Just relax. Other people don't care as much about you as you might fear that they do. You really dated yourself on a Barry Manilow joke. I'm 50, so I'm in trouble here. I can tell. And with that, a lot of our listeners are going to be listening to an edited version of this. We're in three different locations. we're trying to communicate over video, there's mistakes, there's mishaps, we phrase the wrong things, and we cut all of that. Because what we present to the world is a polished podcast, hopefully that people can engage with and they enjoy.

1:03:13But oftentimes when we encounter this digitally from other people, we then put the spotlight back on ourselves and say, oh, I can't live to that standard. That person's perfect. They're achieving so much. They're doing all these things. And as I said earlier, it robs us of that ability to reach out and connect with people. I know we spent a lot of time on this episode talking about biases and how we get things wrong. I'd love to encourage our audience how to overcome some of these mental hurdles that we have in front of ourselves to create deeper connection in our lives and how you maybe personally have utilized some of the science in your own life to strengthen relationships.

1:03:49Let me start answering that question by introducing you to my youngest daughter, Lindsay. Lindsay is eight years old. We adopted her from China six years ago. She has Down syndrome and she is just an absolute angel. And she has a magical ability, which is she has no filter on her hello. Like none. No filter on her hello whatsoever. She is the most popular kid in her school, as far as I can tell. Everybody knows Lindsay because she says hello to everybody. It doesn't matter how their face is looking. She doesn't worry that they're, you know, what they're thinking about her. She just is, takes an interest in everybody and says hello to everybody.

1:04:37And where it's really magical is when we're at the grocery store and you wouldn't guess this, but, but this is like the most, one of the most fun ways to spend an afternoon. If you are a psychologist that I can imagine. If you walk through the store and, you know, grocery store, you see lots of people walking around who just, they just, they just look dead inside. Like, you know, they're trying to find this or that, whatever. I don't really want to be here. You know, they're not paying attention to you. They can't tell that they're resting bitch face. It's pretty bitchy, right? They're just doing their thing there and they kind of don't want to be there.

1:05:14Lindsay will walk by and say hello to every one of them. And it is like you found a magical switch on somebody. You take this person who looks dead and lonely and disconnected, and they just come to life. It's like a grandmother seeing a grandchild. They just come alive. I've come to think of this as the switch. Like there's a switch that folks have on their back that's hidden and she can find it. She just gives the hello. And I've seen that a lot of times. I've observed that. And that's given me courage to try that, to do that myself. and what we found in our work is that the only way that people really overcome this stuff, overcome these gaps, is by practicing and learning where they're wrong.

1:06:09And we've tried all kinds of things. We've tried all kinds of stuff to try to convince people, for instance, let's take deep conversations, that just telling people that these conversations tend to go better than they expect doesn't work. It's having one of these conversations that works, right? So that, I think that's, I think that's for, at least from my perspective, is the powerful thing about this research from my perspective is you don't have to trust me on it. Particularly, particularly on these gaps in sociality, people underestimating how positively reaching out and connecting with others will go, is you can go out and try it and try it in small ways, right?

1:06:50Just try, just spend tomorrow. When you get a chance, you walk by somebody, smile and say hello and just watch how it goes, right? Just watch how that goes. How many smiles do you get back when you do that? When we had people do this at the Museum of Science and Industry, this is Amit Kumar, former postdoc of mine and I, when we had people do this at the MSI, we had them walk around the building, either smiling and saying hello to people when they were somewhat close to them, or just observing people, people actually said that other folks in the museum were friendlier when they were smiling and saying hello than when they were.

1:07:32Right? Now, you say that, John, of course. Yes, of course. But in some ways, that's a crazy response, right? Why is everybody smiling that day? It's because you are, right? You brought that out of them, right? And so if you walk around, you'll see that. It goes to something we've talked about on this podcast before. For myself, it's like the experiment of where would you rather live? In a place where everyone says hi to each other as you're walking on the street or in a city where no one does? And I've certainly lived in both. And I certainly know that I love living in cities that are very friendly.

1:08:11And in fact, it encourages me to be more friendly and to be more conscious and just be more present in the day and extract more enjoyment out of it. One of the exercises that we do with our clients that is one of the most transformational is we have them take a notebook out during the daytime on the street. And you can imagine someone approaching you with a clipboard or a notebook. Your initial assumption is you're going to be ignored. People are going to be rude to you. They don't want to be stopped. They're walking on the street. They can't be bothered. So there's a lot of anxiety that ticks up in our clients as we present them with this exercise.

1:08:47And we say, your goal is to get 50 signatures. And along with those signatures in this notebook, we want you to ask them to write down three qualities about you. That first impression, what are three things they notice about you? And we're on Hollywood Boulevard. So this is where tourists are all different cultures, a melting pot of L.A. And of course, they start the exercise very tentative. I don't want to approach people. I don't want to bother them. All of those mental hurdles we just discussed come up. And they get that first signature. And it's bold, confident, fun, smiling, outgoing, positive.

1:09:21And they come back to our classroom after 50 signatures just beaming inside. Because not only have they broke through that barrier that they had around approaching people on the street and how friendly they would be, but what they get reflected back to them as a complete stranger observing them is so overwhelmingly positive. So not only can you stop someone on the street who's busy about their day and no interest in potentially talking to you because you're holding a notebook, right? Like we've encountered those people who want to stop us to sign something, a voting initiative. And inside of that notebook is just confirmation of 50 strangers seeing them in a way that they haven't seen themselves in years maybe and seeing the positive in them in a way that just lights them up.

1:10:09Can I ask you to modify that example, that experience in one slight way? I want you to ask people two questions. Before they go out, ask them to estimate how many people will you have to ask in order to get 50 people to sign this for you. And then when they come back, ask them to report how many people you actually had to ask. That's known as the underestimation of compliance effect. People tend to underestimate how helpful people will be when you ask them directly. We time box it. So we tell them they have two hours to complete it. And they all say, there's no way I can get this done in two hours.

1:10:52Absolutely no way. And we're literally right outside the street. They've been on the street all week long, so they've seen all of the number of people on the street. You could literally walk one block and talk to 50 people. So we say two hours. Immediately their response is, there's no way I'm going to get to that number. And oftentimes they come back in 90 minutes or less after they've burned through the nervous energy at the start, just exuding this smile that I got 60, I got 70, 50 was a breeze. Well, the other thing about that is for the first hour, they're doing it on their own and their mind is looking for the perfect person.

1:11:28And so they realize that they're not going to get any signatures if they continue to look for the perfect person. And by focusing on the perfect person, you're only making it harder on yourself. So the second hour, we change it up. So we pair them up. And now the one person you're working with, he picks out who you're approaching. So they don't have a choice in the matter. And now that they don't have that choice and their brain is not trying to figure out who's going to do the exercise, they're now focused on just doing the exercise and making a good first impression. And that blows their mind because they get to see the comparison.

1:12:10Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. That sounds like something I need to do with my students in class. I remember I was at the university in the country north of us here in the United States a couple of weeks ago. And one of our former PhD students, we were describing, we were talking about this effect a little bit. And she came up to me and she said, I don't know if I ever told you, but when I was in graduate school, I experienced this effect and it kind of changed my life. I had to go down to the Winter Garden in the middle of the business school building at the University of Chicago. And I had to get a bunch of people to fill out these surveys for me to finish up my dissertation.

1:12:44And I was so terrified about this. I thought nobody was going to want to do this. I'd never be able to get this finished. And she went down and she was basically never rejected by anyone. It's not usually that extreme, but certainly it was way easier than she thought. You asked me how this research has changed my own life. Two things. One is, I guess, a lot less is what's on the mind of another person. And I ask a lot more. And the value of that is it gets deep right away. Right. So I don't guess what my students are thinking. I ask them, how are you doing now? I had somebody in my office last week who was going through a hard time.

1:13:41And you're worried in situations where there's extreme stress. You're worried about self-harm and suicide. And I don't guess or worry about that anymore. I ask them directly. right? Which every therapist will tell you to do. Are you thinking about hurting yourself? Are you contemplating suicide? I don't have any reluctance at all in asking those genuine questions about what's on the mind of another person because I know that's how I'll know. And I know people tend to be interested in open and responding if you ask them directly. The other thing when it comes to overcoming some of these psychological barriers that keep us overly disconnected.

1:14:21I'll reconnect again with Charles Duhigg, who mentioned my name to you the first time. In his first big blockbuster book, The Power of Habit, he described the importance of turning behaviors into habits if they're going to be sustainable over time. That's absolutely true with social actions as well. Absolutely. Right. If you want to be kinder or more sociable, that's not going to work, right? You can't, you're not going to be kinder. But what you might do is create a habit of say, passing along third person compliments. That's something that I have done. I have, so if I hear somebody compliment somebody else, it is just now an automatic trigger.

1:15:00I'm going to tell the person I heard complimented that somebody was loving them behind their back. And in it now, it's just automatic. I don't even think about it. I hear a nice thing said, and I will pass it along. And so when it comes to behavior change, think small and think concrete in a way that can then be replicable and repeatable. Good thing about these social behaviors, by the way, is that it tends to feel really good when you're doing them. So it's not like exercise or sucks, right? It turns out if you're actually reaching out and connecting to other people, it's pretty nice. So that's a good thing.

1:15:38Yeah. There's not the delayed onset. of the gratification that comes with exercise in these situations. It's quick. Well, we know you're working on another book and I know we're going to encourage our audience to read this book. Where can our audience find out more about all the great work that you do? So one of the things that I know about human beings is social media tends to make you a little unhappy. So you're not going to find me on social media, I'm afraid. I'm doing research. I'm writing papers. But you can find me on my website. So nicolaseppoli.com is my website. That's where you can go.

1:16:12You will not find me on Twitter or X or Facebook or Instagram, I'm afraid. Too much social comparison, too much unhappiness there. But if you go to my website, you can find all the papers that I publish. You can find links to the book. You can find videos that we've done, podcasts like these that I've done. And that's the place. Well, thank you for stopping by. Johnny and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. And hat tip to Charles for pointing us in your direction. Yeah, thank you, Charles. else. It was great fun talking to you guys. Thanks, AJ and John. This was really fun. Thank you, Nick.

1:16:53All right. Before we wrap up, this week's shout out is one of our X Factor Accelerator members, Chris. Chris, take it away. Hey, everyone. My name is Chris Raftery. I'm a financial advisor, and I joined X Factor to build better relationships really with my friends at work and also with my family. X Factor really helped me not just with the course material and all the ways I could improve but also in helping me implement all of these different teachings, giving me an outlet and a network to practice these things, to troubleshoot in a way a lot of situations I was going through and really provide some real world applications and have fun along the way too.

1:17:41And the thing I'm looking forward to the most is continuing to develop. They say iron sharpens iron and being able to work with the other guys in the group has really proved that. And I'm looking forward to continuing to build better relationships with the existing folks that I hold near and dear to me, but also meeting new people out there. So, you know, looking forward to hopefully meeting you guys in the future as you join the X Factor. So it's worth it. I have to say, I love the network we've built inside the X Factor Accelerator. And I'm so happy to hear that it's been paying off for members like Chris.

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1:18:57Imagine reading any room, forging meaningful connections, and attracting the partner of your dreams. Scientifically backed lessons to unlock skills and become a super communicator. Break free from the ordinary and step into the extraordinary. Join the Art of Charms X-Factor Accelerator today and unlock the secrets to your success. Visit unlockyourxfactor.com and learn more and take the first step towards a brighter, bolder future. The Art of Charms X-Factor Accelerator, where confidence meets connection. Apply today at unlockyourxfactor.com. All right, before we head out, a huge thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery.

1:19:34Can you do us a huge favor here at the show? Rate and review this podcast on your favorite podcast player. It means the world to us and it helps us get amazing guests like Nick. All right, we hope you go out there and have an epic week. Yeah, I remember you. You were my bad boy. You threw your love away Like it was just a toy And you sold the world You sold the world You sold the world Cause you had your taste All black on the yesterday Yeah, but I remember you Oh, yeah, I remember you It was a bad day that I found it a wrong way