The Social Fear That Keeps Us Lonely (and the easy fix) | Nicholas Epley

Nicholas Epley studies how people misjudge each other, avoid conversations with strangers, and miss out on life-affirming relationships. It all started when he noticed something on a silent Chicago train that changed how he thinks about the strangers he avoids and the people he loves but never calls. The thing stopping him wasn’t what he expected.

Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he’s spent over fifteen years studying why smart, socially wired people routinely misread each other. His research on human connection has appeared in the New York Times and on NPR, and he teaches an MBA course called Designing a Good Life. His new book is A Little More Social.

What you’ll explore in this conversation:

If there’s someone you’ve been meaning to reach out to, or a stranger you keep talking yourself out of talking to, this conversation makes the case for testing that instinct instead of trusting it.

You can find Nicholas at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

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photo credit: Anne Ryan photo

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Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So here’s a wild fact. We tend to assume that people around us on trains, in the coffee shops, at the office, they’d rather just be left alone. My guess research says we have been wrong about that for years, and the cost has been so much higher than we think. In this conversation, you’ll discover why a commute spent talking to a total stranger. It left people happier than the one spent alone, even though almost none of them expected it to. We’ll explore the two dimensions. Psychologists say we actually are being judged on the moment we open our mouths where the personality label that you have worn for years, the sort of social orientation you thought you were, might actually describe less about who you are than the choices that you keep making by default. And the split second thing that your face is doing right now, that might be quietly telling strangers to stay away. Our guide is Nicholas Epley, the John Templeton Taylor Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.. And we’ll jump in right after this break.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:12] Really excited to explore the work that you’ve been doing over a period of years. So much of your research, it ties back in really interesting way to a random morning on a train south side of Chicago. Take me there and tell me. Tell me what happened, but also what Penny dropped. What? What was revealed.

Nicholas Epley: [00:01:33] Yeah. So this would have been maybe 2010 ish somewhere in there. I can’t quite remember the exact time, but I was getting on the train in the morning and riding into the University of Chicago, where I work as a professor, like I’ve done for five or so years at least before then. Um, and I sit down on the train and I’m in the midst of writing a chapter for my first book, which was titled Mind Wise, describing how we’ve gotta mind. Human brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others. It’s made happier and healthier when we’re connecting with other people. Um, and yet I had kind of this eureka moment as I was running through all this in my head. I looked around on the train and I. And I noticed surely not for the first time, but for the first time, that something really clicked, that we were all sitting here, these highly social creatures made happier and healthier by connecting with each other. And none of us were doing it. Not one. You could have heard a pin drop on the train that morning, and I’d been studying how we make inferences about each other’s thoughts and beliefs and attitudes for years enough to write a book about it. And I thought that maybe this might be one of the cases where we’re misunderstanding each other’s minds, potentially. And so I decided that I was going to try something different that morning. I was going to experiment on myself that morning, and I had a woman sit down next to me that day. She was probably in her early 50s African American woman. I would have been in my mid 30s at the time. So she was 15 to 20 years older than I was. She was wearing this fabulous red hat. She was dressed professionally for work, ready to go. I had this, oh, she also had this great big mom purse that she was carrying with us. You know, that kind of magical bag that mothers carry around that has, like, everything you’d ever need in a quick, I gotta put up this picture. So I need a hammer and my nose is runny. I need a tissue. And she’s got both right on right there ready to go. But I, I decided I was going to have a conversation. And so the second I decided to do that, getting ready to talk and my brain starts screaming at me all the reasons why I shouldn’t be doing this, why this is just a bad idea to do that, you know, look, she didn’t have anything in common with her. She probably doesn’t want to be bothered. She might think you’re a creep trying to hit on her or something.

Nicholas Epley: [00:03:50] You don’t. You don’t have anything to say to her. Anyway, uh, but I decided to push ahead through that, and, I came up with a brilliant opening line and I turned to her and I said, hi, my name is Nick. I love your hat. I have one just like it. And she. You know. She chuckled politely at the not so funny joke and turned to me with a big smile. Almost looked like. And I remember this very distinctly. She had this big smile when she turned to me. It almost made her look like a different person. That. Her face shifted from this kind of dead going off to work face that we sometimes carry with us when we go off to work in the morning. And just a great big smile. And she chuckled. And then the conversation just kind of got rolling. And it, it was, it was really quite easy to carry on. We talked about what she did for a living. She felt kind of stuck in her job, but she couldn’t leave. She’s raising a family and they needed her support and wasn’t her dream job. I told her a little bit about the experiment that I had just enrolled her in with us having this conversation, and she I remember thinking that, um, maybe we don’t talk to each other as much as we used to because of the phones that we carry around to keep us distracted from each other and, and so on.

Nicholas Epley: [00:04:59] And, and I remember I was getting up to leave. And as I’m walking around her to get to the aisle, she holds my wrist just kind of gently and she says, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. As if, you know, with a with a sincerity in her voice that I distinctly remember that suggested she was like, happy to have been seen and, you know, connected with on that morning. And we didn’t have any earth shattering conversation. But I walked away thinking two things. One is that wasn’t just nice. It was surprisingly nice. And here’s where I think my training as a behavioral scientist, as a psychologist, might cause me to look at this a little differently than other people might. What I noticed was the gap between my beliefs about how this might go, which drives and governs our decisions to reach out and engage with other people and how it actually went. And it was a meaningful gap. I thought it’d be kind of cringey, mediocre, not so great. And it was really nice, right? Surprisingly nice. So that was one thing. The other thing that stuck with me was that I think I might be doing this quite a lot.

Nicholas Epley: [00:06:11] That is quite a few cases where I could connect with somebody, but you know, a little weird, maybe not is not the right time. They wouldn’t be interested in talking, might be, you know, misunderstood or something. And so I hold back and avoid it. And it seemed to me that, you know, maybe I’m not the only one doing this, but maybe the whole train might be doing that this morning. And if that was true, then this would really change the way I live my life. And it might really change the way a lot of people would live their life if we’re making this mistake consistently. And so the eureka moment that I had, the penny that dropped for me that morning was the possibility that misunderstanding each other, misunderstanding how it might go if we reached out to connect with somebody, might keeping us, might be keeping us from connecting with each other as much as would be good for our our livelihood, good for our own lives and for those around us. And that started what was ultimately has ultimately been been 15 and counting at least years of research, tens of thousands of participants, 120 published experiments and counting on that, on that phenomena.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:23] Yeah. There are so many things I want to tease out with you. Um, you know, let’s zoom the lens out. Let’s go wide first, right? Because we’ve all heard through countless different sources now that, you know, whether it’s the grant study for men or all these different things, all these different data points tell us we are social animals or social beings. And if you look at all the variables that contribute to a life well lived, everything keeps pointing back to the depth and quality of our Relationships. And we I think we all kind of know that, right? We kind of know it in our bones. We don’t need the data. It helps, but we kind of know that anyway. And yet so many of us do exactly what you just described all day, every day. The second we step outside of our house, the shield goes up and we, we just completely we not only don’t take advantage of the opportunity to connect, we actively avoid it. Take me into the psychology of this. What’s happening underneath that’s that’s driving us to this.

Nicholas Epley: [00:08:24] Yeah. So there, there are a few possibilities that we’ve tested through our through our research. And it started by going back to the train that I write in for the morning and looking at what happens if we ask lots of people to do this, to try to figure out what’s going on that’s keeping us potentially from connecting. One possibility is that talking to strangers actually isn’t that nice. I mean, most of the research that you described is really about connecting with friends and family. These more these closer connections, not as much the distant connections like that, right? It could be that we’re being wise on the train, that talking to strangers would be scary and unpleasant, and nobody really wants to. And so to to find out if that’s right, we ran a first experiment on the trains, and we went to the south side of Chicago to Homewood, Illinois, and ran an experiment where we asked people to keep to themselves and enjoy their moment in solitude that that morning to do whatever they normally do. That’s a second condition, a third condition. We asked them to do something radical, actually have a conversation with the person who sits down next to them, try to get to know him or her a little bit. And we randomly assigned folks to one of those three conditions. And what we found was consistent with everything you just described, which is people actually reported having a more positive commute when we randomly assigned them to the connection condition. Then when we randomly assigned them to the solitude condition. So it doesn’t seem to be that connecting with strangers is unpleasant. In fact, precisely the opposite. It’s better than what people normally do and better than keeping to themselves. So why aren’t they doing this? Um, why do these shields go up? To test that possibility, to see if maybe we’re misunderstanding the outcomes of of reaching out to connect. We ran another experiment where we asked people to predict how they would feel in each of these conditions.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:10] And before they do it, you’re like, how do you think you’re going to feel if, if dropped into this.

Nicholas Epley: [00:10:15] To do the very same thing that we do before we reach out to engage with almost anyone, which is we have a moment where we think, how is this going to go?

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:22] Yeah. What you’re doing there then is you’re making known the assumptions that we have about what’s going to happen.

Nicholas Epley: [00:10:28] Exactly. And as a psychologist, if I want to know what you’re going to do, I want to know how you believe something’s going to make you feel. I want to know your expectations because it’s your expectations that are guiding your choices, not your experiences. You can’t know what an experience might be like if you never have it, or if you choose never to have it. And so we ask people then to predict how they’d feel, to report their expectations. And when they did that, they actually expected that they would feel the happiest, have the most pleasant experience if they kept to themselves, and if they connected with a stranger. Right. So as obvious as this might seem, it’s not obvious to people in the moment where they’re thinking about reaching out and engaging with someone, and certainly not in thinking about engaging with a stranger. They, in fact, expected the opposite. But the behavior then that people were exhibiting on the trains and that we might exhibit in many other places of our lives, makes sense in the sense that people are behaving in line with their beliefs.

Nicholas Epley: [00:11:27] If they believe that connecting with a stranger would be unpleasant, they wouldn’t do it. And what we really found that people believed wasn’t actually that they wouldn’t enjoy connecting. In fact, in a subsequent experiments, when we asked people to imagine actually having a conversation, they actually thought they would enjoy the commute more. The barrier, the thing that was really getting in their way was they believed that other people wouldn’t want to talk to them, and so they thought they were more interested in talking than other people were. And so if they reached out to connect, they might connect with somebody who didn’t really want to talk, wasn’t that interested, would reject them. And that’s just what we’re wrong about. And that’s something that we see over and over again. Is that the mistaken barrier, at least that’s keeping us from connecting with other people, is being overly pessimistic about how other people will respond to us when we turn to them and say, hi, I’m Nick, I love your hat. I have one just like it. That’s what we get wrong, is other people.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:28] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because if we take even a layer deeper than that, do you did they talk about the specific fear? Okay, so the other person might not. The fear is okay. I think the other person, the person sitting next to me, wouldn’t want this. They wouldn’t actually want me to to speak with them. They wouldn’t want a conversation. Um, was there also a personal fear? Like was there? Because there’s got to be an interesting other layer, like a fear of rejection, a fear of, you know, like, because I imagine we own, we bring our own experience, we bring our own pathology to this. Yeah. You know, so if we grow up in a household or a family culture or a friend culture, or if we’ve been bullied, if we’ve been ostracized, I’ve got to imagine that this shows up in all of this as well.

Nicholas Epley: [00:13:16] Yeah, yeah. So, um, a lot of these fears are kind of context dependent depending on the situation you’re in. Uh, a friend of mine, Gillian Sandstrom, who’s another researcher who studies talking to strangers and social connections, she’s in, she’s in the UK, a wonderful psychologist. She often refers to this, these fears as the whack a mole problem, which is that there’s just all kinds of whack one down. There’s another one there. There’s there’s another one. There’s. And so, you know, it’s not obvious to me. It’s not obvious to me how concrete or well-formed any of these fears are. There’s just a general this is going to be, and some of it is they’re going to reject me. That can happen when people ask for help, for instance, they’re often afraid of being rejected by another person. Somebody sits down next to you on the train that might come in the form of them not really being interested. And so not really, not really carrying on a conversation very well. But there’s also the sense that sometimes you’re intruding or being rude, right? So when we ran our experiments in London, in the UK, that was a kind of a thought that seemed to be somewhat dominant. They were even more pessimistic about how positively other people would respond. They thought they’d be rejected at even higher rates than folks here in the US did. And that was really one. Then, out of politeness, it’s not even it’s not it’s not that people are disinterested in others necessarily, although that can happen. It said, you know, you don’t want to intrude their boundaries, right? We all hear about this and we gotta maintain these boundaries. And so we put up these fences. And I don’t want to intrude into your space that much. So that’s another version that this fear can take, one that’s actually kind of kind or at least meant to be kind. But of course, the upshot of that kind of kindness is that you end up ignoring other people. And how how nice is that to not see someone or acknowledge them, or pass along a smile to them, or take an interest in them.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:09] I’m also thinking about norms in terms of location. You just described London, so I live in Boulder, Colorado now, but I spent my entire adult life until recently in New York City. Um, and the norm about conversation with strangers or people sitting next to you in New York City is radically different than the norm in Boulder, Colorado. You know, if you’re even if you’re, if you’re, you know, you’re walking up to the counter in a coffee shop in the morning in New York, there’s a line of people behind you. Everyone’s got their head down. Nobody’s talking. Everyone’s trying to move as fast as they possibly can. The ethos. The norm is this is not a place for conversation. This is a place for expediency. I’m on my way to somewhere else. And if you try and stop me from that, like, that’s not okay. Even even the person serving you behind the counter, you know, there’s no conversation. There’s no, hey, how are you doing today? You walk up to the counter in Boulder, Colorado, and the person’s like, hey, how are you? Like, got any good plans today?

Nicholas Epley: [00:16:08] A little slower pace, a little, you know, less crowded than others. Yes.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:12] Right. So like, I’m the same person. Yeah, but I, but I show up very differently. And I have a different set of assumptions about how a social interaction with a stranger is going to go in Boulder versus New York.

Nicholas Epley: [00:16:25] So it’s worth yes, it’s worth noting that what people are doing, this is what they’re doing on the trains in Chicago, too. And this is what we do all around, is we look to other people to figure out what seems to be kind of appropriate here, and then we don’t test it. But of course we’re all doing this. And so what that means is that on the train in the morning, right, coming into Chicago, all of my, you know, friends, you know, potential friends, my friends I haven’t met yet on the South side of Chicago, sitting on that train there looking around, everybody’s being quiet. And so they assume, oh, I guess that’s what we’re doing here. We’re all being quiet. And you can then get a carload of people who would, in fact, be happier talking with each other if somebody acknowledged them or engaged with them, nevertheless, keeping completely quiet because we infer that other people don’t want to talk in this setting, we accept the social norm that’s given to us there, rather than testing it and seeing if maybe we are all acting out of some mistaken sense of a social norm. So when I go to New York, for instance, and I get onto the subways in New York City and other places where people ostensibly aren’t supposed to talk to each other, I always talk to folks and I always have lovely conversations, right? You take it as given when you’re in a coffee shop in New York City that those human beings don’t want to talk to you, and wouldn’t respond with a smile if you tried. And I think what our data suggests is that when it comes to social connection, we’re highly social animals. And if you’re in a context where people aren’t engaging, it’s not because it doesn’t have to be because they don’t want to. It may just be because people aren’t and therefore infer that it’s not okay. And you can test that. Pass along a smile or a hello. Ask them, what do you love here at this coffee shop? Just see what they do. You might be surprised.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:11] I guess one thing that’s coming up for me also I’m really curious about is. Somebody thinking to themselves, I’m going to stumble with my words. I’m going to fumble. I’m going to be judged. I’m going to be rejected. And maybe I already have that in other parts of my life. Maybe I have a history of feeling that and feeling really awful when that happens. So, you know, it’s not even about norms. It’s not about not wanting to bug somebody else, but it’s just a fear of like, I don’t want to be rejected again. Mhm.

Nicholas Epley: [00:18:46] Mhm. So that’s an interesting one. And it is one that we thought might be going on, going on in lots of contexts. And, and it’s got to be coming on sometime, going on sometimes. But we’ve had, we’ve had, we’ve, we’ve found less evidence for that kind of memory based thinking than we, than you might imagine. So one possible interpretation of what’s going on here is that people remember having bad conversations with strangers, for instance. That’s a version of it. And I don’t want to do that again. Right. And, and it’s possible that maybe, you know, just the just the worst experiences are the ones that really stick out in our mind, right? The, the one time you were rejected and it hurt. Right. And that’s what comes to mind. You don’t want to experience that again. That’s, that’s what psychologists refer to as negativity dominance. And but but we actually didn’t find evidence for that. I thought that was a plausible thing that people were kind of using their past experience as a guide.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:45] Yeah. Because it would sound like that would be something.

Nicholas Epley: [00:19:47] It sure does. But we ask people, imagine that you had a conversation with somebody who was really uninteresting, was kind of negative. Imagine you’re in a conversation with someone who was really interesting, was really pleasant, right? And then we ask people to imagine having a conversation with someone. And if they’re kind of being biased by sort of negative past experiences, then that control condition, right? That unspecified condition would actually their expectations would look closer to the negative condition. And they actually weren’t. It was actually a little closer to the positive condition. Right? And this also works in the other way in our experiments where we have people go through a conversation with somebody, they then predict how they’re going to feel a week from now in a new conversation, if they have another one right Immediately after the conversation. They’re optimistic about how things will go. But then a week later, before they’re about to have another conversation, they’re right back where they started a week before. So that positive experience was fleeting, too. We have a surely to some extent, our expectations about an interaction that are going to be based on our memory of past ones. But really, what drives it a lot, I think, is the momentary construction of our expectation that we have at this time. So when you are in Golden, Colorado, and you walked into your coffee shop there. Right. And somebody says hi to you, your belief about how that conversation is going to go is coming from that very moment, right? It’s constructed at that time when you go into a coffee shop in New York City, it’s constructed at that time based on what’s happening around you, not based on a as much as I might have imagined on a on a summation of your past history. A lot of it is coming on the fly and those moments then I think are what are really driving a lot of our choices and where a lot of those those fears, sometimes misplaced fears can come from.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:40] I mean, that’s so interesting. So it’s much more your immediate situational expectations about how it’s going to go, not so much like this long history of how it’s gone in the past.

Nicholas Epley: [00:21:49] I think so. And I think that’s also why we get these disconnects in some ways between kind of knowing that we it’s good for us to be connecting with people. But yet when we are in the moment, choosing not to. Right. So we look around and everybody’s wearing their resting dead face, which interestingly, in just brand new research, we’ve done that. We just analyzed the data last week. We find that if you ask people to just show a neutral expression, like they’re thinking about something but not thinking about another person, that face looks more similar to the face that they make when we ask them to look as unfriendly and unapproachable as they can. It looks more similar to that than when we ask them to make the face that they would make when they want somebody to come up and say hi to them. Right. So our, our resting face is, is, is rather is rather bitchy, it turns out. So, you know, if you look around and people aren’t talking, they’ve got their resting bitch face on and you know, they might look unapproachable, but it’s those cues in the moment, which is why if somebody comes up with a smile and says hello to you, you’re often happy to engage with them.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:53] Yeah.

Nicholas Epley: [00:22:54] Or if you see a friend, come and sit down. You’re happy to talk to them. Or you go to a networking event where the expectation is, we’re going to talk. You’re happy to talk there. Right. These are really constructed at the time when we’re thinking about reaching out to others. And we find that those constructions in lots of ways can lead us to be overly pessimistic.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:13] So whether you are pessimistic or optimistic about how a conversation will go in the moment just before is largely, I don’t know if the word determinative, but it has a really big impact on how that conversation actually will go and will be received.

Nicholas Epley: [00:23:30] I call it determinative. It guides your choices. Absolutely right. Somebody sits down to you and says, hello. You’ll talk. If they don’t, they won’t. But that also means if you sit down next to somebody with a smile and you say hello, they’re likely to talk, too. It’s surprisingly powerful, a determinant of their behaviors, the way we we approach them. But yeah, it’s, it’s really those moments. And this is also why, you know, this is also this is also something that can, can lead to avoidance is that, um, at a distance, there are lots of things we can want and know we ought to do. Oh yeah. I’ll talk to a stranger tomorrow. No problem. Right. Our approach oriented motivations tend to be strong when something is far away. I’m happy to try to do that thing. But as you get closer, closer and closer and psychologists have known this now for a century, all of our fears, the reasons not to do it, those become more present in our minds, those ramp up in their power. And that’s why we sometimes get cold feet, right? Oh, I, I saw that person on the train again. Or on a plane or I saw that person at work. Right. Somebody in the office who I’ve seen before. I’ve got that neighbor or I’ve, I’ve seen her, you know, walking around the block before multiple times. And I really should say hi. Okay. I’ll do that tomorrow. And then when she’s walking by you on the sidewalk, right at that time, uh, you decide not to. And you and you go by. Right? So that temporal distance up to the moment we actually had to make the decision also also matters.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:00] Yeah. So how do we just, on a practical level, on day to day level, how do we actually in the moment, if we find ourselves, we’re in a setting, whatever it may be. Um, and we notice that we’re surrounded by a whole bunch of people we either don’t know or don’t know very well. Great opportunities to start a conversation. Um, but we, but we’re, and then we’re keen, we’re like, oh, like, I’m literally telling myself the story of like, this is going to suck. This is not going to go well. Do you have a recommendation for like how to reset that? Or is this literally just exposure therapy and saying like, just do it and let the evidence be like, like, can the, the convincing?

Nicholas Epley: [00:25:39] Yes. In fact, it’s exactly exposure therapy. Um, that the only thing that really calibrates our beliefs about reality is reality itself. In fact, the guy who came up with exposure therapy, Stefan Hoffman, wrote that fear is like a parasite. It just feeds on itself, and it feeds on the absence of information, on the absence of experience. So what Hoffman learned is that to actually treat social anxiety effectively, he’s got a great book on this called CBT for Social Anxiety, which is a highly practical, practical, if not a little bit wonky, um, book for anyone who’s, who’s interested in this, um, is to put people in the very social situation that they are afraid of. They can’t simulate it, they can’t imagine they actually have to have to be in it. And what you learn then when you actually put yourself in this situation, there’s two things he’s found. And this is true from folks I’ve talked with over the years as well. And that’s what we think people are learning in our experiments too, is one. Other people are often nicer than you’d think. When you approach people in a nice way, you have power to elicit kindness from others. When you approach them in that way, they tend to reach back to you the same way you reach out to them. And second, even if they don’t. So somebody’s got their earbuds in and they put it back in after they say hi to you or whatever, they turn out not to want to talk.

Nicholas Epley: [00:26:55] Turns out you can handle that better than you think. It’s actually not. It’s actually not so bad. Right? And so we have tried over the years, lots of things to try to calibrate people’s beliefs independent from actually getting the data yourself. And they can push things around for a moment, like just, just for a little bit. But it’s, you know, it’s like a, that’s the, it’s like a whisper effect, right? That that’s the kind of nudge that that is, is just a small one, But actually trying the thing, testing those beliefs and testing it over and over again, and actually seeing what happens when you say hello to somebody or take a meaningful interest in somebody, or ask somebody a deeper question than you might ask otherwise, actually watching what happens and getting the data yourself. You don’t have to believe me on this. You can go out and try it yourself. That’s how you calibrate your beliefs. And that’s also how you learn your own your own abilities. We all can manage conversations in slightly different ways, and you might be better at one thing than another. You might have a particular thing you enjoy talking about, or learn something that really works well for you, and reaching out to somebody else that you learn that from approaching other people. You learn nothing from avoidance.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:11] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. What about you brought up just before the idea of a networking event? So if we’re thinking about rooms that we may find ourselves in. There are. There’s. There are situations where you. You don’t understand if there is a difference in power, if there is asymmetry in all different types of variables, right? And so you just kind of have to wing it like it’s a social situation. You don’t know who anyone is. You walk up, you say, hi, what about context, where you find yourself in a room or space or an event or something like that, where there’s a pretty strong expectation that there is a strong asymmetry here. And maybe you’re the person who feels like, actually you don’t belong in the room. Um, how does this play into it?

Nicholas Epley: [00:28:58] So this is again, one of these sets of beliefs that’s going to create barriers to reaching out that I think is probably misplaced, right? Most people are people and they’re happy to be treated as people. And when you go up to somebody in a kind way to reach out and connect with them, even if you think there’s a power asymmetry, um, that’s likely to go better than you might imagine, particularly if you’re focused heavily on that, on that asymmetry at the time. Um, Bill Hewlett who um, founded Hewlett Packer, um, he had a famous famous saying or mantra that he always tried to keep in the top of his mind, which is never stifle a generous impulse. I love that thought to just keep on the top of your mind. And if you have a generous impulse to go up and say hi to somebody, to be kind to them, to be civil to, to try to strike up a conversation and get to know someone. Don’t stifle that. Reach out. It’s likely, I think, to go probably better than you think. And these other barriers about power asymmetries and whether, you know, it’s okay for you to say hello in this particular situation, that can sometimes stifle a generous impulse, uh, when it, when it shouldn’t, could cause us to overthink and our own mind gets in our way and then we end up not talking at all, or we end up not approaching someone in a genuinely interested way. And that’s going to get in our way rather than helping us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:23] No, that makes a lot of sense. I think this also references, and this is something you write about, this notion of what we expect ourselves to be judged by when we start a conversation, versus what people are actually paying attention to. Like we especially in that professional context, we’re like, we need to show up because we need to demonstrate competence, expertise, skill. That’s where the value is, right? That’s not often what people are looking for on the other side of the conversation.

Nicholas Epley: [00:30:47] That’s not the number one thing. That’s the number one thing in our minds. Right? Right. So what psychologists have identified are at least two dimensions that we judge each other on, that we evaluate each other on. They’re likely more, almost certainly a third. But these are the ones that psychologists refer to as the big two. Okay. One is competency. How capable, how effective are we when we’re speaking to someone? How articulate are we, right? How well spoken are we? How knowledgeable? That’s all about competency. And that looms large in our mind because we’re agents, we’re trying to do things. Thinking is for doing and what we’re trying to do is something effective because we’re out there trying to do stuff, right. So when somebody sits down next to us, if somebody sits down next to me on the train or, you know, I have a have a kind thought that I might pass along to someone or, you know, I feel grateful to someone. I’m going to write him a letter. What comes to my mind first is what am I going to say? What are we going to talk about? How am I going to how am I actually going to do this right? We’re worried about our competency. Am I going to look like an idiot if I ask this question in the room, for instance? Right. That’s what’s coming to my mind. Other people, though, tend not to be as focused on that as we are ourselves. It’s not that competency doesn’t matter.

Nicholas Epley: [00:31:58] It’s just not the primary dimension that we evaluate other people on. What we want to know when we’re evaluating other people is, is this person a friend or a foe? Is this person somebody we ought to trust and approach? Is somebody we should avoid? Is it somebody nice or who’s not nice? What we care about with when we’re evaluating other people is the second dimension, which psychologists usually refer to as warmth. That’s what’s primary on our mind. Imagine somebody shows up at your door or a stranger you don’t know comes up and says hello to you at a networking event. What do you primarily wanting to know, you’re wanting to know? Is this person a nice person or a scary person? And that’s what we want to know first. And even in contexts where we might imagine competency is dominant, psychologists find that it’s really warmth that is often carrying the the day in terms of our overall impressions of people. And so again, it’s not the competency doesn’t matter, but a kind word, a smile, genuine interest in somebody else, honesty, authenticity goes a lot further than we might imagine. And so when you lead with that, when you lead with kindness and then follow that up with, you know, competency, that’s, that’s how you approach other people. But if we’re focused on our competency and other people care about our warmth, we’re going to underestimate how well other people respond when we reach out to them in kindness in some way.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:16] Yeah. You use the word authenticity, which is an interesting word, and it comes up in a different context that I know you’ve explored. And it’s this idea of, um, the extrovert ideal. You know, we live in a world where, um, Susan Cain is an old friend of mine, the person who wrote the book quiet, you know, which is all about, you know, the power of introverts and extroverts world. And we live in a world where we’re often sort of, you know, whenever the topic comes up of your social orientation, you know, we’re asked to say, are you an introvert? Are you an extrovert? Are you an ambivert? Now there’s overt, from what I understand, also just non-joiners. Um, so we look at it as this is just kind of the way that we’re wired. Like this is our type.

Nicholas Epley: [00:34:02] This is what we like and what we don’t like.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:04] Right? You don’t necessarily agree with that take.

Nicholas Epley: [00:34:06] Yes. So someone I, that’s I can tell you a lot of data on this, but one of my favorite things is to talk about friends I’ve made over the years. So Jessica Pan is a friend that I’ve made in going through this research. She reached out to me. She’s, uh, she’s, um, a wonderful journalist in the UK, recently had a baby not that long ago. So it hasn’t been, um, hasn’t been writing as much, although she just finished a book. Um, she reached out to me maybe 2016 or 2017 after she’d read about some of our experiments, like on the trains in Chicago. And she called me in a panic, just a total absolute panic one day. Um, it was one of the first times I talked to her and she told me that she just signed a book contract, spent a year as an introvert, living as an extrovert, you know, as a self-identified introvert. She called herself a shy introvert, right. And she was going to live a year acting more extroverted and report how it would make her feel, because she was kind of inspired to do this by our work. And she called me just in a cold sweat, thinking she had just committed to ruining a year of her life. And so she tried this over the years, looked to see what would happen if she talked to strangers on the train. If she talked to the woman at the coffee shop, who she’d always admire but had always been a little afraid to talk to if she she. She shook off some of these labels.

Nicholas Epley: [00:35:24] She had gone through kind of a hard patch of her life, you know, had had lost a job and had a friend move away. And it just was really feeling shaken and was feeling isolated. And she wanted to change that. Right. You know, not everybody wants to change. Fine. That’s no problem. But she wanted to change. I wondered how it would go. And over the course of her year, she learned how it went, that it went surprisingly well. And one of my most prized possessions is a copy of her, her wonderful book. She’s a lovely writer and a lovely person called Sorry I’m Late. I didn’t want to come. Um, and she, she inscribed the book to me, thank you for changing my life and that of many others. It’s lovely. Right. Um, and so I think that’s the right way to think about it is that these personality traits or labels become things that kind of create, Create bars for us, right? That channel our lives in one particular way or another. And if you don’t want to be channeled in that way, test that bar, right? Just just see what happens when you reach out and try to make a connection when that feels pretty good. Just take note of that. Right? But the other thing is I actually just, I just don’t think these labels are helpful because we’re not a collection of traits. I mean, to some extent we can be if we choose to act in line with them. So if we believe that the Myers-Briggs actually describes our personality, you will behave in line with it and then it will become your reality.

Nicholas Epley: [00:36:54] But what we really are are collection of capacities, right? You can be quiet, Jonathan, on a given day if you choose to be or you can be gregarious. Jonathan. If you choose to be, you can be the Jonathan that puts his headphones in and ignores the guy or the gal sitting next to him on a plane. Or you can be the Jonathan that’s kind and gets to know somebody and makes them feel welcome in this space when they might not have otherwise. Or the guy who goes a little bit deeper in conversation with someone and creates a friend in that moment, rather than sticking to shallow stuff, or the the guy who picks up a pen and actually writes a thank you note to someone you appreciate who’s done something meaningful for you, or you can decide, ah, I’ll keep it to myself. That’s not really me, right? You can be lots of different people. We’re collections of capacities. We’re not fixed traits. And so I actually think we’d be much better off. This is where this concept of ambivert, by the way, has become so popular. What that means is that this label is just kind of nonsense. That’s essentially what it means, right? And I think that’s the way to think about it. You can be lots of things, be who you want to be, right? And if you like to be more outgoing and happier, do it. Give it a try. See how it goes.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:09] I love the invitation to think about it as sort of like a set of capacities that you can sort of like choose at any given moment, at any given context. I want to touch into one other thing. You just referenced this wonderful moment where, you know, this writer sends you a note expressing her gratitude for the work that you’ve been doing, which feels like you get something like that. It always feels good. You also share a really like a fabulous story about you waited 30 years to thank a high school band teacher.

Nicholas Epley: [00:38:37] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:38] And so many of us, like, you know, we’re talking about just instance or like impromptu conversations. But there are conversations, I think oftentimes that we’ve probably wanted to have sometimes for years and years and years. And it just feels like it’s so long, it doesn’t make any sense. Or there’s a million reasons we come up with not to have them.

Nicholas Epley: [00:38:54] The whack a mole problem.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:55] And then when you finally have them, sometimes they’re pretty magical.

Nicholas Epley: [00:38:58] Totally. Yeah. Often totally magical. And you wonder, why the hell did I wait 30 years to tell Craig Orny, my high school band director, that he’s the most amazing teacher I’ve ever seen? Right. Is that. Is there ever a bad time to hear that someone appreciates you? Right. Um, and yet, because we focus on our competency, right? That’s where these fears come up. Maybe now is the right time, not the right time to pass along the compliment. I’m not quite sure I have the right words. In fact, I was. I caught myself doing this while I was writing this chapter on appreciation and gratitude, and I had done another podcast where, uh, someone asked me I was doing the Hidden Brain podcast with Shankar Vedantam, and he asked me, um, is there someone in your life who you feel grateful to, but you haven’t reached out to express your gratitude to that, to that person? And I immediately thought of Mr. Ani. Right. And I hadn’t reached out to him or why hadn’t I? Because, you know, it was weird and it was a long time. And but I channeled this guy and I think about him every time I go into a classroom. He did amazing things with us as high school band students, many of whom, including me, didn’t really want to be there. I was a tuba player, right? I was mostly there to screw off and have a good time. I was a football player, and the ratio of football players to attractive girls in the band was was pretty good for me.

Nicholas Epley: [00:40:24] And so, you know, I had fun. I had a lot of friends there. Um, and, you know, I was more in it for the social, for the social part of it. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t a musician, but he had a way of getting the best out of us better than almost any, any teacher I’ve ever seen. His enthusiasm and passion for us was was wonderful. Every one of his band students can still hear the sound of his voice screaming from the top of the bleachers without a microphone, encouraging us in the middle of games or performances to continue. And so when I actually did get over that hump, I think this is this is dumb. Of course. Reach out to him. I got over that, that misplaced fear that he might not respond. Well, I sent him a note. Um, he wrote back to me shortly, just saying I wanted to connect that I had, you know, expressing my appreciation in a quick text because I was able to get his phone number through a friend, just setting up a time to talk. He wrote back saying, Nick, I’m sitting on a park bench right now close to my home in tears. I’d love to talk. And it has been, you know, I had more conversations with him. I’ve seen, you know, I when I went back home, I met up with him around the holidays this last year and we just had a lovely conversation.

Nicholas Epley: [00:41:33] I’ve sent him notes from time to time when I get together with some of his other fans from my high school class, I send him a note. Recently I was in Kansas City meeting with two of my friends, Todd and Marcy, and I sent a picture of all three of us to him. I mean, it’s been lovely, you know? And he writes me notes saying things like, thank you for validating my career. Right? And like, my bet is that almost every listener here right now can think of someone who they feel grateful to, who had a meaningful effect on their lives. Do they really appreciate and love, but for whom, for whatever reason, they haven’t sat down and just told them how much they love them and how grateful they are to them, and how much they appreciate what they did for them. Right. And it’s silly that those people exist silly in the, in the, in the reality sense of the term. But of course, in our minds, what we’re playing through are these, you know, I don’t have the words. How can I say it? Now’s the right time. They’ll think it’s weird. I haven’t done this for 30 years. Right. And, you know, my advice is just just test that you just just go out and test that belief. Please see how that goes. And I think you might be surprised by the outcome.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:42] Yeah. It seems like that is the meta advice here. Just test it. Yeah.

Nicholas Epley: [00:42:46] In fact, that’s what I do that that is my entire career as a scientist, right? As I look at these moments where people have opportunities to connect and I test why are or aren’t they? And what I find is that people’s beliefs are really, really important about how those interactions will go and that those beliefs are often systematically mistaken, and I don’t know how this is going to play out in the lives of your listeners. I don’t know how this is going to play out to someone right now who is thinking, yeah, this sounds great, but I’m not sure I can do it in this moment. Or I don’t ride the train, I walk to work or I go on my commute or I don’t, you know, I don’t work at a university. I work somewhere else. I don’t know how it’s going to play out in your life. But in our research, we test those flags, those barriers that come up in people’s minds and often find them misplaced. And my advice to listeners here is to take note of the flags in their own life, the bars that are coming up that are keeping them from reaching out in moments and just test them like we do in our research. Run those experiments on yourself, like I did in that morning when I turned to that woman sitting next to me in the red hat and just see how it goes, collect the data. I see how it goes. I think I think it might change your life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:53] Yeah, I love that. Feels like a great place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Nicholas Epley: [00:44:02] When in doubt, reach out our data. Don’t suggest that you should be reaching out all the time, that it always turns out well, that that you should be doing this 24 over seven. Our data suggests that we’re sometimes overly pessimistic about other people for predictable reasons. We underestimate the power that we have to create meaningful connection with people. When we choose to try a little more often. And again, we don’t have to take the really hard things. It’s when when you’re on the fence, right? Don’t take things that seem horribly risky to you, right? So don’t don’t talk to a guy in a back alley way in the middle of the night. Fine. Right? Don’t don’t invite someone up to your apartment. Right. Who you’ve never known. Obviously, it’s when you’re on the fence, right? When you, you know, you’d like to reach out, you’d see somebody, you’d like to say hi, or you’d like to pass along this note to someone, or you’d like to have a more meaningful conversation with someone than you typically have, but you’re a little nervous how it would go when you’re on the fence, when you’re in that doubt, moment of doubt a little bit. That approach avoids conflict. That’s when you ought to test it and reach out and see what happens. And if you just change those moments a little bit, be a little more social. Just reach out in those moments when you’re in doubt. I think that’ll make your life a little better, meaningfully better, um, in ways that change your character and eventually kind of become, become who you are. They change who you are. Mm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:19] Thank you. So let’s talk about some takeaways here. One thing that’s really stuck with me. It’s how much of my hesitation in social situations, they come down to predictions that I’ve made really my whole life about how people will receive me and how wrong they almost always are. I also was curious about the gap between how a conversation with a stranger will go, and how it actually goes runs in our favor almost every time. We also walk around assuming people are grading us on kind of how sharp we sound, how competent we are, when what they’re actually reading is, whether we’re warm. And that personality label you’ve carried maybe since high school. Introvert or extrovert? Nicholas describes it as more of a set of habits than it describes who you actually are. You get to choose differently on any given day. So here’s what maybe you could try today. Think of one person that you’ve been meaning to text or call, or just say hello to, or maybe even a stranger, and do this small, slightly awkward version of what he did on that train. Not a grand gesture. Just a quick hello. And if you could do me a quick favor. Share this conversation with just one person who, you know, needs to hear what we talked about or leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us get discovered and brings more people into the conversation. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By, Troy Young, and Alejandro Ramirez. Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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