← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
‘The Anti-Social Century’: America’s Epidemic of Solitude—and How to Fix It
01:12:47
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What's up everybody? Chris Vernon here and welcome to a.
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New season of the NBA and the Mismatch.
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And huge welcome as well to my.
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New co host, Dave Jacoby. I can't wait to link with you twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday right here on the Mismatch to break down everything that's happening in the league. Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction. We've got you covered right here. So follow us, subscribe and hit us with those five star ratings on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And also don't forget to follow us on social media. That's Ringer NBA. And check out the full Mismatch episodes with the two handsomest podcasters in the history of podcasting right on The Ringer NBA YouTube channel.
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This episode is brought to you by Indeed. We're driven by the search for Better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search match with Indeed. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibly listed@ Indeed.com plane, just go to Indeed.com plane right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you. Need Indeed.
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O-R-I.comsimmons before we dive into today's episode, a few announcements. First, I want to remind folks that Plain English is having our first live show in Washington, D.C. february 12th at Union Stage at the Wharf. Tickets are now available@theringer.com events. I'm already lining up guests. I can promise you this is going to be an awesome, awesome show. The first live plain English will be in D.C. february 12th at Union Stage. Second, I just want to say before we go on that my heart is so so with the many people I know and the many, many people I don't know who are suffering in the Los Angeles fires. This is not a problem that is solvable with words, and there's really nothing I can say here that meets the moment. But I am just truly gutted and sorry for the people I know and love who are going through this disaster. I'm just so, so sorry. So today Today has been a long time coming. For much of the last year, this podcast publishing schedule was reduced from twice a week to once a week. And this was for a couple the first reason was that I was finishing a book, Abundance, co written with Ezra Klein of the New York Times. That book is about how American politics and economics has gone awry in the last 50 years, and it charts a path forward for America and specifically for liberalism in America. Abundance is coming out in March, and I'm excited to talk your ear off about it in the weeks to come. But the other reason that we reduced our publishing cadence was that I was finishing a feature for the Atlantic, which is on the COVID of the February issue. And it's this story that I want to talk to you about today. The story is called the Antisocial Century. This is a long essay. I think the original draft came in around like 11,000 words. But the upshot is actually very brief. Very, very brief. The story really pivots around one fact, one statistic. Americans are spending more time alone today than in any period for which we have trustworthy data, going back at least to the 1960s and probably to decades before then. In the 21st century alone, we've reduced our face to face socializing time by 20% and added an additional 99 minutes of home time to the average day. I strongly believe that this surge in isolation is changing our economy, our culture, our politics, and our relationship to one another. Now that's a huge claim, and huge claims deserve copious evidence. So let me back each claim up with some evidence. Question 1 How is the Antisocial century changing our economy? Well, when I think about the most social activity, I think about restaurants. I love dining out. I love getting cocktails with friends, a piece of meat and a Bottle of wine. That's my slice of heaven. But something very interesting is happening today to the restaurant industry. In the last few years, the sector has shifted dramatically from tables to takeaway. In 2023, the last year for which we have data, 74% of all restaurant traffic came from takeout and delivery. 74%. That means of all restaurant business today in America, just a quarter of traffic comes from sitting down at a table and ordering food. The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of us Adults having dinner or drinks with friends in any given night has declined by more than 30% in the last 20 years. My point here is not that doordash is evil. God knows sometimes you're just exhausted at home and it's easier to click a screen than to roast a chicken. I get that. But when we cancel on a lunch here, a coffee there, a dinner here, drinks with friends there, when one person's decision to withdraw from social interaction is scaled over years and that person's behavior is scaled out across millions of Americans, it creates a new norm. And today, I think many companies in delivery and retail and entertainment and dining are currently molding themselves around the expectation that the American consumer's natural habitat is to be inside of their home, and their conveniences allow us to lead lives of unprecedented homebound isolation. Truly, I think America's preference for solitude is changing the way companies think about reaching us as consumers. Question 2. How is the antisocial century changing our culture? I think this age of reclusion has done something very important and weird and worrying to young men. Men spend more time alone than women, and young men in particular are increasing their alone time faster than any other group, according to the American Time Use Survey, which is an official government survey run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So a few years ago, a philosopher and writer, Andrew Taggart, wrote an essay in the religious journal First Things where he said, a new kind of masculinity seems to be emerging. Strong, obsessed with optimization, and proudly alone. He wrote that the men he knew seemed to be foregoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and dirty diapers, they were committed to their bodies, their bank account, their meditation, sharpened minds. Taggart called these men secular monks. He wrote, practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous monitored forms of ascetic self control, among them cold showers, intermittent fasting, data driven health optimization and meditation boot camps. When I read this essay last year, I felt this shock of recognition. In the previous months, I'd been captivated by this very particular genre of social media, the viral morning routine video. If you're, you know, active on TikTok Instagram X, I'm sure you've seen this, you've got this. This video where a protagonist is a man typically handsome and rich. We see him wake up, we see him meditate, we see him write in a journal. We see him exercise, take supplements, take a cold plunge. What's most striking about these videos, the more I watch them, is the element they other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonist typically wakes up alone and stays that way. No friends, no spouse, no children. These videos are like advertisements for a luxurious form of monasticism that treats the presence of other people as, at best, an unwelcome distraction and at worst, an unhealthy indulgence that's ideally avoided. Like porn, perhaps, or Pop Tarts. When I watch these influencer videos now, when I watch these dioramas of a life well lived, the thing I always look for and often do not see is other people. These beautiful Internet celebrities on TikTok and Instagram that millions of people look to to guide them through life are often advertising a very particular and I think, incredibly strange vision of a perfect life. A complete obsession with perfecting the self, and a total disregard for the possibility that the best life is about other people. Question 3. How is this changing our politics? So Mark Dunkelman, who's an author and a research fellow at Brown University, I called him as I was reporting up this essay, and he told me that in order to see clearly what's happening here and how the trends I'm talking about are warping society, we have to see something that's actually a little counterintuitive and strange. Today, many social bonds are actually getting stronger. Parents, for example, are spending more time with their children than they did several decades ago, especially higher income parents. And many couples maintain an unbroken flow of communication throughout the day. If you've got a boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, you know, you're very likely in constant touch with them in a way that you couldn't have possibly been in touch with them so constantly 70 years ago, when one of you or both of you had to go to the office. So in many ways, this sort of inner circle of family is stronger than it used to be. And at the same time, Dunkelman told me, messaging apps and TikTok streams and subreddits keep us plugged into the thoughts and opinions of the global crowd that shares our interests. Like if you're a Cincinnati Bengals fan as Mark Dunkelman is, or if you're a fan of a particular kind of music, or maybe if you're the parent of a child with special needs, you're plugged in to a global digital network that gives you access to thoughts and opinions and people. That was never possible before the Internet. So in a way, you could say that just as the inner ring of families getting stronger, the outer ring of let's call it tribe is also getting stronger. So this, this age of the antisocial century seems to be solidifying our closest and most distant connections at the same time, right? Our inner and outer rings are being strengthened. But something's getting lost here. And Dunkelman calls it the middle ring. The village, your neighbors, the people in your town, the people we live around. We used to know them well, he said, and now we barely know them at all. Sometimes this middle ring is so key to social cohesion because while families teach us love and tribes teach us loyalty, it's the village that teaches us tolerance. It's politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you, dunkleman said. And in the absence of that cooling agent, our politics goes berserk. We become socialized to be intolerant of any out group because we're used to be only around our family and people that agree with us and that intolerance of out groups, that really is American politics today. In a 2021 poll by Axios and Generation Lab, nearly a third of college students who identify as Republican said they would never go on a date with a Democrat. And more than 2/3 of Democratic students said the same of Republicans. In the last 50 years of polarization surveys, we don't have evidence of anything like this happening in previous decades. This, I worry, is politics on solitude, the hollowing out of our social relations, the death of that middle ring, which is the cooling agent for what would otherwise be a nasty politics. And in the absence of that cooling agent, I think our politics is becoming angrier and coarser and more chaotic. Finally, question number four. How are these trends changing our relationships? Well, I talked to several dozen people for this story. I talked to priests and parishioners. I talked to architects. I talked to developers and authors and restaurant owners and sociologists. And of all these conversations that I had, one of the most interesting was with the University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley. Today's guest is Nick Epley. We talk about his research on relationships and solitude, on why we need people in our lives, on why sometimes we disregard that need we talk about social fitness as the key to a good life. And we talk about how his work, his research has changed the way he spends his minutes and hours and days. And how his research has changed mine. Hi, I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Nick Epley. Welcome to the show.
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Thank you, Derek. Really appreciate being here.
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Thank you for being here. Before we dive into your work, tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.
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So my name is Nick Eppley. I'm a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. I study mind reading for a living. I study how we think about other people's thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. And mostly how we screw that up and misunderstand each other in lots of ways that cause some frictions in our lives.
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A
So I reached out to you in the middle of my reporting. And when I called you, I was a bit stuck. What I had my hands on was a set of firm statistics about Americans spending less time socializing, more time alone, more time in their home. But someone could easily ask. And in fact, my editors did ask, so what? Maybe Sartre was right. Maybe hell really is other people. Maybe we're better off denying ourselves. So social interaction. And I called you, and the first thing you said is that the question that I was asking. Touched on what you see as a fundamental paradox at the core of human life. What is that paradox?
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That paradox is really just a fundamental tension. Between the nature of who we are and the choices we often make in our daily lives. On the one hand, we are fundamentally social beings. It's Aristotle who was right when he said that we are by nature social animals. We really need other people in order to get along well in life. He suggested that people who didn't actually need other people were either beasts or gods. We're not beast or gods. We're people. We're normal people. The only way we get along well in life is through our connections with other people. And psychologists haven't so much been unlearning that perspective over the years. We've just been expanding it in so many ways. Aristotle was right in so many ways. Beyond the ways he actually knew. We were fundamentally, fundamentally social. It affects our health. We're happier when we're connected positively to other people. It is without question, I think, the biggest determinant of happiness. Or at least one of the biggest determinants of our happiness. And so there's that we're fundamentally social. And yet go outside and look around a little bit and watch what we actually Do. I rode in on my train this morning from the far south side of Chicago. I get on this morning. I had some friends to talk to, which I do now because I know this. And so I talk to people, so I have a carload of friends. But you look around and what instead you see are a whole bunch of people totally choosing to keep to themselves. There are all these people around them who they could engage with, who they could talk to, and they're choosing not to. So we are, on the one hand, fundamentally social, and yet on the other, we so often choose to isolate ourselves. And that hits you like a bat to the face. If you're a psychologist, why is it we do that? Why do we make those choices?
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How do we know you're right? So those are two interesting and falsifiable claims. A humans are social. But Aristotle, great guy, didn't have RCTs at his disposal. We can't know for sure that his prose was defensible in the modern academic climate. And also that people are denying themselves access to sociality. That would make them happier. So how do we know this is true? What experiments have you done to establish the fact that people might have a happier experience of life if we urge them to be a little bit more social?
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Well, let me tell you just the simple one that's closest to the story that I just told you. Some experiments that kind of started what was, for me, 15 years of research on this, which I've been doing for the last 15 years and continue to do now. We went to the trains that I ride on every morning. I had this observation about a decade and a half ago. I got on the train one morning. I just remember this. It was just a eureka moment for me. I get on the train. I'm writing the first book that I wrote called Mind Wise. And in that book I'm writing about how fundamentally social we are, how we've got these brains that are uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others, how we're made happier and healthier by connecting with others. And yet I looked around the train and nobody's talking to each other, including me either. So on that particular morning, I finally was attentive to this thing that was going on around me in a way I hadn't been before. A woman comes down and sits next to me. She's got this bright red hat, like right out of old Hollywood or something, like, you know, mid-50s African American woman. And I decide today I'm going to put myself in a sp. I'm going to Try something different. I'm going to try to have a conversation with her, try to get to know her a little bit. And so I opened a little joke, told her, I love your hat. I got one just like it. We both kind of chuckled at that. And what struck me was that it was almost as if she'd been struck by a lightning bolt. She just came to life all of a sudden. When I reached up, she'd gotten on kind of dead faced. I reach over, talk to her, she just brightens up. And so I thought, you know, that's what kind of started me thinking about this. And so we, as many psychologists do, we study sometimes the things we observe in our lives. We test hypotheses that often start from observations in our life. They don't have to be true, but they might be. So what we did, and this was Juliana Schroeder, former PhD student of mine, we went down to the south side of Chicago to the train line that I ride every single day. We didn't go to the station that I ride from, which is in Flossmoor, Illinois, because that's an above ground station. And we started running these experiments in February. And it's pretty freezing cold here in Chicago in February. You don't want to freeze anybody to death. So we went, went to Homewood, which is the little town north of us. They have an underground entryway. And so we could be a little warmer recruiting people for our participant. And what we wanted to test was what happens if we do what you just asked about? What happens if we just ask people on your commute to try talking to somebody versus whatever they normally do versus just keeping to themselves, enjoying their solitude. So those were three conditions we had in this experiment. And if people were interested, we then randomly assigned them to one of those three conditions. They only knew about the one. And that order, by the way, is important. You don't want people in experiments choosing which condition to be and. Right. Because the people who would choose the talk are different. So who would choose not to talk? So we randomly assign them to those conditions. Those in the connection condition, we asked them to do something that's seemingly radical on the train. We told them when somebody comes and sits down to neck, sits down next to you this morning, try to get to know him or her a little bit, try to make a connection, have a conversation. Okay. In the control condition, we told them to do just whatever you normally do. And mostly that's not talk to the person who sits down next to you. In the third condition, we told them when you're on the train today, just spend your time enjoying your solitude. Don't talk to anybody around you. Just focus on your day ahead. Just keep to yourself. Enjoy your solitude. Okay? We then handed them an envelope which had a $5 Starbucks gift card in it, which is word to the wise, the most motivating incentive you can give to people on the planet. People will do anything for a morning coffee, including talk to strangers on the train. We gave them an envelope with a surve inside it. That's kind of an old school way. We now do this on people's cell phones. And the survey inside it asked them a few questions that they were supposed to fill out at the end of the train ride. And it was a pretty long survey. But the first four questions were the ones that we focused on most. Some of them later questions were personality items, but the first four ones were the ones we focused on the most. We asked them, how happy are you after your trip, commute today, how sad are you after you commute today? And how positive, pleasant or unpleasant is your commute compared to normal? We average these together into a composite, and then we just look to see who reports having a better commute. And what we found was that those people who we had asked to try to have a conversation with somebody reported a more positive commute than those we asked to keep to them, to keep to themselves and more positive than the control condition as well. So this raises the question, if actually connecting with somebody on that train in the morning does in fact lead to a more positive commute, why on earth do people almost never do it? Why do they almost never do it? And to figure that out, we had to run another survey where we recruited people. And we asked them, instead of, instead of doing these things, we asked them to anticipate how they would feel if they'd each of these things right. Our choices are guided not by our actual experiences. Our choices are guided by how we think we'll feel if we do something. And we did that. We asked people to imagine, we put them in each of these experimental conditions. Try talking to a stranger, keep to yourself, do whatever you normally do. And then they predicted how they would feel if they were in each of these conditions. And people predicted actually the opposite of how they actually. The people who actually did this felt. They predicted that they would be happier if they kept to themselves than if they talked to a stranger. It's not a surprise people are keeping themselves on the train. That's what they think will make them happy. And as far as we can tell they're just wrong about that.
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A
It's such an interesting study. The title of the study, the words just kept ringing in my head. Mistakenly Seeking Solitude is the name of the paper. And this idea that every day, every hour, millions of people in this country and around the world are mistakenly seeking solitude because they think it will make them happy. When if there's a little angel on their shoulder just nudging them to talk to a stranger in the form of a Starbucks gift receipt or a University of Chicago psychologist, they'll find more happiness than they would expect. It's an amazingly interesting finding. It's a bit of a wacky study. Maybe some people are thinking, wait, this is very strange, forcing people to talk to each other on the train. I certainly wouldn't want to talk to anybody on the train. Does this kind of thing replicate? Have other studies found similar results? Nick, have other studies found similar results?
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B
So lots of studies have found that either have found conceptually similar results in lots of different ways. So one very quick replication we did of this study was to go to the trains in Chicago, right? So, I mean, Juliana and I started running these studies on the train because we were. We were kind of interested in places where people are around other people. But they seem to be choosing not to engage with other people. And the question is, why are they not engaging? And would they be feel differently if they actually did engage? So the next place we went were to buses in Chicago. If you want to see places where people don't talk to each other but are in close proximity to one another, go sit on a bus for a little while. The buses in Chicago were a little better for us because unlike the trains where people were going off downtown and we had to count on them to send their survey back to us on the buses. We could have them commute in on the bus to our lab and tell us how they felt when they got in. So everybody who was in the experiment filled out a survey for us and we found exactly the same results on the bus. People thought they would be happier it feel better if they kept to themselves than if they tried to talk to somebody on the bus. In fact, precisely the opposite was true. They felt more positive and more positive bus ride when they tried to talk to somebody else on the bus than when they kept to themselves. We went to London as well and tested it there. If you want to find people who are notoriously crabby and seem to like keeping to themselves, go to London. We ran study on the commuter rails there. We find a very similar Pattern. Even Londoners, it turns out, enjoy talking to people more than keeping to themselves. Interestingly, in the London study, for reasons I'm that are probably a little technical and complicated and that I'm not entirely sure of, in London, people actually expected that they would enjoy having a conversation with somebody a little more than keeping to themselves. They still underestimated how much they would enjoy talking to a stranger in London, but the pattern was slightly different. But this tendency for people to underestimate how positively they'll feel, how positive they'll feel when they reach out to somebody else is a pattern we have just replicated over and over and over again. We find it in deep conversations with other people. We find it when people reach out to give compliments to other people, express their gratitude to somebody, reach out and express support to someone. As we're recording this right now, for instance, there are fires ablaze in Los Angeles. There, you know, there are all kinds of people. My guess that your listeners know. Who could use some support that they haven't reached out to. They're not quite sure what to say. They think it might not go great, and so they're reluctant to do that. And yet when they actually reach out, it tends to go better than they think. This is an effect that is so replicable and robust. I feel like I've got a hammer, an idea that's a hammer, and the whole world has become nothing but nails.
- [29:29]
A
So there's a really simple way to summarize your finding, which is that too many people expect that solitude will make them happy, when in fact, socializing will make them happy. But what I love about your work is that if you dig deeper into that, there's various mechanics to that prediction that I find so interesting. One way to tease out what your research means is that we're bad at predicting the future, Especially about our own personalities. We're bad at predicting ourselves in the future. What will make us happy. Not just in 20 years, should I buy a big house here or a smaller house here? But what will make us happy in conversation. Another mechanism, though, is that we're bad at predicting how other people will respond to us when we reach out to them. So maybe the right question to ask here is, why do you think people talk back when someone strikes up a conversation on the train? If we're all maybe a little bit more pinched, then why are people so likely to open up when we make the proverbial comment about their big red hat?
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B
Well, so let me back up to the start of that question then. I'LL try the first part of that question about what I think people are getting wrong. Is it themselves or is it other people? And then I'll help answer that second question about why is it that people talk back?
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A
You perfectly disentangled the question. That's what I'm interested in. Are we wrong about ourselves or are we wrong about other people? That's a great way to frame it.
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B
We're wrong about other people. That's what I think it is that we're wrong about. So it's not so much that people think that being connected to others will be unpleasant or that having conversation will be unpleasant. What we found on the trains coming in and out of Chicago in our very first experiments, for instance, was that when people imagined actually having a conversation with somebody, they actually thought it would be pretty pleasant. So it wasn't that, you know, they were looking back on their lives and imagining the worst conversation that they ever had. When they were thinking about having a conversation with somebody, that wasn't it. When we just asked them to imagine having a conversation, they actually thought it would feel pretty good. The barrier was they didn't think other people wanted to talk to them. They didn't think that if they reached out to engage with this person was sitting next to them, not talking to them. They thought that that person is less interested in talking to me than I am in talking to them. They were pessimistic about how this person would respond. And notice if everybody on the train has just a little bit of that, and that difference can even be small. I'm a little more interested in talking to you than you are to me. What percentage of people are going to reach out and talk? Zero, is the answer. Zero. And so you're going to get an entire train load of people, or a bus load, or a plane load or a business load or whatever of people experiencing what psychologists refer to as pluralistic ignorance, where you have a plurality of people who are ignorant about what the plurality of other people is. And so if you've got a train load of folks who are made happier and healthier by connecting to each other, but they don't really think that other people want to talk to them because they're not talking to them in the first place, then you'll get an entire train load of people never giving it a try and learning that they might be wrong. The reason why people talk back when we reach out to them is because we are fundamentally social. And what we really value in other people is their warmth and their kindness. And when you Reach out in a kind, positive way to somebody else. The most overwhelmingly powerful common response is they reach back to you. Right? If you want somebody to see somebody smile, the best way to see somebody smile is to smile at them first. You want somebody to say hi. Best way to do that is to say hi to them first. You want to see somebody wave, you wave to them first. Reciprocity. That responsiveness is just an extremely powerful social norm. And by not initiating it, you don't see people reaching back to you.
- [33:47]
A
If there's introverts listening along and they're starting to develop hives thinking about forced conversations in the train, I think the next question is going to give them outright boils. So a forced conversation on a train about hats and gloves is a relatively shallow conversation. Have you ever been so cruel as to force people to have deep conversations?
- [34:11]
B
So for the last few years, every single one of our incoming MBA students here at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business on the second day of their orientation has been put through that wringer of asking deep questions. I sit everybody down. We had this year, we had a little over 700 students in two separate groups because we don't have a room that seats 700 people. And I tell them, just a few minutes, I'm going to pair you up with another person in this room, and I'm going to ask you to have a conversation with this person about these questions that I put up on a screen. And they're not about hats and gloves and mittens and where you live and what you do and nonsense like that. They're real stuff. They're the questions we want to ask other people about but don't because we think, ah, that'll be weird. They won't want to open up. They'll feel like I'm intruding too much. I don't want to be impolite. The questions are things like, if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? If you had a crystal ball tell you anything about your future, what is it you'd want to know? Can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? What is it that you're most anxious about in starting this MBA program here at the University of Chicago? And after I put those questions up on the screen, usually you could hear a pin drop in that room. Everybody is sort of silently having a panic attack, is what the very first time I ever ran this experiment, in fact, or this is more of a demonstration. I don't have multiple conditions here, so. But the very first time I ran this demonstration was actually not here at the University of Chicago. It was at a corporate finance conference out in the east coast at a hedge fund. And I brought in, I think, kind of to be been brought in as a speaker, kind of just as light entertainment for these people. These were all masters of the financial universe, running pension funds and things like that. These were not people who wanted to talk about the last time they'd cried in front of another person. So I throw this question out on the screen. I put these questions up, and right away, a guy in the front room, I remember this so vividly. He looks up and he says, oh, shit. And the whole room just bursts out laughing, right? So that's the experience my MBA students have, right? They're looking at these questions. I ask them to anticipate how they're going to feel after this conversation in a bunch of ways. I then send them off. They all go out of this room, and the problem I now have is I can't get them to come back. After I let them go, they disappear out into the hallways and out into the garden outside, and they end up at the chapel on the other side of the street. They're walking around the building, and I tell them, come back in 20 minutes. And nearly everybody is still deep in conversation at 20 minutes. So we corral them in. We're out there like cowboys with our whips and megaphones trying to bring them in. They come in, they sit down, they fill out a survey afterwards, telling me how they actually felt. And the gaps between how people thought these deep conversations make them feel and how they actually felt are so big as to be almost embarrassing. Frankly, as a psychologist, these gaps are so huge, it almost feels like we had to have known this already. How could this not be obvious to people? The gaps are so huge. The students will say, I'll ask them how this went. I've had students almost every year in tears in front of all their classmates, telling me about how this conversation went. I had a student a year or two ago tell me this is the best conversation they had ever had. I had a student say in front of all their peers, I told somebody in this conversation something I had never said to another person before, right? These are really, really, really powerful and hard to anticipate going in. So the gaps between them are huge, deep conversations. Deep and meaningful conversations, the kinds that we want to have with other people aren't just powerfully positive. They're surprisingly powerful, surprisingly positive when we.
- [38:38]
A
Surprisingly powerful because they're not demanded to the degree to which you think they should be. I wonder, have you done this experiment in an environment that has less of a, let's say, selection bias as a group of booth students coming together. Right. So like a group of, I'm just guessing, median age, 26, 27 year old people who want to be corporate leaders and are living in south side Chicago for the next two years of their lives. They're going to have a lot of things that are similar about their backgrounds to a certain extent, and they're going to have things similar about their prospective futures. They all expect to do well in the next two years, the exact same program. Have you thought about running a study like this? Are you aware of a study like this on the power of deep conversations within a more motley crew of old and young and poor and rich and college grad and non college grad? That'd be really interesting to know if the power of deep conversations replicated in that stranger environment.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah. So I will say I mentioned the MBA thing just because it's a big thing I do every year. And I should point out that even amongst, and I've done this now with, with over 3,000 people, so I know what these effects look like. And I've done that particular demonstration not just with my MBA students, I do it at corporate events. So, you know, I'll, I'll do it across a company. Company wants me to come in and speak about relationships. This includes C level suite executives down to, you know, custodial staff. These effects are so replicable, I don't even have any anxiety when I stand up on the stage that I'm going to, that I'm going to see them. But in the paper that we published actually report a bunch of different experiments. This is just one of them. And in these other experiments, some of them are experiments we conducted in Millennium park here in Chicago. These are people just walking around a public city park who happen to sit down on a bench with us and are interested in participating in an experiment. They show similar effects like these with deeper conversations. We do it in online settings where we've, we've got a virtual lab that we maintain at the University of Chicago that includes people from all walks of life all around country. We've got everybody from a finance professor at a university who I never guess would have signed up for this, to people who are doing online experiments as their primary way of making money. So a huge range of people in the US and we See the same kinds of effects there, if anything. Actually, my bet is that the more diverse the sample is, we haven't tested this specifically, but this would be my hypothesis that the more diverse the sample is, the more interesting and enjoyable the deep conversations would be. Because not only in conversation do I connect with you, but I also learn things from you. Particularly in these deep conversations. You really learn about the life of somebody and what's meaningful to somebody who's not you. And sometimes you see similarities, and that's really interesting. But sometimes you learn a lot new things, and that's. That's quite interesting. We find that people not only underestimate the hedonic enjoyment they're going to get from this, how happy they'll feel, but they also underestimate the practical value, the informational content they'll get from these conversations, how much they're actually going to learn from them. So my. My bet would be that the more diverse the sample, the actually more surprisingly positive they would be. But we have not tested that yet. It is not a phenomena that's restricted to MBA students even close.
- [42:23]
A
That's good to know. It's interesting. As a journalist, I sometimes have these experiences. For this article, the Antisocial Century, there was a whole piece of it that I reported out that didn't make it into the final cut about church and churches in Baltimore. And there were dozens and dozens of Catholic churches that were recently closed in Baltimore that had predominantly black parishioners. And I was interested to know what the closing of those churches had done to the social ties in Baltimore. Because I think of church as I'm a secular Reformed Jew, so I'm the furthest thing from a practicing Catholic that is conceivable. But I wondered what this might have done to the community there. And I talked to a priest, and he set me up with some parishioners. And I talked to these several old black Catholic parishioners living in the suburbs of Baltimore and their story of what the church meant to their lives. Having lost their son and how it helped them get through that loss, how it had tethered them to their community and yoked them to a sense of purpose in life. I think the gentleman that I spoke to, who was, I think in his 80s, said that he thought of church as a bus strap, that life is a bus on a jangly road and you need something to help you stand upright. And Jesus was his bus, was his bus strap that he could hold onto and trust would always be there. And I remember hanging up the phone and I Have an excuse as a journalist, people, to have these deep conversations with people from time to time. And the conversation made me feel so emotional in the best way, like a yoga flow for the spirit. I felt so embiggened by the conversation, and it was beautiful. And so I buy the theory that I'm a decently shy person in public spaces. I'm a slight introvert. And reading that paper, having this conversation, thinking about it in the context of this essay, really has changed the way I think about just turning to people next to me in coffee shops and public transit and sometimes just saying hi. Has it changed you? Do you come away from these studies thinking that. That your natural inclination to keep to yourself should maybe be exploded a little bit and you should open yourself up to people?
- [44:49]
B
So there's no research that I've ever read about or been involved in that's changed the way I've lived my life more than this. It's not even close that morning, and some of it started to. I started to feel some of it even before I started seeing the data. But I've now seen 10,000 data points showing these gaps between our pessimistic expectations about what happens when I reach out, when I take a genuine interest in you and reach out and try to connect to you in a positive, meaningful way with good intent. I'm not trying to get something out of you. I'm not trying to hit on somebody. It's nothing but having your interest in mind and trying to take a genuine interest in you. I've seen so many data points at this point about the size of that gap that it has changed the way I live my life from top to bottom. There are so many instances of what I refer to or think about as the choice that we make. The choice to reach out and approach somebody or to avoid somebody. And these can be little things, right? Just that you're walking down the sidewalk. I could walk down the sidewalk in one of two ways. I could say hi and smile to the people coming by, or I could keep to myself and look to the ground. There's no skin off my back if I do one or the other. And often people kind of. It's easier to keep to yourself or something, but the block will be better if you smile and say hello to people, to big things like having deep and meaningful conversations, which I do with people now quite regularly. So just one example of a recent one. A guy on the train, I suspect his name is Jalen. I suspect it won't call him out to just mention his first name. He's always very handsomely dressed. Guy's got a bow tie, suit, looks. He just. He looks as sharp as could be. I saw him one time a little while ago, and I just told him that he looked awesome. Whatever he's doing today, he was killing it. The next time I sat down, I saw him again and I started talking to him about just introducing myself again and saying hello. And I just asked him, just tell me about yourself. How did you get here? And I didn't mean how did you get here, like, how did you walk? I meant you're here on the train going downtown in this part of your life. How did you get to this point? And the story that he told me about, I mean, he goes back to his childhood. The story he told me about his life and his upbringing on the south side of Chicago. I'll never forget that story. And you're right. You leave that moment feeling better about other people. The big thing I think that I feel, knowing about this research is empowered, amazingly. It almost feels like you've got a superpower. Once you realize that that fence in your mind that's holding you back from reaching out and connecting to other people is misplaced, it's like being in a bit of a prison. It keeps you from reaching out and doing things. And you've never checked to see if the door was unlocked, right? And when you find the door is unlocked, your world just opens up in just lots of ways. And I don't want to blow this too far out of proportion. It's not like every waking moment is wonderful. But what psychologists have made crystal clear is that happiness is really determined much more by the frequency of positive events in your life than by the intensity of your events of positive events in your life. And once you know about how easily you can connect in positive ways to others, you just sprinkle this throughout your life. It's just in a way that just keeps, you know, makes your life meaningfully and notably better. I think.
- [48:43]
A
This episode is brought to you by Indeed. We're driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search match with Indeed. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibly listed@ Indeed.com plane, just go to Indeed.com plane right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you. Need indeed.
- [49:30]
C
This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Here's the thing about prime whatever you're into, it makes it even better. I love because we watch a lot of prime movies for the rewatchables. I love being able to pop up the X ray thing that tells you what actors and what scene. I love that. I love being able to rent movies that just came out or buy them. If I'm excited to do that. From streaming to shopping, it's on Prime. Visit Amazon.comprime to get more out of whatever you're into.
- [50:02]
B
This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Sometimes the most painful part of getting sick is the getting better part. Waiting on hold for an appointment, sitting in crowded waiting rooms, standing in line at the phone pharmacy. That's painful. Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy remove those painful parts of getting better with things like 247 virtual visits and prescriptions delivered to your door thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.
- [50:30]
A
The way that we closed our initial conversation, I was furiously scribbling down what you just said and it became the conclusion of the piece. And I just want to read the conclusion of the piece here because it really is my gloss on your words. When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on the train, the experiment probably didn't change anybody's life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15 minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15 minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. Those really are your words, like what you just said. It really, really helped me understand that the power of this experiment and the power of these conclusions are not that they transform our lives at the level of decades, it's that they transform our lives at the scale of minutes. But we live life in minutes, and that's what makes it powerful. I want to take us to a related but separate finding from your work, which is about talking on phones versus talking in the physical world. There are people who are going to look at the statistics that I have in this article about the decline of face to face socializing and the enormous rise in phone time and say, well, so what? Of course face to face socializing is declining. It's just moving to the phone. And the way that we spend our time on the phone is just as nourishingly social as the way we would spend our time talking to each other over a glass of wine at A bar, Are they? Right?
- [52:06]
B
So I think no. I think no. But it does depend a little bit on how we're using the phone. So modern life has given us an endless set of new choices that our ancestors never faced before. And those choices are about not just what to connect with somebody, about what to talk to in conversation, what to approach somebody for, it's how to do it. It, right? We can type to each other an email, we can text each other, we can do video chat or a phone call. We can meet up face to face. Right? All of these different media, how we connect to each other, they convey things using different kinds of cues, and it kind of seems like they're all equal. When I talk to my kids, they'll say, oh, you know, I talked to so and so as a friend and I have to clarify for them because they think of these as the same. Did you use your mouth parts or did you use your fingers to talk? You know, in quotes. I put talk in quotes to talk to them because those two things are not the same. Okay, so the big difference we find in our research, at least, and this is what I think so far based on our research, is that the really important cue for connecting us to the mind of others, the big one that we get is the voice, physical touch notwithstanding, shaking hands, hugging, that all matters a huge amount too. That happens in face to face conversation. But we find that when it comes to social connection, the voice is really important compared to text. The voice contains some cues that text just lacks and is hard to recreate to the same degree. What voice contains are paralinguistic cues beyond the semantic content of what we're saying. Semantic content just being the words, the content, what you might type in an email on top of that, voice contains signals essentially to the presence of mental life. They tell me that you're alive inside. I can't see your mind, I can't see your thoughts or your feelings or your attitudes, but it turns out we can hear them. And your voice contains those cues. It goes up and down and fluctuates in tone. And that up and down fluctuation gives me a cue that you're feeling things, that you're alive inside, right? I know that you're alive physically because your body moves. I can see bodily movement. You're nodding your head at me right now, but I can tell your mind is alive because your voice moves up and down. It fluctuates, right? It speeds up and it slows down. Your voice has life and that does two things we find in Our research one is it just makes you seem more alive inside. That is, it makes you seem more mindful or as we often measure it as psychologists, more human like actually. Right. The difference between a human and a non human is active mental life. At least that's the way people typically perceive it. And when I hear your voice, you just sound more thoughtful, more intelligent, more rational. Would we have voters on opposing sides of the political aisle read what another person has to say about why they're voting versus listen to the very same things said by the other person? The other person seems more like a human being, more thoughtful, more intelligent, more rational when you hear what they have to say than when you read the very same words or read something that they have written. Voice contains mind. So when you talk to somebody, you really feel like you are connecting with their mind. And that's what it means to really be connected to somebody. When you and I interact with each other, when I feel connected to you, what that means is that I feel connected to your mind, to your thoughts. I feel like I understand you better. I feel like I get what you're like a little bit. I'm connected to your mind. So we also find in our research that when people talk to each other with their voice, they also feel meaningfully more connected to each other than when they type to each other as well than when they type to each other instead. And so the phone does. I will give some credit to the phone for still allowing us to actually talk to each other. Nobody uses it that way anymore, but you can, you can use it to talk to each other with your actual mouth parts. And when you do that, it's better than when you use it to type to each other.
- [56:42]
A
Yeah, I think my friend, the YouTuber Cleo Abram has a lovely phrase where she says there's a difference between hanging out and catching up. And often I find that texting is really good for catching up and brief phone calls are really good for catching up. But hanging out is not just catching up. Hanging out is feeling, as you said, the paralinguistic, the physical, the mammalian presence of that other person and feeling their literal and emotional warmth. That's what the social animal needs. And I do think that it's partly why I so strongly believe that digital communication is often a very thin simulation for physical world communication in many ways. To your point, it keeping going. Let's see how many times you can say paralinguistic in the next 30 seconds. But those cues are necessarily flattened, aren't they? Once you go from voice to text. It's one reason why I remember when I was doing research on the shift to work from home, I had various work from home experts explaining to me why in communication people have to use exclamation points and smiley faces and winky faces because those emojis are the replacement for the paralinguistic cue that is excised by the text. And so you were nodding so furiously that I'm trying to go by your cues to get that you want to talk here. Tell me what you picked up from that distinction between hanging out and catching up.
- [58:16]
B
So I'll mention two things. Let me mention what you say about the paralinguistic cues in text. There's one series of experiments that we did that we actually still haven't published yet. We had people read the text of something that somebody had said just to look, to see, like how much life is in their voice. And the intonation, for instance, is about half or so of the intonation that's actually in a real person's voice. You read it like a dead voice, a monotone voice. Text really is dead. It's lifeless. It lacks the mental life that voice conveys. So that's one big thing.
- [58:57]
A
Which, by the way, is why when you send a paper you're really excited about to, I don't know, the department head or some journal, and they reply with two letters, okay? In an email, you're like, oh, shit, they hate it. But if you hand a manila envelope to that same person in the hall and they're like, okay, exactly. It's the same word, same two letters. But your mind, for whatever reason, wants to read the text at about half the level of enthusiasm.
- [59:29]
B
Well, it's not even for whatever reason, there's no paralinguistic cue in text. It's flat, right? It is flat. It doesn't rise and fall. We have capital letters, but we have nothing for an increase in pitch. We have periods of ellipses, right? To notice pausing or slow. But you don't write a sentence that way that speeds up and slows down, right? You don't do that. We have nothing for that. It's not in there. Text is dead, right? So you can't put it in there. You can't hear it. And you read it in exactly the same way that another person might say it. The other thing you mentioned, though, about in person interaction versus voice, which is not. It's not actually something that we have studied empirically because it's very hard. It's very easy to compare voice against text. Because we can control the stimulus. It can be exactly the same thing, it can be exactly the same words, spoken or written. But what you pointed out, that's different about talking on the phone versus, say, catching up versus hanging out. Hanging out includes a whole bunch of other things that you do in person that don't happen when you talk on the phone. The big thing is that you just spend more time in each other's presence and stuff just comes up on a phone call, you're not going to hold that thing to your ear forever. You're going to eventually hang up, you're going to get out of the conversation. But if you go to a bar to hang out for a while, you're just going to be in each other's presence for longer. The ease of exit is harder than it is with a phone call. And so you just spend more time in each other's presence. And one thing we find consistently across experiments is that it's not going to be surprising to anybody. The more time you spend in conversation or in each other's presence, the more positive you feel. It's not a perfectly positive, you know, it's not a perfect correlation, it's not crushing. But in general that's. In general that's true. And in person interaction allows for that. I think in a way that this phone interaction probably doesn't, but we have not studied that yet.
- [61:34]
A
Before we close, I have two concluding questions. The first is that when I put together the most important conclusions from your work, it seems like social life is strewn with what you call these gaps, these expectations gaps. And we mistakenly seek solitude. We mistakenly seek shallowness in conversations versus deep conversations. And at times it seems like we also mistakenly seek phone based socializing when we would be more nourished with socializing that involved voice and even presence in the biggest picture. And you may have retraced some of this, but I just want to get a concluding thesis statement thought here. Why do these gaps exist? What is the right way to see what these social gaps are and why they persist?
- [62:28]
B
So the best way to see why they persist is that you only learn from the experiences you have, and you don't learn from the experiences you avoid. Anxiety thrives in avoidance and it dies in approach. When you reach out to somebody else, you find out what it's like, right? You find out what it's like. And if they're generally positive, we generally enjoy social interaction. You know, if I have a conversation with you, I'll learn. I enjoy it. It was fun, it was nice. If I Have this with lots of people. I'll learn that it's generally nice. If I note that my expectation beforehand was that this wouldn't be so great, it turned out to be pretty nice. Well, eventually I'll change my expectation until it becomes aligned. That's what I talked to you earlier about. The empowering part of this. The empowering part is realizing the power you have to impact other people in positive ways. That's also nourishing for you, but that only comes from you can hear about these results. People can hear you talk about these. They can read your work on this or my work on this and think it and realize it. But those misplaced expectations won't disappear until they're actually put to the test, gone out and tried it, and avoidance is what leads these things to be perpetuated. If I think that talking to you would be unpleasant, I won't try it. I won't find out that I could be wrong. If I have a phone in my hand that takes a moment of awkwardness, right? It's a little awkward to first say hi to somebody, but I got a phone there that I could look at, right? I'll never do the hi or I'll be less likely to do it. And I won't find out that that could be wrong. And that misplaced belief that this will be awkward or weird will remain and will thrive.
- [64:25]
A
Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz run the Harvard Study for Adult Development, which is the oldest longitudinal study on happiness and well being. And they told me on this show last year that the simple and profound conclusion of their work was that good relationships are the key to happiness. And just as many people are familiar with the concept of physical fitness, they said we should be equally open to the concept of social fitness. What is your parting advice to folks to be socially fit? If you were going to design for America a fitness program for social fitness, where would you start?
- [65:08]
B
So I would start by sweating the small stuff. I thought your insight about the next 15 minutes, the way you write about that, was really right. Remember, happiness is really a function of the frequency of events and not the intensity of them. A good event is nice for a little bit and then it dissipates, right? And so to feel good again, you need another uplift a little bit, right? And so the way to turn these kinds of insights into sustainable increases in well being or to live a little better life, you know, within the bounds that we can, is to turn these kinds of behaviors into habits. Right now we've got certain kinds of habits that encourage avoidance. We'll look at our phone, we'll put our headphones in. We'll not say hi to people when we walk by their door. The key to making this sustainable is turning these little events into habits that we do just routinely. So let me give you just one simple example and these. I'll just give you one little example. To start. When I come into my office here in Hyde park at the University of Chicago, where I'm talking to you from right now, I enter on the south side of the building, come through the doors, walk over the elevator, I come up to my office and I walk down the hallway to my office door. When I walk through the office or even from the train, which is a few blocks away, I pass a lot of people on the way and it's very easy to walk by and just say nothing. But I very deliberately developed a habit of just saying hi to people when I pass. And now I do that without even thinking. So when I come in in the morning, I've said hi to Keith, our janitor, who is just one of the. Has the most delightful smile you've ever seen on a guy. He just lifts up your spirit. When I say hi to him, he hollers a hello back to me. I say hi to Eric. Eric Hurst is one of my colleagues down the hallway. He's often got his door open. When his door opens, I'll holler hi to him on the way by. I'll say hi to Virginia, who's right there. They're next. Joe Vavra is next door to me. I'll say hi to him. You know, that's a 200 yard walk that I've turned into a habit every morning. That's like getting a bunch of high fives. And that's nice. Right now that's not making my whole day better, but it's making that moment better. And I turn that into a habit. So now I don't even have to think about it. It's just something. It becomes part of my character. In the Aristotelian terms, character is not a trait. They're the things that you do habitually. Right. The things you do routinely. Right. It's an act, a series of acts. And so finding those places where you can do something routinely, easily, in a way that makes it a habit. That's, I think, the place to start. And you can sweat the small stuff there. They might seem little like a conversation on a train. What is that? That's a nice moment. Yeah, well, do that the next day. Do that the day after that. Some days you'll find amazing things happen. One day on the walk from the train to my office, I was having a conversation with a woman who I won't name. She works at the hospital here. I've been going through a tough time in her life. I'd seen her on the train a number of times. Our kids had swam together and on the way from the train, because I take an interest in her, I asked deep stuff. She talked about some just hard things she was going through in her life. And we had a wonderful conversation. It's three blocks from the train to my office. That's short amount of time. When we got to the south side of the building here, she hugged me and told me she thought God had sent me to her that day. And we walked away and she said, wait, just one more. She came and gave me a hug again. Now you know that doesn't happen every day but when you make these things habits, it becomes part of your character, part of your routine, part of the thing you do just sustainably. And that's what a better life is.
- [69:17]
A
Nick Epley, thank you so much.
- [69:19]
B
Thank you so much for having me here.
- [69:22]
A
Many, many thanks to Nick Epley. I hope you heard why I felt like my conversation with him was. My original one hour conversation with him was such critical mortar for this essay and for my thinking. It just held together so many different pieces. I think what I'm going to try to remember from his research that I find so important on top of his concluding message that life really is just about moment by moment by moment is that social life really does seem strewn with these three critical expectation gaps we mistakenly seek isolation when reaching out to people is what makes that next 15 minutes of our lives happy. We mistakenly seek shallowness in our conversations because we're afraid of what other people might think about us. When in fact it's the deepest conversations that make us feel most nourished. And I think many times we mistakenly reach for our phone and seek phone based socializing when it's the physical world with all of its messiness and all of its inconveniences and its traffic and it's the sometime annoyances of other people. It is that world, I think it is that physical world of relationships that really does make life most fully living. And just repeat, I guess what Nick said in the end. These are not antidotes to misery. These are not solutions that are going to make the next 10, 20 years of people's life happier. They just make that next moment of life happier. But that next moment is the most important moment. So thanks to Nick again, and I'd be remiss if I didn't end this by saying that my heart really, really is still very much with and very much breaking with the people of Los Angeles. We'll talk to you next week.