Paul Rand: Why do we avoid talking to people that we’ve never met?

Nicholas Epley: It is the paradox that I’ve become obsessed with. We underestimate how positively other people will respond to us when we try to reach out to them and as a result, can choose to avoid interacting with people in ways that would otherwise be good for us. So we avoid talking to strangers.

Paul Rand: That’s Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He’s the author of a new book called A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection.

Nicholas Epley: So we find, at least in our work, that there’s a social psychological misunderstanding. We misunderstand how other people will respond to us. We’re more pessimistic than reality warrants, but as a result, that pessimism leads us to be avoidant. And when we avoid interactions, we don’t learn that our pessimism might be wrong.

Paul Rand: And oftentimes when we do go out of our way to talk to strangers, we make small talk and don’t necessarily try to make a deeper connection.

Nicholas Epley: Stick to shallow conversations once we’re talking because we think other people aren’t that interested in having a more deep and meaningful conversation and we’re wrong about that. We underestimate the extent to which other people want to have the same kind of meaningful conversations that we’d like to have.

Paul Rand: So what if talking to the person sitting next to you on the train on your commute home from work or the barista at the coffee shop could surprisingly become the most meaningful conversation of your day?

Nicholas Epley: We do have choices to reach out and engage with other people. Some of social connection is a choice and how we choose to connect with others or hold back from them does have powerful consequences for our happiness and also for our health.

Paul Rand: And Epley has seen this repeatedly in his research. Having meaningful conversations can not only improve your wellbeing, but also your health and even your happiness.

Nicholas Epley: No research I’ve ever been involved with has changed the way I live my life more than this. Recognizing that other people are often delightful and happy to talk when you try.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, where we explore the groundbreaking ideas and the discoveries that are changing our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs on today’s episode, The Power of Social Connection and how it could benefit our lives. This is your second book and I’m wondering when did you come along and say, “I’ve got to say something else.” And what was it that you felt you had to say or that you thought we had to hear?

Nicholas Epley: The results we were seeing in our work, it’s really the only big idea I’ve ever had about these ideas around social connection. I keep coming back to it over and over again and I thought we were learning something that I felt like I just had to tell people about.

Paul Rand: Your book opens with a story about a woman, Marinella Barretta. And I wonder if you can tell us who she is and why you started the book this way.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So Marinella shows up in the first chapter of the book, which is the chapter about social connection. And this is an interesting case. This happened in Italy where there had been a storm and firefighters and police officers were just out going through the community just trying to make sure everybody was okay. And they came up out on a house and they looked inside and they found a woman there who did indeed need some help, but they were way too late. They estimated the woman had died sitting here- two years before. The quote from the mayor of the town that she lived in I thought was so insightful. She said the tragedy of this death is not that nobody knew that she died, it was that nobody knew that she was alive. And that is such a distinctly modern experience to be able to now live in a world where you can be so independent on any given day, you could go through your life for years and be so disconnected from people that folks might not know that you were no longer with them.

And that for most of human history, we lived in kind of small groups and you were around people. And you could go off into the wilderness or something and be lost, but people would know you were missing. And now on any given day, you can spend your whole day without seeing anybody if you wanted to. You can get up and you can work from home. You can order your groceries online, deliver to the store, touch free, right? You entertain yourself at night reading books, watching movies on Netflix. Never have to have any social connection. We have choices about our social lives that we never used to be able to have. And I think our research suggests that that choice can sometimes get us into trouble.

Paul Rand: Well, one of the things that to me was shocking in reading this and then talking a little bit about some of the connecting tissue around loneliness and the numbers of not only older people like Marinella may be feeling loneliness, but the numbers that were truly shocking to me were younger people’s feelings of loneliness.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. Yeah. So just a couple of years ago, the numbers flipped. So it had always been that older people were lonelier than younger people, but during COVID and shortly after those numbers flipped more young people reported feeling lonely than older people. And that’s nothing we’ve seen in the last 50 plus years where we’ve been surveying these kinds of things. That is quite a shocking reversal.

Paul Rand: We’re going to dig into this, but this is not simply a matter of choice or not choice. There are direct health implications, mental and physical that go onto this.

Nicholas Epley: Oh, there are. So there are consequences. When I say it’s choice or not choice, we do have choices to reach out and engage with other people. Some of social connection is a choice and how we choose to connect with others or hold back from them does have powerful consequences for happiness and also for our health. And these are kind of staggering. The psychologists for decades thought that social connection was sort of a luxury good.

Abe Maslow famously put it in his pyramid of needs up at the third level. If you needed food and safety, then you needed security and then you could start caring about belonging, social stuff. And in the famous Harvard longitudinal study that looked at young men graduating from Harvard College in the 1930s and followed them over the course of their lives, they were measuring all kinds of things to predict long-term success and the relational measures, how well connected they were to other people, relationship variables were kind of an afterthought. They had them. They just threw some in just because they didn’t think any of that would matter. They measured all these other objective qualities of these young men. And in the end, it was only the relationship variables that really predicted the quality of their lives. And for Maslow, also that his hierarchy of needs has never had really any empirical support.

We have a collection of needs that matter for us and some of which are quite basic, but belonging operates in the very same kind of way that the need for food or sex or other sorts of basic needs does too. When we are missing it, we crave it and it hurts us and our body sends us signals that this is a problem and you need to do something about it and it’s a stressor and that stressor makes us unhappy and makes us sick and makes us die younger even.

Paul Rand: Well, you talk about that we are deeply social animals, but routinely you say we avoid being social. So there’s a disconnect there. Why is that?

Nicholas Epley: Yep. That disconnect is the thing that’s obsessed me for pushing 20 years now. It is the paradox that I’ve become obsessed with. We have, I think, what is at least part of an answer to that, that we underestimate how positively other people will respond to us when we try to reach out to them and as a result, can choose to avoid interacting with people in ways that would otherwise be good for us. So we avoid talking to strangers we find at least partly because we think other people aren’t that interested in connecting with us. And so we hold back and avoid. We stick to shallow conversations once we’re talking because we think other people aren’t that interested in having a more deep and meaningful conversation and we’re wrong about that. We underestimate the extent to which other people want to have the same kind of meaningful conversations that we’d like to have.

We can do acts of kindness for other people that connect us with them, but we think it doesn’t matter as much as it actually does, express our gratitude, but we underestimate how positively it’ll leave people feeling. So we find, at least in our work, that there’s a social psychological misunderstanding. We misunderstand how other people will respond to us. We’re more pessimistic than reality warrants, but as a result, that pessimism leads us to be avoidant and when we avoid interactions, we don’t learn that our pessimism might be wrong.

Paul Rand: You and I are both talking from Chicago and at least I have spent plenty, plenty, plenty of time on commuter trains, but you did an experiment with Julieta Schroeder on the Chicago trains. And I wonder if you could tell us about that and the data that you got and why it was a bit surprising.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So all of this work that goes into a little more social ... I mean, my interest in social cognition and mind reading, how we understand the minds of others is longstanding. But I had this eureka moment one morning on the train when I was commuting in on the Metra, which I do every day when I go into work and was writing a chapter for my last book for MindWise and sitting there describing how we got these brains uniquely equipped for connecting with other people, made happier and healthier by connecting and yet looked around on the train and here we all were ignoring each other. And that’s exactly the kind of behavior that gets psychologists thinking, why are we doing this? Does this make sense? How can I explain what’s going on here? And so we started running some experiments on the trains and they were very simple.

The first ones that we did, we recruited one group of people and this is from the Homewood Illinois train station. So just north of where I live. I’m in Flossmoor, on the far South side.

Homewood is just north of us. It’s got an underground entryway, which is critical so that your research assistants when we’re running this in February in Chicago, do not freeze to death. Juliana did not want to freeze to death..

Paul Rand: Understandable

Nicholas Epley: We went to that one underground and we recruited people and randomly assigned them, commuters, randomly assigned them to do one of three things on the train that morning, either to keep to themselves in solitude, just focus on their day ahead, to do whatever they normally do, which is typically keep to themselves and focus on their day ahead. Or the third condition, we asked them to try to have a conversation when a person comes and sits down next to them, try to make a connection. We then gave them a survey. This was back in the old days. Now we do this on surveys, but this was like 2011, 2012 right in there. And so they had paper surveys that we gave them. They opened up the envelope at the end of their commute, pulled out their $5 Starbucks gift card, which was their incentive for participating. And then they filled out the survey, essentially reporting how well the commute had gone, how pleasant it was compared to normal, how happy they felt, how sad they felt.

And what we found was that the commuters randomly assigned to try to have a conversation with a stranger actually reported having the best commute and those we randomly assigned to keep to themselves and focus on their day ahead, reported having the worst commute, the least positive. But when we recruited another sample of commuters and asked them to predict how they would feel, the reason why people choose not to connect became clear because when we asked people to predict how they would feel, they predicted exactly the opposite results. They thought they’d be happiest to keep into themselves and thought they’d be the least happy talking to a stranger and their beliefs just weren’t wrong. They were precisely backwards, but people were behaving in a perfectly rational way in alignment with them. They were following their beliefs about what would make them happy. It’s just those beliefs were off.

Paul Rand: Well, you talk about it as the choice.

Nicholas Epley: Yes.

Paul Rand: What’s the choice?

Nicholas Epley: The most important choice we make in our daily lives is the choice, the decision to reach out and engage with somebody to approach them or to hold back and avoid them. Our social lives depend on how we make that choice over and over and over again in our lives.

Paul Rand: Well, one of the things that I’m willing to bet many of our listeners are familiar with was the whole idea of the 36 questions. And I wonder if you can tell us about walking into a room of hedge fund executives, what they looked like and what it felt like in that room.

Nicholas Epley: These questions came from Art and Elaine Aaron. Back in the 1990s, they developed a procedure in the lab to make people closer. It was a series of questions of escalating intimacy. They actually thought you needed a long runway to do this.

I think that’s actually not true. And they also had a bunch of other beliefs about what connects people. They thought you had to be similar to each other and really be trying to connect. None of that was true. All that mattered was, are you asking meaningful questions? Are you discussing meaningful stuff or not? And so I was interested in why if these deep conversations are better, just like if our commutes when we connect with someone are better, why are we so rarely asking people, if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? Or can you tell me about one of the last times, Paul, that you cried in front of another person? I’m betting you’ve never asked somebody that or at least not that way. If those are the things that connect us, why aren’t we having those conversations?

So I thought I would test it to find out a little like I did on the trains and I had run a lab study on this. And so I had some, I wasn’t just coming totally out of the blue. Our undergrads, when they asked deeper conversations, they underestimated how positively it would go. And so they thought it would be more awkward than it actually was, that they wouldn’t connect as much as they actually did. And those gaps were bigger for the deep conversations than they were for a small talk. But to go out and run it in the wild is a different animal. And I was out speaking at a conference, a financial decision making conference at a hedge fund on the East Coast and I thought I want to run this here for real as part of my session. And the folks who were in this session, they did not know what they were in for.

These are all like pension fund managers, C level executives running these massive funds. They’re here for quant jock upbringing. That’s what they want. They want to have their math skills tweaked and here was touchy feely going to come in and have them talk about the last time they cried. So they didn’t know what was coming. I started into my talk and a little ways in I told them, “I’m going to run and expand with you right now to show you some of these effects rather than just tell you about them.” And of course in my own mind, I was like 51% confident maybe that it would work. I thought this will probably work, but the confidence I had on it was low and this could go really well or this could be a total nightmare, like the worst talk I’ve ever done, but you never get anything without swinging. So I put these questions up on the board. If a crystal ball could tell you anything about your life, what would you want to know? And can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? I put this up on the screen, tell people in just a minute, I’m going to pair them up with another person to have a conversation about this and I’ll never, ever forget this. Toby Moskowitz, one of our faculty, was sitting in the front row of this talk and right next to him was some other guy who hollered out, “Ah, sh*t.” As soon as I put that up on the screen, I apologize for any young listeners here, that is the truth of what happened. And the whole group just erupts and laughter and I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be a nightmare.” Nevertheless, we continue, they go to a survey, they tell me how they think the conversation’s going to go.

They think it’s going to be terrible. I pair them up, they start talking and I’m telling the guy who’s running it, let’s let them talk for like 10 minutes or so, then we’ll bring them back. Well, at 10 minutes, I mean, the room was on fire. I’ve never seen a room switch like this.

Paul Rand: Amazing.

Nicholas Epley: From being kind of dull and dower to just coming alive. These folks were deep in conversation with each other. I said, “Okay, well let’s wait another five minutes. It was still going strong and then I’m struggling for the next minutes, two minutes left.” And I probably said two minutes left, three minutes in a row, but then once they were talking, they didn’t want to stop. So what does this tell you? It told me just like on the trains that our beliefs about these social interactions aren’t just wrong, they’re really wrong. People want these kinds of conversations. It’s not that they don’t. You ask people how deep you want your conversations to be, how deep are the conversations you’re having. They say, “I’d like much deeper conversations that I’m having.” It’s not that they don’t want to have them. It’s that they think other people don’t want to have them.

And they’re really, really wrong about that. Once they actually take an interest in another person and they try having this conversation, they find other people are often just as willing and happy to open up and engage with them as they would imagine they would be. And so those expectations are way off in ways too that keep us stuck in way too much small talk in our lives. This is a hypothesis we’re just starting to look at. In fact, as we’re talking today, the data just came in this morning for this master’s project that we’re working on where we hypothesize that people are actually more willing to open up and reveal things like secrets to strangers than they are to people that they know well. I think there’s a strong intuition that that’s likely true.

Paul Rand: Yes.

Nicholas Epley: I suspect we will confirm that and we’re going to try to understand why that is. I do think though that there is something that can be magical about strangers that people really don’t utilize.

Paul Rand: You introduced a new term in this book. There’s a few actually. One was homosocialis, if I’m saying that correctly, and you think that that’s better than homo sapiens. Tell me what homosocialis means.

Nicholas Epley: It highlights the inherent sociality of our nature. That’s what really makes us special is our ability to connect with other people. That’s the reason, Paul, why we have such big brains in fact, is because it’s required for a highly social species to be able to live in these complicated social networks that require you to know who to trust and who to approach and who to avoid and to remember who knows what and to create these cooperative alliances. That requires a lot of neural capacity and our great big brains show that. So you see the social nature of our beings etched into the size of our brains relative to our nearest primate ancestors. We’re also super social in that we can care for non-kin in ways that other species just do not to the same degree. I mean, look, all of these are matters of degree.

Other primate species also think about the minds of other primates too, but not to a level that we do. And that’s also true of caring. Kin selection gets you a long ways in evolutionary terms, but we do things that no other primate species does at least to the same degree. We care about strangers. We adopt non-kin into our family. We have done three times into my family and they become part of your family every bit the same.

Paul Rand: You are teaching MBA students, you’ve lectured to hedge fund managers and others. I’m willing to bet at least one person in those groups thinks that money’s going to buy them happiness. And there is a famous study with Kahneman and Deaton that looked at this question and maybe it was relevant to those groups. Can you talk about that study and what surprised you about it?

Nicholas Epley: So there are lots of data that look like the Kahneman and Deaton study or their paper. What Kahneman and Deaton though did, what they had that others don’t was the ability to compare the effect of money on happiness compared to lots of other things. And that’s what makes it interesting. So Kahneman and Deaton, this is a 2010 paper. Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton were both Nobel Prize winners in economics, although neither of them were economists themselves. And what they did was they analyzed the Gallup daily wellbeing survey. So every day Gallup surveys a few thousand people and basically ask, “Hey, how were you doing yesterday?” That’s kind of what it is. They look back yesterday and they’re asked questions about, “Did you smile yesterday? Were you feeling happy yesterday? Were you feeling stressed yesterday?” A bunch of questions about wellbeing, both positive and negative and they then ask a whole bunch of other questions too like, “How much money do you make?

Did you feel alone yesterday? Is it a weekend or a weekday? Are you religious or not? “ These kinds of questions. And what Kahneman and Deaton did was they can then create, they can find out how big of an effect does the amount of money that you make matter for your say positive affect. So smiling yesterday, feeling enjoyment yesterday, that’s what the measure of wellbeing is. And they found that yes, money does bring some happiness. Yes, it does. That is like a one item IQ test. Yes, absolutely does. Most of the effect is down on the lower end. It peters out. It continues to rise. Logarithmically, what that means is very slowly, but all of the action is really down on the low end of this, getting out of poverty.

Paul Rand: Getting your needs covered.

Nicholas Epley: Exactly. Being poor really stinks.

Nicholas Epley: Being wealthy is better than being moderately wealthy but not so much. But the effect is there, but it’s not huge. But then what they could do was they could compare the effect of being relatively wealthy or poor against being relatively high or low on a bunch of other variables too. Like did you report spending the entire day alone yesterday? And you can now compare people who are relatively high or low in income and they did this by doing basically a median split on their data. Now you’ve got an index variable there and you can compare the effect size, the difference between those two groups, between say the difference in people who reported feeling alone yesterday or being alone yesterday versus not being alone yesterday. And it turns out the difference in that alone question between being alone yesterday versus not seven times bigger effect on your reported positive affect yesterday than being relatively high or low in income.

Paul Rand: Yeah, big number.

Nicholas Epley: So it’s not that money doesn’t matter. Of course money matters, right? Money matters. But the really big thing that matters is am I with other people or am I alone? What are my social relationships like? And time and time. It’s a little hard to say, are social relationships more important than money. Certainly some analyses like this one show that they are and way more important, but these are kind of apples to oranges comparison. The easy thing to say is that if I want to know how happy you’re feeling in your life, how satisfied you are in your life, a really important thing arguably the number one thing I want to know is what are your relationships like? How much time are you spending alone? That’s going to matter.

Paul Rand: Well, I think you’ve done a really great job of setting the foundation for the need and the importance of social connection. And you also get into the book that there are some things that can be done. If people look at this and say, “I get it, but I’m just uncomfortable with it. “ What do you tell them?

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. First place I would suggest to start is to change a little bit how you’re thinking about happiness and wellbeing. I think this is really important. You can then look back to yesterday, say, and do what we refer to as a choice audit. Were there moments where you were keeping to yourself just kind of wasting time, but you could have connected with somebody else. You could have picked up the phone and called somebody maybe when you were commuting home in the car or you’re sitting in a, you’re walking through the hallway of your office and you could have invited somebody to come to coffee with you and you didn’t. Or I’m riding on the commute on my way in on the train in the morning and I could have said hi to Susan sitting next to me or Harold across the way from me, but I didn’t.

And there you’ll start to see things you can work on, little actions that you can do and that’s where you start.

Paul Rand: The point of doing any of these things is a fear of rejection. And you tell a story about somebody that decided he was going to go with that sensitivity training on rejection and just make sure he never felt bad about it again.

Nicholas Epley: This is one of my favorites. I’ve gotten to know this guy quite well. We’ve had a number of conversations. Jiaj Yang is his name. He wrote the book called Rejection Proof, which I recommend to people and their videos online. If you go to rejectionthrapy.com, you’ll see some of these videos. Yeah. He decided that he was an aspiring entrepreneur but was too nervous about being rejected and he decided he was going to follow the cognitive behavioral therapy protocol of exposure therapy, which means essentially throwing yourself at your fears and experiencing them over and over again. Well, he did those things. He developed, he did this over a hundred times in fact. He videotaped them all and the videos are priceless. He’s posted them online. He starts off being successful. He tries to get rejected and he does. First thing he does, he goes and asks a security guard working outside a bank if you could borrow a hundred bucks.

The guy kind of laughs and chuckles and says, “No, I’m sorry I don’t have a hundred bucks to loan you right now.” And Jiaj walks away and he says, “You know that wasn’t that bad. I was rejected, but it like didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would. “ By day three, he starts to fail and this one is beautiful. He’s in Atlanta. He goes into a Krispy Kreme donut store and asked the woman behind the counter if he could get crispy cream donuts in the shape of the Olympic rings and she doesn’t remember what the colors are. And so she sits down, she starts writing down the shapes. He’s sure he’s going to get rejected, right? Just 100% she’s going to say, “Get out of here. We don’t do that idiot.” But no, she sits down like in her thinker pose. You see it on the video.

She’s trying to process this. She says, “Give me 15 minutes. I’ll come back.” 15 minutes she comes back with a box of these. She’s almost embarrassed though because she thought she could have done a better job, but these donuts are beautiful, colored five rings interlocking. It was amazing. And in the voiceover of his video, he says something to the effect, I quoted in the book, but I don’t have it top of mind right now, something to the effect of, “And this is why humanity is worth saving.” 

And he continues, and by the end of it, we actually analyzed all his videos. He didn’t know this. He didn’t know this. He was actually his outlandish requests go into a private airport and ask if he could co-pilot a plane he’s never flown before. Yes, he can do that. He’s in Southwest getting onto a flight and asked, “Can I do the safety announcement?” No, you can’t do that, but you can get up and address the plane if you want. He goes up to a house in Texas and asks the guy, “Can you take a picture of me playing soccer in your backyard?” No problem. He walks up to a woman, he’s got a rose, a potter rose. “Can I plant this rose in your front yard? She’s delighted by it just over and over again. And it turns out that his outlandish requests are accepted more often than they are rejected.

He’s actually accepted 51 times, 48 times. It’s a no. But even out of those no’s, many of them were very gentle. Almost none were negative. I think we detected negativity and only seven of the rejections. Most of them were super nice or they were doing things like couldn’t do one thing he asked, but they allowed him to do something else. He goes into Costco and he asked to speak over the loudspeaker, to tell everybody how much he loves Costco and how proud he is of all the workers. The manager says,” Look, I can’t have you do that, but we can sit down and have pizza here. “So he comps him lunch and he gets to talk to the manager about how much he loves Costco. So Jiaj, he said that he did in fact lose his fear of rejection, but not because he developed thicker skin, but because he learned that other people are just way more helpful and kinder than he thought they were.

It changed not himself, but his view of human nature. And he came to describe that to me later when we were talking about it. He said,” Nick, I’ve come to feel like I have a superpower that other people don’t have. I’m just not afraid of other people.”

Paul Rand: That’s really cool.

Paul Rand: That brings me to what I think is your third virtue, which is honesty. And in talking about honesty, you do make a distinction between self-protective lies and what you call pro- social lies. Tell me why that honesty is a virtue in your world.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So this work here, this chapter is really based very heavily on work that my colleague, my wonderful colleague at Booth, Emma Levine has done for lots of other researchers as well. I talk about Michael Slepian who studies secrecy, for instance, in that chapter. And we often think about lies in ways that are harmful to other people. They’re selfish lies. I’m lying to you to protect myself in some way, or I’m lying to you to mislead you in some way. But there’s a whole other category of lies of deception that are benevolent lies or white lies, they’re called, which are meant to not actually hurt you but to help you. So a student hands me this paper and I think it’s terrible, but I don’t think the student can handle that. So I actually tell the student it’s great.

This is a case where you have an ethical dilemma where Emma points out, benevolence, the desire to be kind to somebody and honesty, the desire to be truthful to somebody come in conflict with each other. And what Emma documents though is that who’s the one who sits down with you and says, “Paul, that talk you gave just wasn’t as good as it could have been. We’re going to make this better. We’re going to strengthen you. “ And when people give those kinds of pro- social lies, they think they’re being nice to another person. The other person is actually evaluating that more negatively. And what they misunderstand is that when they’re truly honest with somebody, we have people have confront a partner in conversation about a difficult thing they’re going through that they haven’t brought up to the other person. Those constructive confrontations are received much more favorably than people expect beforehand.

Emma finds that people spending a day being as honest as they can be in their relationships, they think that’s going to leave their relationships worse off. In fact, it leaves their relationships better off at the end of the day and about on par with being as kind as you can be to other people. So one barrier then to being honest is misunderstanding that it’s often interpreted as kindness because it is kind. It is kind to be honest with someone.

Paul Rand: If you’re looking and trying to provide a guide of what meaningful a life of meaningful social connection actually looks like, how would you describe that as what ought to be something that becomes a goal?

Nicholas Epley: So here I’ll talk a little more personal because I don’t have research on the totality of it, but I think the picture that emerges from all of our data is one where you just walk around with a little more optimistic and empowered sense of what other people are like and how you can interact with them. The ability that you have moment after moment, day after day in your life to create connections with other people. No research I’ve ever been involved with has changed the way I live my life more than this. Recognizing that other people are often delightful and happy to talk when you try, that I’ve got amazing power to lift people up with a kind word or an expression of gratitude or passing along a third person compliment or taking an interest in somebody else has just flat out made me a friendlier person. A more decent human being, I think.

Paul Rand: Nice.

Nicholas Epley: And I’m not only more likely to approach other people, I also think it has made me more approachable by other people. I know people’s names because I take an interest in them and I write it down because I care. I think that’s what the consequence of this looks like if you really come to realize the power you have to connect with other people and the positive impact you can have on other people and the likelihood that they’ll reach back to you if you reach out to them first. It kind of changes all your relationships for the better.

Paul Rand: I love that. Really nice. The book is filled with all sorts of wonderful stories. There’s one toward the end of the book about a bit of a metaphor with Uncle Rufus and his cows.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So a key challenge here is taking behavioral science research and applying it in our lives, right? How do you do this? The pessimism that holds me back might not be the thing that’s holding you back. The opportunities I have to connect with other people might not be the same opportunities that you have. Men and women live in different worlds. What a woman might do to connect with others might be different from what a man may do. So all of those things are true. There’s a lot of individual artistry to this. And I use this analogy of my great uncle Rufus’s cows. He lived across from my grandpa and grandma Floyd and Justine. And in the summers I’d always spend some weeks up on the farm. And I used to love going over to look at Rufus’s cows. Rufus was this stodgy old kind of farmer, but with this huge heart and his wife, my aunt Betty was just a lovely human being.

But every now and then, Rufus’ cows would end up on grandpa’s side of the road. And the way they would do that is they’d walk along the fence and they’d kind of lean into the fence posts until they found one that was kind of at a low spot that was wet, that was soft. And then they leaned into it hard and pushed over, pushed it over and that’s how they got out. And I think that’s a good analogy, Rufus’ cows, for how we ought to test these beliefs in our life. Find the ones that you think maybe are likely to be the wobbliest. The bits of pessimism that your coworkers don’t want to have coffee with you or wouldn’t want to sit at lunch with you or the people who are your neighbors might not want to talk with you. Find the easy ones and test those first. There are a lot of hard things that you can do, right? Hard relationships you can try to repair or hard conversations you can try to have. Start with the easy ones. Follow Rufus’s cows and test the easy barriers first and see if you can knock those over and then you can maybe get a little courage to go to the harder ones.