 Welcome to the show, Nick. Great to have you. Thank you. So happy to be here. It's going to be fun. I'm super excited. We had Charles Duhigg on talking about his latest book, Super Communicators. He spoke so highly of you, and we knew we had to bring you on the show to talk about our sixth sense, reading each other's minds and actually building deep relationships. What got you interested in this psychology behind understanding people and how they think? I wouldn't say it was a thing. I couldn't find anything else to be interested in. Like, it was more a process of elimination. If you're a psychologist, I don't think there's anything else that I could be interested in. We have this brain that's really special for one thing, which is for understanding each other. Everybody in their daily lives is a psychologist by birth. We all think about why others do what they do, why they act as they act. We are all intuitive psychologists, and it just seemed like the funnest thing to do this professionally for a living, to actually be able to put people into experiments to put those intuitive psychological skills to the test. Well, I love in your answer that we're all psychologists at heart, trying to solve what other people are thinking, feeling, and certainly how they feel about us. What stuck out to me, at least at the start of the book, is how we overestimate our ability to read each other's minds and really understand each other. What are some of these assumptions that we make that are misguided, and what does the science really say about our ability to really understand each other deeply, read each other's minds? This capacity to think about the minds of others is the thing that really makes us unique on this planet. It's the reason our brains are the shape and size that it is. Most of our neural capacity up here above our eyes, this fat part of our brain here, under our baseball caps, that's the thing that really stands out in the human brain, among the animal kingdom, is the size of our cerebral cortex relative to the rest of our brain. If you look across primate species, the size of the cerebral cortex relative to the rest of the brain is best predicted by the size of the social group we inhabit. We are the most social of all primates. We live in the largest of social groups of all primate species on the planet. We are the most socially sophisticated species around, at least in the primate world. And yet, the mind of another person is the most complicated thing we ever think about. The challenge is not doing better than chance. Most of our judgments about other people, in fact, are better than chance. We do have some accurate insight. We do have a sense of you come into work one day and somebody's laying down in tears in the corner of your office. You know, that guy's having a bad day. We can figure that stuff out and we can be very sophisticated thinking about the minds of others. The problem is this capacity that we have operates so quickly and so easily and so readily, we often don't pause to question whether we might be wrong, just to occurs to us as an accurate read of the world. So for instance, when we brought married couples into the Museum of Science and Industry and had one person predict how the other person would answer a series of questions that are sort of, you know, deep things. Like, I often feel our families too heavily in debt these days. To what extent do you disagree or agree with that statement? Or I would rather spend a quiet night at home rather than go to a party, okay? We had one spouse predict how the other spouse would answer those questions and people did better than chance on hard problems. In fact, the correlation between my belief about how my spouse would respond and how she might actually respond was around 0.5, which is pretty good. And if we looked at how often they got the bullseye, exactly right. They got it, you know, on the seven point scale, they picked the number exactly correctly. They were better than chance. Not wildly so. They got about four and a half or 4.9 correct out of 20, rather than chance, which would be about 2.8. But they actually thought they'd get about 12 right on average, right? So they were actually getting about five right, and they thought they were getting 12 right. So this capacity is good, makes us the most socially sophisticated species on the planet. And yet it's a super hard problem. And we're not as good as we think we are. And I think that's really the take home message. You can make these problems easier or harder and people will do a little better or worse. Confidence tends to consistently outstrip our accuracy. We're just not good at this as good at this as we think we are. So Nick, you called it a problem. So what exactly do you suspect or are you referring to as the problem? So the problem is the gap between how I think you're going to, what I think is going on in your mind and what's actually going on in your mind, right? I think you believe X and you actually believe Y. I think you want this thing for a gift for your birthday and you actually want something else. I think you don't like me when in fact you do. All of those gaps between my beliefs about what's going on in your mind and what's actually going on in your mind creates the opportunity for friction, right? When I really know, when I really know what it's like to be you, we can coordinate beautifully, perfectly. I know what you're going to do before you do it. I know what you're thinking before you have to tell me. I know what you did yesterday or how you're feeling about something, right? Before you... That sounds more like the problem to me than could not. No. Well, depends what you're thinking, right? That's probably what you're thinking. But look, if I have insight into your mind, if I really, really know you, then I can coordinate with you. I can cooperate with you. And when I'm off a little bit, it creates friction, creates friction. And that's the problem, social friction. Well, I'm excited to share this with my wife because I know that there's been moments where we've disagreed and she's like, you should know exactly what my favorite food is. And of course, a lot of this stuff, we feel in the moment that we hold deep and dear, but we're shifting, we're evolving our beliefs, our moods, our emotions are impacting all of those thoughts that we're having in our mind. And it's definitely led to some arguments at the dinner table. It's definitely led to some confusion as to why I didn't read her mind perfectly. What is interesting though is there is that misnomer that like we know our partner so well, because we've had those moments of pure synapse where we guess exactly what they're thinking are going to do. But then you also represented in the book that the science shows it's actually not that much better than just strangers in general. Like the difference is not as impactful as we think with our partners. Particularly for novel things, for things you haven't already discussed before. Obviously, if you tell me how you're really feeling about something, if my wife tells me she really, really, really wants to go see this play downtown this week and then I know, right? Then that's the only way we know what's on the mind of another person really is when they tell us. But with novel things, yeah, it's surprising how little familiarity actually helps. And that creates what psychologists sometimes refer to as an illusion of knowledge. So what we find pretty commonly in our data is that the more time you spend with somebody, the better you get to know them. Yes, that's true, right? There's a positive slope on that. But what rises faster is our confidence, our belief that we know the other person. And so what you end up with is the people who have been together the longest are often the most overconfident. The people who don't know each other all have some sense that, well, I don't really know you that well. But being with people for a long time can sometimes create an illusion of knowledge which can sometimes surprise us. The flip side of this, and we talk a lot about this with our clients, is one of the most impactful moments in our coaching program when we actually tease apart the cognitive distortions around how we view the world and what are those biases that are happening internally and distorting that view. We often have this overconfidence in understanding ourselves, and then that is projected on to others. Yeah, so we often think we know how we'll feel in a situation we haven't been in and can sometimes be surprised by that. You can see, in fact, psychologists often will document very similar parallels in the way we think about other people that we see in the way we think about our future minds. So for instance, I tend to use my own mind as a guide to yours. I tend to be egocentric. So if you and I are in a room together and I'm feeling it's hot in here, I assume you think it's hot in here too. If I'm trying to explain something to you and it's clear to me, I understand this thing, then I assume it's clear to you as well. Those same biases show up in people's predictions of themselves and the future as well. So if you know something today, right, you've solved the problem today or some idea is clear to you, you won't write it down. You will soon, it will be clear to you a week from now, and you get to that point and you have lost it altogether. Very similar parallel kinds of biases we have thinking about ourselves at other points in time that we see thinking about other people in the present moment. For all of us, we tend to, as AJ had mentioned and you so eloquently put in the book, that we tend to overestimate how we view other people and what they're thinking, but, and we really don't have an idea of how we feel in our own mind. And I think a lot of this, it can be seen. I mean, if you take one of these personality tests, right, my answers one day will vary from another time and taking that test. And of course, the result is going to be completely different. I'm sure everyone here has taken several Myers-Briggs tests. And I'm sure there's a default where those things set and that's how you think you're going to be feeling and you can predict that. But if you had a bad day, your answers are going to be drastically different. And the analogy used, you used in the book that I thought I painted a good picture of this was the long held myth of the iceberg, right? That we, we have this 10% and there's this 90% that we're not using or they're not in control of. And in the book, you mentioned why that appears to be wrong and what you, how you would like to, the analogy that you would like to use, would you share that with our audience, please? So this is, this is in the chapter on introspection, where we're talking about how well people can know what's going on in our own, in our own minds. And the common sort of the illusion that goes back to Freud is that we only use 10% of our brains. Of course, we're using 100% of our brains. There's no portion of our brain that's not being used. But the mistake that we sometimes make is that we do think we have access to the way our minds are working in ways that we don't really have. So one thing that psychologists have learned, this goes back, well, this goes back to the early 1900s, the very dawn of our field, but was really documented most clearly in the 1970s or so, is that the people are pretty good at saying what they're thinking or feeling. So, you know, if I'm asking, if I want to know if you're happy today, I ask you if you're happy. How are you feeling right now? And, and you can, you can say that you can report that what we're not so good at is psychoanalyzing ourselves that is looking inward and identifying what's causing what, how our neurons are firing, you know, figuring out exactly why we're feeling that way. We're kind of telling stories, and those stories are not giving us direct access to the workings of our mind. They're inferences we make about ourselves, right? John, you might think you're feeling great today because you got this bright red shirt on and that just lifts your mood. It may have nothing to do with that, right? It might be that, that you got to control the thermostat today. So the room's just the right temperature. Well, I'm in Florida and it's hot in this sheer shirt. It's just right for you. Well, you know, you mentioned something there that I have to just laugh at and you brought up Freud and perfect example of somebody, well, when, when we think of psychoanalysts, we think of Freud. But if you start reading his literature, you're just like, this guy was on way too many drugs and he, and he's, and he's, and there's a lot of psycho babble in, in what he had produced. And so if you're going to hold him up as the grandfather of psychoanalogy, well, we can generally see just how wrong and how much we just don't know. But the, the iceberg analogy, which I love about this, and I think this is why people have held onto it and it's burning to their mind because everyone, everyone thinks of it as, well, if this is me using 10% of my brain and I'm pretty awesome, imagine when I tap into that other 90%. I'm going to be crushing it. The analogy that I used instead of the iceberg, which I think, which I think, which I think represents conscious experience in the brain a little better is more like a house, right? Where there are parts of it you can look around and see. So, you know, AJ, if, if I asked you, you know, what your house was like to describe it, close your eyes and tell me, you can probably walk me through your house right now. You could, you could tell me what's all there, right? But what you can't do is tell me how it got there. Like what, you know, what are the carpenters do to get these walls up and what was it like before then? And, and why is the wall this way and not that way? And why is that room there? And is this a load bearing wall or not? Right? You can't, you can't look beyond what's immediately visible to you to introspect on why things necessarily are, as they are. Or we can think about, like if you're sitting in a classroom, for instance, you're going to be able to, you're going to be able to tell, tell me what's on a, on a screen in front of the room, right? You're going to be able to say what's up there, but you're not going to really be able to say, why is the projector able to do that? Like, you're just not going to be able to work through or be able to see all of those causal processes in our brains are kind of like that, which is we've got access to the mental contents, right? What's projected on the screen, what we can see when we're inside a house looking around, what we don't have such access to is exactly the causal processes that are guiding it underneath. But we often think we do. That doesn't mean that Freud was right to propose that he could, through careful introspection, create all these amazing motivations underlying it. A lot of that's nonsense. But at least he did get one part right, which was, you know, our brains working away as we're not necessarily aware of. At least that part was right. But I don't think there was any brilliant insight in that per se. I agree. Well, using that analogy, if Johnny were to describe my house and I were to describe my house, we would probably focus on completely different things because the perspective is also important. So we are often viewing the world through our perspective and then taking that same perspective and saying, okay, that's the perspective Johnny's taking. But when Johnny enters that room, he's going, man, it is freaking cold in here. I enter the room and I'm like, wow, look at the beautiful view outside the balcony because the room temperature is perfect for me because I set the thermostat. So it's often this idea that like, okay, I know exactly what my wife is thinking because I have this perspective. And then we compare notes and it's like, well, that's not at all what she was paying attention to in that situation at all. And in fact, her perspective was completely different. And you go through a few experiments in the book that are really enlightening around just how this perspective taking works for us and how it actually creates some of these foibles in our ability to read each other's minds. Yep. So we cover an awful lot of them. So when we don't know what's on, you know, we don't know other person that well at all or we're just kind of guessing, we tend to use ourselves as a guide. That can work really well. So if I think it's hot in a room, it's probably reasonable to think that you do too. If I think a joke is funny, it's probably reasonable for me to assume that you do too. If I think a problem is easy, it's probably reasonable for me to assume that you do too. The problem is, we can't tell one other's perspectives are different from our own. So this creates a phenomenon like what psychologists refer to as the curse of knowledge. So if you know the answer to a math problem, you tend to assume that it's easier to someone who doesn't know it than it actually is. So giving people knowledge actually makes it hard for them to intuit what it's like to not have that knowledge. When we communicate with other people, we tend to assume that other people can understand and see our intentions more clearly than they can. So in one experiment we did, we had people communicating with somebody else in a context where it was either pretty easy to convey your intentions or in a context where it was hard to convey your intentions. So we had them write 20 sentences, 20 statements on 10 different topics. For each topic, one of the statements they wrote was meant to be sincere and the other was meant to be sarcastic. So John, you're going to write a sincere statement about AJ and also a sarcastic statement about AJ, okay? So what would the sincere statement be? That he's a dedicated worker. Okay, what would the sarcastic statement be? Well, you definitely put me on the spot on that one. I have so many to pick from. That he's a dedicated worker, right? That was actually the first thing that interchangeable. That was the first thing that popped up actually. So when you're communicating with other people, it's not just what you say, but how you say it, of course, that conveys meaning. We had people communicating either with their voice, talking, or typing to the other person. And typing is, when we type to each other, a lot is missed. So we had them communicating sincere sarcastic statements. You knew as a sender that they were sincere or sarcastic. We had our senders predict how many of the recipients would be able to guess correctly out of these 20, how many are sincere and how many are sarcastic. We also had the recipients then tell us of these 20, which are sincere and which are sarcastic. Now, in the abstract, it's not going to be a surprise that in this experiment, people could actually detect sarcasm better when you could hear what they had to say than when you couldn't. So when you could hear what they had to say, they get about 75% of them right. They still miss quite a few, but better than chance. But when they were just typing to each other over email, they were barely better than chance. They got 56% right. So that's kind of not a surprise in the abstract that we can interpret things better when we hear what somebody has to say than when we just read it. But that obvious thing wasn't so obvious to the folks who were actually communicating. They predicted that their recipients would get around 80% accurate, regardless of whether they were talking to the person or typing to the person. They didn't seem to appreciate that typing, AJ is such a hard worker, isn't that nonsense? They didn't seem to appreciate that their sarcasm wasn't coming through their fingers. So they didn't think that how the medium through which they were communicating mattered for how well they were actually communicating to another person. So this thing that's obvious in the abstract is not so obvious in practice. They were being egocentric. It also wasn't obvious to the recipients of this. The recipients who were 75% right when they heard what the person had to say, but were only at chance when they were reading, they actually thought they got 90% of these on average, right? In both the email and the voice conditions. So they were the most overconfident and they were totally clueless about how the context in which they were communicating mattered for their ability. So here we see a problem of egocentrism. So John, I'm teasing you about something. I think it's obvious. I'm teasing you. I sent out this funny email, right? Then you, I think it's obvious. It's clear. You go off the handle because it's not obvious to you and you're pissed off. That's how friction can arise, for instance, from egocentrism, just one of many sorts of examples like that. Yeah. And we've seen the rise of the shorthand, the slash s, in written communication in these formats to denote sarcasm and the emojis and trying to add an extra color to what we're typing. What's fascinating to me is how poor we are at predicting what that future behavior or reaction will be in that moment. So there was a violent attack of someone in a car that was posted on Reddit. And if you actually look at the comments, the comments were all, man, I would have ran that person over, I would have got out of the car and gotten violent with them. I would have reacted in such a bold way based on what was happening to them. And the person replied to these people that in the moment, I froze. And we have this idea and this prediction in our mind that if someone is racist in front of us or someone is violent in front of us or someone gets in an accident in front of us, we in our altruistic state will rise to the occasion and be the most heroic version of ourselves. But that prediction is actually quite faulty in reality. Yeah. So again, this gets back to our conversation earlier about how we were guessing, not just at the minds of other people, we can often get that wrong. But when we're thinking about ourselves in a different context, how might we have behaved if we were in a different situation? We also are doing the same thing. And imagine that we would be thinking or feeling about it at that point in the same way that we are right now. So one example that I sometimes mention back, not long after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Mark Wahlberg, you know, movie actor, tough guy, he was actually supposed to be one of those planes. And he was interviewed by Men's Health Magazine. And he told, you know, after all of this goes down, we know what was happening in those planes. We know what was going on. We understand the risk that was, all this stuff is clear to us now, right? Just like my sarcasm is clear to me when I type to you and I therefore assume it'll be crystal clear to you. We know all this stuff after the September 11th attacks. And what Wahlberg thought was, if I had been on those planes, what he said in the interview, if I'd been on those planes, it wouldn't have gone down like it did. There would have been blood in the first class cabin and me saying, everybody sit down, things are going to be okay, something to that extent, right? It's easy for us to imagine that we are, when we are sitting here, cool and calm and collected. And we know that there's an emergency out there that we would rise to the occasion and feel about it then exactly the way we do now. The fact of the matter is when you're in those situations, there are often very different emotions than the one you're feeling right now, which doesn't give you a good guide, the best guide to how you're likely to feel in a situation is how others feel who are actually in the situation that you are not in. For a lot of our clients, when they are ready to create change in their life, they know where they're at and they're frustrated and they are ready to make a change. They know that if they continue doing the same things, they're going to get the same results. However, there's also the people who will hypothesize all day of how they will handle whatever events, whatever situations from their couch, because they read a book, they listened to this podcast, they know how to do it. It's like, okay, well, when you're able to do that consistently in real life, in your mind, you let us know what those results are because those people who are ready to make change in their life, they've already played it out in real life multiple times and did not like the results and realize it's time that I have to make changes in order to get the desired results. It's the ego part of our mind that for whatever reason clouds and distorts our abilities in our mind. One of the things in the book, there was a lot of studies that pointed out these limitations or where they're at and perhaps you could explain a few of those for our audience now because I think the best way forward is to let go of your ego, which is also to let go of that theory of mind part of you don't have the answers. You certainly don't know what other people are thinking and it's obvious that you certainly don't even know your own thoughts. Again, we want to be a little bit careful here. Accuracy is a nuanced concept. Our married couples, for instance, when they were in the lab, they were better than chance. They could guess how their partner felt a little better than they could with strangers, not wildly so, but a little better. They were better than chance. I don't want to say there's no accuracy at all. What we know is that there are certain mechanisms we use to understand each other's minds. Those mechanisms give us some insight into what's going on inside the head of another person, which as far as we can tell, other species on the planet can't do anywhere near to the extent that we can, but they lead to predictable mistakes. Take egocentrism, my tendency to assume that the way I'm representing things right now in my own mind is also the way that you are representing them. I think this is a funny joke. I'm going to assume you think it's funny too. I think this instruction to you, if I'm a boss, is crystal clear if you're my employee and it's total mud and nonsense to you that can create some accuracy. If it is clear to me, it probably makes sense there is some clarity to you, but it can create a predictable error, which is I tend to assume that your mind matches my own more than it actually does. Their whole category of mistakes that look like that. Once I know a little more about you, John, I know you're in Florida, AJ, I see you're wearing a sharp-looking suit. You look like a businessman, but maybe have a little fun on the weekends. You've got the long hair, so I think you've used the surfboard before, maybe. Once we have a little more information about somebody, once we have a sense of what groups they might be part of or what they're like, we can use stereotypes. Abstracted knowledge about the groups that they belong in. Those stereotypes also contain some accuracy. If you meet a tiger, you probably write to be more of a freight of a tiger than if you meet a rabbit. There's some accuracy to that. If you meet a Republican, you're probably right to assume a certain set of beliefs compared to if you meet somebody you know they're a Democrat. The problem with stereotypes isn't that they're inherently wrong. The problem is, at least when it comes to groups, they tend to be defined by the things that differentiate people from each other. So men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Well, the things that create the category men are the things that differentiate them from the category of women, but what we miss in that in that differentiation are all the things that are shared or in common with each other. And so what stereotypes tend to do is they tend to exaggerate the differences between groups on the dimensions that make them central. So, for instance, women or people, sorry, overestimate the extent to which women have more empathic ability than men do. They're right. The stereotype is right. Women do tend to be more empathic than men, but on tests of empathy, for instance, people tend to assume that gender difference is three times bigger or so than it actually is, right? So we get groups exaggerating, stereotypes exaggerating group differences. And then the last mistake I describe in the book is when I can actually see what you are doing, when I actually watch you, right? I get on the train, for instance, in the morning here in Chicago to go to the office. When I can actually see what you're doing, I sit down next to you, you're not talking to me. I can make inferences from that behavior. I can work backwards from what I see in you to what I presume is on your mind. You're not talking to me. I assume you're not interested in talking to me because if you're interested, you would be talking to me. The mistake that creates is that we assume, we tend to assume that people's behavior is a simpler representation of their mind than it actually is. So, right, John, if you sat down next to me on a train or a plane, you might not talk to me because you don't want to talk to me, but you also might not talk to me because I'm not talking to you, right, even though we both like to talk, right? So, that intuitive behavior tends to lead us to assume that others' minds are just simpler. There's just less going on than there actually is. When it comes to male and female empathetic skills and being able to feel in that manner, you mentioned it. It's only a few points. It's not the giant divide that we tend to think it is. At least, I think that divide would be more convenient for all of us if that was the case, but because it isn't, it makes things a little bit more fuzzier. However, we do know the voting patterns, and we certainly have seen those graphs of men and women, the demographics, and voting across the country. So, even those couple degrees and empathetic talent skills drastically change that voting demographic. So, my point there being that it doesn't take much to wildly alter the results of that empathy. So, there is some truth to that. There are things where a few percentage points really does matter. There's no doubt about it. And what's more, one of the reasons why it's so easy for people to come up with examples of differences like in terms of gender is because if you have a small difference between two distributions, right? Even if the means are just not very different from each other, at the extremes, they are going to be quite a bit different. The tails of those distributions are going to be quite different. Most empathic people are more likely to be women than men. Those differences are going to be big. And the least empathic people are more likely to be men than women. So, at the tails, at the extremes, small mean differences can be big. But when it comes to gender, for instance, most of these distributions overlap almost completely. Gender, just to stay with that for a minute, is the only individual difference dimension that I know of in psychology where somebody had to propose a theory that the two groups are not actually that different from each other. Janet Hyde, the gender similarities hypothesis, right? That mostly our theories are about differences with that one exception. But let me give you another example about these stereotypes. Let's take politics. You mentioned politics, right? So this is a place where friction causes a real problem. You have unsure heard and probably observed that political polarization is increasing in the United States, and it has been for at least the last 30 years or so. What has really been increasing, though, is not so much the differences between people who say vote Republican or vote Democrat if you ask them about their beliefs on a bunch of different things. Those are actually staying pretty much the same. What has really been diverging are people's beliefs about what the other side believes. Perceived polarization. People have increasingly come to see members of the opposing side of the political spectrum as increasingly extreme in their beliefs, and we've been getting more and more and more wrong about what each other believes. But what's driving polarization, in part, is not actual changes in people's beliefs, but my beliefs about what the other side believes. And the motivations behind it. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely the motivations behind it. I think that's the nuance that gets missed is we are trying to drive our team on whatever side you're on to take action, and the easiest way to drive them to take action is to hold up the extreme tail end of the other side as this is what we're fighting against. You can't say, well, look at how similar we are. I need you to show up on November 2nd, and I need you to hit that card in my favor. But it's a lot easier to motivate someone to show up when you go, hey, you know the tail on the other side? That's who we're fighting against. Exactly, exactly. So I ran an experiment for the book. There were lots published in the literature, but there was one that I was particularly interested in, had to deal with perceptions by Republicans and Democrats. This was about 10 years ago I ran this experiment. This was about preferences for distributional wealth. So I gave people two different countries they could live in, in theory. One where wealth was pretty unevenly divided, and one where wealth was pretty evenly divided, and it turns out true to stereotypes. Democrats said that they would rather live in the country that was more equally divided in terms of income, and Republicans said they would be a little more interested in living in the one that maybe more like a meritocracy where there was a little more uneven wealth distribution. But those two groups differed by only a couple percentage points. People thought the gap was about 50 percent. So this is the way in which stereotypes can provide some accuracy, some insight. We often will get the direction of effect wrong, but it can get the magnitude really wrong. And that magnitude really matters. If I believe the other side has a particular view, but they're really extreme, really crazy, you know, gun control nuts, or really crazy gun advocates, right? Well, that's scary. That's what pushes motivation, right? AJ, when you hold up those tails, and those tails are increasingly misperceived. I always think about where do we go when the marketing around painting each side as radicals and extremists and crazies, when all of that finally just wears out and no one's buying anymore. How do they motivate everyone after that? Because we're already at the other side or loonies and that's it. I remember when I was a kid, and I don't know if I'm older or younger than you guys, but we're in the ballpark, maybe in the, you know, at least within a decade or two of each other. I remember when I was a kid thinking all these people sound kind of the same. Yeah. It wasn't so carefully tritrated by polling and identity to get the one or two percent of, you know, try to push one or two percent of people who aren't paying attention to pay attention. They all kind of seem sort of the same and it kind of mattered who you elected, but you know, both were highlighting, it was pretty easy to see that, you know, in general, they would be similar. So my hope is that we would go back to a lot more boring elections. You know, all right, either of them could drive the ship fine. I think we'll well be on that, but let's hope. We'll see. Well, to your point, Johnny, what I think is funny in all of that again is the horseshoe theory, because then even at those ends, the overlap and the similarity becomes the extreme left hate the government as much as the extreme right. And they end up agreeing on more than they actually disagree on even in the extreme cases of what they're fighting for on both ends. What I'd love to touch on, and this is again, this perspective taking that I know a lot of members of our audience take and ego comes into it, is this feeling that when we share with others in order to build a connection, we have to go slow. We have to follow a progression of questions and divulging information to forge deep connections. And if we go too fast, the other person is going to judge us negatively, our ego will take a hit. And it's actually going to fray our ability to build connections with people. And I know we talked at the very beginning of this around loneliness before we hit record. And this epidemic that is upon us, everyone's feeling lonelier than ever. And we talked to a lot of our clients who they want a formula for building connections fast, but their fear is if they ask the wrong thing, or they say the wrong thing too fast, the other person is going to have a much more negative view of them. And it's going to make connection even harder. And I know you've done some great work in this area around how we forge connections, how we ask the right questions, how we divulge the right information that actually makes it happen a lot sooner and a lot faster counterintuitively to us than we believe. And I think, again, the part about our research, and at least our perspective on these kinds of problems that is interesting and at least seems important to me, is comparing people's intuitions about how they ought to behave in these contexts compared to what actually, how they actually ought to behave. Again, putting our kind of intuitive mind reading to the test. And we find, we find just in lots and lots and lots of different ways. We've been doing this work actually since, largely since we published MindWise over the last decade or so, that people just underestimate how positively others respond when you reach out to them in a positive way to connect. People are overly reluctant to sit down and have a conversation with a stranger, like on the train or a bus or a cab or a plane, because they assume the other person's not that interested in talking to them and they're just kind of wrong about that. And they fail to appreciate that if you reach out to somebody else in a positive way, they tend to reach back. If you walk around smiling at other people, what do they tend to do to you in return? They smile back. And yet we have a lot of these theories, we look at other people, they're not smiling at me. So this is kind of the intuitive behaviorism problem. We infer what's on their mind from what we see them doing. They're not smiling at me, I assume. They don't want to smile to me. They're not very happy at the moment. And that can create, a lot of these mistakes can create barriers that keep us from opening up and connecting to other people as optimally as we could in ways that actually keep us overly lonely, I think. So deep conversations are one example. We're a little overly reluctant to start a conversation with strangers, people we don't already know well. And once we're talking, we tend to stay overly shallow. We tend to assume that we might want to get to know somebody. We might want to connect with them. We might want to understand their minds a little better. We might want to know a little bit more about what their background is like, what their life's been like, how they got here. You know, have a really meaningful, interesting deep conversation. And yet, we're a little worried about how they might respond if we do that, if we ask them this deep question. And we just find that people are really off about that, just like we underestimate how positively a stranger will respond if you reach out and say hello to them. We also seem to underestimate how positively others respond when we actually open up to other people and take a genuine interest in them. So what we do in our, in some of our research, and I do this now with all of our incoming MBA students at the University of Chicago, second day, at least we've done that the last couple of years, second day of their orientation, they get a session with me on becoming a Boothie, right, becoming a University of Chicago MBA, which is all about the importance of being open and honest with each other so that we can figure out what's true about things, right? University thrives on free expression and on open inquiry and understanding. That's what makes a university a university. We're fighting against, yes, I see John's eyes going up there. We're fighting against norms that are pushing in the opposite direction. We're trying to be different at Chicago in lots of ways. And so I tell them, you know, and just in just a minute, I got 300 students in a room, they're 700 total, but you know, I do this over a couple of sessions because we don't have room being enough. I tell them in just a minute, you know, this is our second day, second day of orientation. So I'm going to sit you down in just a minute with another person, pair you up with another person here, and you're going to have a conversation, not, not a shallow one that, you know, talks about the weather and where you're from and what you want to do when you're here and, you know, all the standard safe stuff we talk about. But that actually tries to understand this other person and create a meaningful connection with them, actually tries to reach in to their mind and touch them, right? Learn something meaningful. Questions like what are you most grateful for in your life? Tell me about it. Or if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what'd be most important for me to know about you? Or can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person, which Charles might have mentioned to you when he was on your show? Or what are you most, what are you most nervous about starting this MBA program at Booth? And before the conversation, we asked them to essentially to tell us how they think this conversation is going to go, right? So we asked them to imagine how they're going to feel at the end of the conversation and how the other person is going to respond. Mostly they think this is not going to be very good. This is going to be, this is going to be weird and awkward. And the other person's not going to really care about what I have to say. And this isn't the right place for this. And in fact, when we asked our students this year, would you rather have this conversation or take a break? 25%, roughly about 24% of our MBA students, most outgoing extroverted people on the planet, you might imagine, about a quarter of them said, I would rather take a break than have this conversation with this other person, right? We then pair them up, they go out and have this conversation. They then come back and tell me how the conversation actually went. Now, they knew exactly what questions they were going to discuss. There's no surprise here. It's not like they knew exactly what the context was going to be. And yet when they come back, they tell me the conversations went way better than I thought they would. I thought they'd be really awkward. Turns out telling somebody what you're grateful for and hearing it from them, not awkward at all, right? Opening up and sharing what you're nervous about and having them do the same thing, not awkward. It just isn't weird, mostly, and certainly is nowhere near as weird as they think it will be. And at the end of this, when we ask them, now that they've had this conversation, would you rather have had that conversation or taken a break? Remember, about 25% beforehand said, I'm out of here. I'd like to take a break. After the conversation, it's less than 2%, say they'd rather take a break, right? Have taken a break. And so I think that suggests, AJ, that these theories we have in our minds, these beliefs we have about how much we can open up and reach out and take an interest in other people and genuinely get to know another person, ask them stuff that we really want to know about, and answer things that they would want to know about us. We've got a lot of psychological barriers in our own mind, walls that come up that keep us from reaching out and engaging. And of course, if I think, AJ, having this conversation with you is going to be bad, I won't have it, right? I won't do that. John, I'll stay in the shallow end of the conversation pool with you because if I think I'll go too deep, it'll be bad. And then of course, we don't learn that our beliefs might be wrong. I want our listeners to take that in because a lot of them are always going to side on conversations that are analytical in nature, problem solution oriented conversations that they can easily breeze through and not have to open themselves up to any scrutiny. However, sure, you might be able to solve somebody's problem, but you're not connecting with them. You're not sharing emotional space. And all the questions that you had brought up are medium disclosure. They're talking about dreams, talking about things that are experiences. So we have to talk about how we have felt or how we will feel or what gets us fired up. We have to share. And when for our clients, when we discuss with them that the analytical conversations are not going to do on a date, they're not going to do in rallying your teammates to get them to buy into a project, right? That the conversation is going to be, is needs to be you to be vulnerable. And others to go, I feel that way too. Or if that's the way you feel, I need to support you and help you through this. Now our connection is being made. And what you said there, and I want all of our audience to hear that, that those conversations that you fear because you have to open yourself up are all usually percentage wise are always going to go much better than you think. And for our clients who go out there and implement the emotional bids and the rapport building that we talk about on this show, and then that we work through in the X factor accelerator, every time they apply it, they're so surprised at the results because they actually gave it a shot. There's another thing I want to mention here, another important psychological mechanism and a subtlety that produces these gaps between how we think we can behave in these situations and reality, particularly in social situations. Psychologists have identified two main dimensions that we evaluate ourselves and other people on. One is competency, right? How good are we at this thing? These are all the technical skills and what are the facts here? That's all stuff focused on agency and how smart you are and how to do something and so on, all competency. The other dimension is warmth. How nice and friendly and trustworthy and honest and kind and caring or nasty and mean and awful are you, right? That's warmth. That's most aligned with morality. What's interesting to go back to our conversation about egocentrism earlier, the way we think about ourselves is different than the way other people think about us. I take my warmth for granted. I'm not questioning whether I'm a moral person. I'm trying to do something. John, if you're working for me, we're going to sit down and I'm going to tell you, look, I've got to get this stuff done, XYZ, go off and do this thing because that's what I'm focused on, right? Your perspective on me is different. You focus on competency, yes, but you're also concerned about whether somebody is decent and trustworthy and somebody want to be around and you're questioning that, right? When you walk up to somebody on the street, what's the first thing you want to know? Can they solve a complicated math problem? You couldn't give too farce about their competency when you first meet somebody, right? Or you go out on a date with somebody, right? Do you really care whether they're a talented writer and really able to do stuff? No, you want to know, is this person going to hurt me? Can I trust this person? Trust and warmth is primary in our evaluations of other people, but we're focused on is our competency. Of course, you can see the mismatch there. Absolutely. I sit down to have a conversation with you. I'm thinking about what am I going to say, and you're thinking, does this guy seem nice? And when you smile at somebody else, you seem nice. Of course, they tuck back to you, right? But if you're focused on competency, you might not do some of these things. I'm going to say, I'm going to ask the wrong question, right? I might say the wrong thing and you miss opportunities to connect. And we often describe people's behaviors directly to us. So one of our favorite examples in class, John's wearing his favorite red shirt, as you can see, if you're watching the video, he's walking down the street, very prideful, had a great day, great interview with Nick, and passes a group of women and they happen to snicker as they go by. John keeps walking and now that snicker is rattling around. No concept of what they are actually laughing about. But clearly he is now having a bad day because he thinks, what did I do? Something's in my teeth. That's a judgment of me. When in reality, they may be sharing a story of a silly joke the Uber driver said when he dropped them off for the restaurant. And yet we have this happening all the time when we're around strangers looking at what's their body language? What's the signals they're sending? Oh, they're frowning. They must be frowning because of me. And it's creating all these barriers in our mind to connection that keep us from even getting to those deep questions that keep us from even taking that chance and that risk on one another. And it also happens in the digital world where we're seeing people post about things going on in their life. And we're like, we don't want to bother them. Oh, they're having such a great time and things are going so well for them. And I don't want to be a bother. I don't want to take time away or they can't be interested in reconnecting with me and create these barriers mentally that then put us in this state that's just awful for our health. We need a social creatures to have deep relationships for our personal well-being, for our longevity. And yet we're using all of these signals and ascribing them personally to ourselves. And then we're robbing ourselves of those connections. So there's a constant psychology that I think is the most liberating of all phenomena in the field. And it was identified by my PhD advisor, Tom Gilbert, just known as the spotlight effect. And this is people's tendency to believe that others are paying more attention to them than other people actually are. So in the famous experiment that he did on this, he brought people into the lab and they were in a conference room. These are these are college kids, okay, these Cornell undergrads. And they come into a conference room. There are a handful of other students sitting there. But before they sit down, the experimenter pulls you aside and asks you to just put on a t-shirt, just put on the shirt before you go into that room. And the shirt is emblazoned with a big picture of Barry Manilow on the front. Now, you know, you might be a Manilow fan, but come on, most people aren't. And that's a little embarrassing of your college kid to be wearing around a Manilow shirt. People then went and sat in the room. And once they were in there for a minute, the experimenter says, sorry, you've been in, you know, we got to have you do something else, you're coming too late, pulls the Manilow shirt wearing person out of the room. At which point, they ask the shirt wearer to predict what percentage of people in that room will be able to identify that it was Barry Manilow on their shirt. They think about half of the folks in the room will be able to do this. They then ask the people in the room, hey, there was somebody here just a moment ago, and they had an image of someone on their shirt. They give a multiple choice test, right? Chance is 25% out of these four. Can you say who was on this person's shirt? And they can't above chance levels at 25% roughly get it right. Meaning they had no clue. They weren't paying attention to you at all. It's easy to walk around in the world thinking the world's about us and paying attention to us. And when we see signals for them to assume that it's about us, and other people just don't care about you that much. You're the center of your own world, not other people's. That is the most liberating phenomena I've ever come across in the entire field. Just relax. Other people don't care as much about you as you might fear that they do. You really dated yourself on a Barry Manilow joke. I'm 55. I'm talking about Mark Wahlberg and Barry Manilow. I'm in trouble here. I can tell. And with that, a lot of our listeners are going to be listening to an edited version of this. We're in three different locations. We're trying to communicate over video. There's mistakes. There's mishaps. We phrase the wrong things. And we cut all of that because what we present to the world is a polished podcast, hopefully, that people can engage with and they enjoy. But oftentimes, when we encounter this digitally from other people, we then put the spotlight back on ourselves and say, I can't live to that standard. That person's perfect. They're achieving so much. They're doing all these things. And as I said earlier, it robs us of that ability to reach out and connect with people. I know we spent a lot of time on this episode talking about biases and how we get things wrong. I'd love to encourage our audience how to overcome some of these mental hurdles that we have in front of ourselves to create deeper connection in our lives and how you maybe personally have utilized some of the science in your own life to strengthen relationships. Let me start answering that question by introducing to you to my youngest daughter, Lindsay. Lindsay is eight years old. We adopted her from China six years ago. She has Down syndrome. And she is just an absolute angel. And she has a magical ability, which is she has no filter on her hello, like none, no filter on her hello whatsoever. She is the most popular kid in her school. As far as I can tell, everybody knows Lindsay because she says hello to everybody. It doesn't matter how their face is looking. She doesn't worry that they're, you know, what they're thinking about her. She just is, takes an interest in everybody and says hello to everybody and where it's really magical is when we're at the grocery store. And you wouldn't guess this, but this is like the most one of the most fun ways to spend an afternoon if you are a psychologist that I can imagine. If you walk through the store and, you know, grocery store, you see lots of people walking around who just, they just, they just look dead inside. Like, you know, they're trying to find this or that, whatever. I don't really want to be here. They're not paying attention to you. They can't tell that their resting bitch face is pretty bitchy, right? They're just doing their thing there and they kind of don't want to be there. Lindsay will walk by and say hello to every one of them. And it is like you found a magical switch on someone. You take this person who looks dead and lonely and disconnected and they just come to life. It's like a grandmother seeing a grandchild. They just come alive. I've come to think of this as the switch. Like there's a switch that folks have on their back that's hidden and she can find it. She just gives the hello. And I've seen that a lot of times. I've observed that and that's given me courage to try that, to do that myself. And what we found in our work is that the only way that people really overcome this stuff, overcome these gaps is by practicing and learning where they're wrong. And so, and we've tried all kinds of things. We've tried all kinds of stuff to try to convince people, for instance, let's take deep conversations that, you know, just telling people that these conversations tend to go better than they expect doesn't work. It's having one of these conversations that works. So that, I think that's, at least from my perspective, is the powerful thing about this research. From my perspective, you don't have to trust me on it. Particularly on these gaps in sociality, people underestimating how positively reaching out and connecting with others will go, is you can go out and try it. And try it in small ways, right? Just try, just spend tomorrow. When you get a chance, you walk by somebody, smile and say hello and just watch how it goes, right? Just, just watch how that goes. How many smiles do you get back when you do that? When we had people do this at the Museum of Science and Industry, this is Ahmed Kumar postdoc of, former postdoc of mine and I, when we had people do this at the MSI, we had them walk around the building, either smiling and saying hello to people when they were somewhat close to them, or just observing people. People actually said that other folks in the Museum were friendlier when they were smiling and saying hello than when they were. They could, right? Now, if, now you say that, John, of course, yes, of course, but in some ways that's a crazy response, right? Why is everybody smiling that day? It's because you are. Right? You brought that out of them, right? And so if you walk around, you'll see that. It goes to something we've talked about on this podcast before. And for myself, it's like the experiment of where would you, would, where would you rather live in a place where everyone says hide each other as you're walking down the street or, or in a city where no one does. And I've certainly lived in both and I certainly know that I love living in cities that are very friendly. And in fact, it encourages me to be more friendly and to be more conscious and just be more present in the day and extract more enjoyment out of it. One of the exercises that we do with our clients that is one of the most transformational is we have them take a notebook out during the daytime on the street. And you can imagine someone approaching you with a clipboard or a notebook. Your initial assumption is you're going to be ignored. People are going to be rude to you. They don't want to be stopped. They're walking on the street. They can't be bothered. So there's a lot of anxiety that ticks up in our clients as we present them with this exercise. And we say your goal is to get 50 signatures. And along with those signatures in this notebook, we want you to ask them to write down three qualities about you, that first impression, what are three things they notice about you. And we're on Hollywood Boulevard. So this is where tourists are all different cultures, a melting pot of LA. And of course they start the exercise very tentative. I don't want to approach people. I don't want to bother them. All of those mental hurdles we just discussed come up and they get that first signature and it's bold, confident, fun, smiling, outgoing, positive. And they come back to our classroom after 50 signatures just beaming inside because not only have they broke through that barrier that they had around approaching people on the street and how friendly they would be, but what they get reflected back to them as a complete stranger observing them is so overwhelmingly positive. So not only can you stop someone on the street who's busy about their day and no interest in potentially talking to you because you're holding a notebook, right? Like we've encountered those people who want to stop us to sign something, a voting initiative. And inside of that notebook is just confirmation of 50 strangers seeing them in a way that they haven't seen themselves in years maybe and seeing the positive in them in a way that just lights them up. Can I ask you to modify that example, that experience in one slight way? I want you to ask people two questions. Before they go out, ask them to estimate how many people will you have to ask in order to get 50 people to sign this for you? And then when they come back, ask them to report how many people you actually had to ask. That's known as the underestimation of compliance effect. People tend to underestimate how helpful people will be when you ask them directly. We time box it. So we tell them they have two hours to complete it and they all say, there's no way I can get this done in two hours. Absolutely no way. And we're literally right outside the street. They've been on the street all week long. So they've seen all of the number of people on the street. You can literally walk one block and talk to 50 people. So we say two hours, immediately their responses, there's no way I'm going to get to that number. And oftentimes they come back in 90 minutes or less after they've burned through the nervous energy at the start. Just exuding this smile that I got 60, I got 70, 50 was a breeze. Well, the other thing about that is for the first hour, they're doing it on their own and their mind is looking for the perfect person. And so they realize that they're not going to get any signatures if they continue to look for the perfect person. And by focusing on the perfect person, you're only making it harder on yourself. So the second hour we change it up. So we pair them up. And now the one person you're working with, he picks out who you're approaching. So they don't have a choice in the matter. And now that they don't have that choice and their brain is not trying to figure out who's going to do the exercise, they're now focused on just doing the exercise and making a good first impression. And that blows their mind because they get to see the comparison. Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. That sounds like something I need to do with my students in class. I remember I was at the university in the country north of us here in the United States a couple of weeks ago. And one of our former PhD students was, we were describing, we were talking about this effect a little bit. And she came up to me and she said, I don't know if I ever told you when I was in graduate school, I experienced this effect and it kind of changed my life. I had to go down to the winter garden in the middle of the business school building at the University of Chicago. And I had to get a bunch of people to fill out these surveys for me to finish up my dissertation. And I was so terrified about this. I thought nobody was going to want to do this. I'd never be able to get this finished. And she went down, she was basically never rejected by anyone. It's not usually that extreme, but certainly it was way easier than she thought. You asked me how this research has changed my own life. Two things. One is, I guess, a lot less is what's on the mind of another person. And I ask a lot more. And the value of that is it gets deep right away. So I don't guess what my students are thinking. I ask them, how are you doing now? I had somebody in my office last week who was going through a hard time. And you're worried in situations where there's extreme stress. You're worried about self-harm and suicide. And I don't guess or worry about that anymore. I ask them directly, which every therapist will tell you to do. Are you thinking about hurting yourself? Are you contemplating suicide? I don't have any reluctance at all in asking those genuine questions about what's on the mind of another person because I know that's how I'll know. And I know people tend to be interested and open and responding if you ask them directly. The other thing, when it comes to overcoming some of these psychological barriers that keep us overly disconnected, I'll reconnect again with Charles Duhigg, who mentioned my name to you the first time, in his first big blockbuster book, The Power of Habit, he described the importance of turning behaviors into habits if they're going to be sustainable over time. That's absolutely true with social actions as well. If you want to be kinder or more sociable, that's not going to work. You're not going to be kinder. But what you might do is create a habit of, say, passing along third-person compliments. That's something that I have done. So if I hear somebody compliment somebody else, it is just now an automatic trigger, I'm going to tell the person I heard complimented that somebody was loving them behind their back. And now it's just automatic. I don't even think about it. I hear a nice thing said and I will pass it along. And so when it comes to behavior change, think small and think concrete in a way that can then be replicable and repeatable. Good thing about these social behaviors, by the way, is that it tends to feel really good when you're doing them. So it's not like exercise or socks. If you're actually reaching out and connecting to other people, it's pretty nice. So that's a good thing. Yeah, there's not the delayed onset of the gratification that comes with exercise in these situations. Well, we know you're working on another book, and I know we're going to encourage our audience to read this book. We're going to find out more about all the great work that you do. So one of the things that I know about human beings is social media tends to make you a little unhappy. So you're not going to find me on social media, I'm afraid. I'm doing research, I'm writing papers, but you can find me on my website. So Nicholas Epley.com is my website. That's where you can go. You will not find me on Twitter or ex or Facebook or Instagram, I'm afraid. Too much social comparison, too much unhappiness there. But if you go to my website, you can find all the papers that I publish, you can find links to the book, you can find videos that we've done, podcasts like these that I've done, and that's the place. Well, thank you for stopping by. John and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and hat tip to Charles for pointing us in your direction. Yeah, thank you, Charles. It was great fun talking to you guys. Thanks, AJ and John. This was really fun. Thank you, Nick.