Nick Epley's train ride to his University of Chicago office used to be a predictably uneventful affair: 45 minutes of people looking out the window or staring at their phones, oblivious to the world around them. But one morning, the behavioral scientist decided to try something different. When a woman sat down next to him, he complimented her on her hat.
That compliment began a conversation that would change the trajectory of Nick's research over the ensuing decade, and it would change the way Nick approached his life.
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Episode Transcript
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Max Chopovsky (00:02):
This is Moral of the Story interesting people
telling their favorite shortstories and then breaking them
down to understand what makesthem so good.
I'm your host, max Dripofsky.
Today's guest is Nick Epley,the John Templeton Keller
Distinguished Service Professorof Behavioral Science and
Faculty Director of the RomanFamily Center for Decision
Research at the University ofChicago Booth School of Business
(00:24):
.
Aside from his professorialduties, nick is a bestselling
author and an award-winningresearcher whose work has
appeared in the New York Times,the Wall Street Journal, cnn,
wired, npr and many others.
He's been named a professor towatch by the Financial Times,
one of the world's best 40 under40 business school professors,
by poets and quants, and one ofthe 100 most influential in
(00:48):
business ethics by Ethosphere,among many other honors.
Nick's class at Booth,designing a Good Life, is one of
the most highly rated andsought-after classes at one of
the most highly rated andsought-after business schools in
the country, at a grad schoolknown for its quant focus.
Students have come to love theclass, where principles include
doing good, feels surprisinglygood.
(01:08):
Perhaps this is because Nickunderstands one of the most
important life lessons it's notall about the numbers.
The real KPIs are harder toquantify good conversations,
meaningful relationships, acareer you love making an impact
, and as Nick teaches hisstudents, there isn't much of a
trade-off between self-interestand social interest.
(01:29):
It's a refreshingly atypicalperspective.
But Nick is a refreshinglyatypical educator.
Growing up in Cedar Rapids, iowa, and a family full of farmers,
nick fell in love with theoutdoors at an early age.
He played football in collegebut, fortunately for the
thousands of students whoselives he would positively impact
, he broke his nose in his firstgame and decided that academics
(01:50):
might offer a more promisingand less violent future career
than the offensive line.
After earning a PhD inpsychology from Cornell, nick
began his teaching career atHarvard.
His first day was September 12,2001.
Needless to say, lecturing wasnot top of mind and he and his
PhD seminar students sat aroundthe table and just talked,
(02:11):
processing their emotions in thewake of the terrorist attacks.
It was this vulnerable,down-to-earth, real-world
approach to education that gotNick voted one of Harvard's
favorite professors three yearsin a row.
And although Nick hasn't foundhimself on the gridiron of late,
the father of five hasmaintained his love for the
outdoors, turning his suburbanChicago home into an urban farm
(02:33):
with fruit trees, a large garden, a flock of chickens and a
large family to help tend it all.
So when he's not teachingbehavior, you might find him
feeding his chickens, splittingwood and picking fruit.
And that's Nick's way of livinga well-designed life teaching
others about perspective whilemaintaining a healthy one
himself.
Nick, welcome to the show.
(02:53):
Thank you, max.
Nick Epley (02:54):
That was lovely, I need to hire you as my PR guy.
Max Chopovsky (02:57):
That's great.
I love writing the bios.
So you are here to tell us astory Before we get into it.
Set the stage.
Is there anything we shouldknow about the story before we
get started?
Nick Epley (03:11):
So the story seems small but, like, I think, most
good stories, it grew intosomething really, really big for
me and it's something I thinkabout a lot.
It's one small experience andit was one that I never would
have imagined I would reallyremember.
(03:32):
It's one that's touched myprofessional life.
It kind of changed thedirection of my research over
the last decade or so, but it'shit me in home a lot too, hit my
personal life a lot, and it haschanged the way I live my life
more than any other researchI've ever done.
Stem from this, I think, fromthis little experience.
Max Chopovsky (03:55):
That sounds profound.
Yeah, all right, let's get intoit.
Nick Epley (03:58):
Tell me a story.
So I take the train into Chicagoevery day from my home in
Flossmore on the far south side,where we have the fruit tree
and garden and chickens, andevery day I see the same kind of
drill, and I don't pay it awhole lot of mind.
One morning, though, I got onthe train and I just noticed the
situation in a way I kind ofhadn't noticed it before.
(04:21):
So I was writing my first book,which is called Mindwise, and
the book is all about theresearch that I do here as a
behavioral scientist, studyingsocial cognition.
These are the inferences wemake about each other's thoughts
and beliefs and attitudes, andmostly I study how we screw that
up and misunderstand each otherin lots of different ways.
And this capacity to connectwith or to think about the minds
(04:44):
of others is the thing thatreally makes us unique on this
planet as human beings.
It's the reason our brains arethree times bigger than our
nearest primate, relative to thechimpanzee, and yet and it's
also the thing, it turns outthat makes us happiest when we
connect with others, we tend tobe happier than when we're alone
.
Being alone is one of the mostmiserable states that we can be
in.
And yet every morning I get onthis train and I see the same
(05:09):
drill happen time after timeafter time.
And this morning.
I find that morning I finallynoticed it.
Everybody gets on the train,lines up along the outside
window, hugging that window asif it's like the last safe space
on the planet.
And then people come in and sitdown next to them and we've got
a 45-minute ride into Chicagoand for those 45 minutes people
(05:33):
sit there and essentially ignoreeach other, just totally ignore
each other.
And this one morning I saw thisand it clicked in me that this
just seems weird.
What are we all doing here?
Is this really the best we cando?
We're all sitting with ourneighbors, other folks who are
perfectly delightful or just asinteresting as we are, and here
(05:54):
we all are sitting there staringat our stupid phones or reading
a book or whatever other thingwe think we might like to do at
this time.
And I'd ridden the train foryears by then.
But this morning it just struckme as odd and so I decided to
try something else.
That morning a woman had gottenon the train.
(06:16):
I'm usually the last one to havesomeone sit down next to me on
a train car if I'm riding bymyself.
I'm not a kind of guy.
Somebody comes and naturallysits down next to me.
I'm kind of big.
I don't know, I'm often avoided.
But eventually a woman came andsat down next to me.
She was probably in her 50s Iwould have been in my upper 30s
(06:38):
at that time, or so mid to upper30s and she came and sat down
next to me.
She had this beautiful red haton it's a big red hat and took
it off when she sat down next tome African American woman and I
decided I'm going to trysomething different today.
I'm just going to try to have alittle conversation here.
So I did and you can imaginethe feeling of sitting there.
(07:02):
Somebody comes down, you'regoing to have a conversation.
It was like I was hitting awall there.
I had this anxiety.
Maybe she's going to think I'mweird or trying to hit on her or
something, or she's going to beuncomfortable.
What do I have to say to thisperson?
She doesn't seem interested,she's not talking to me.
All this anxiety that we havein many of these social
(07:23):
situations about reaching outand engaging, I had right there.
Nevertheless, I tried.
I remember making a joke abouther hat.
I said something like I loveyour hat, I've got one Just like
it, and she kind of chuckled.
I said hello, I introducedmyself, said who I was, she
introduced herself and then forthe rest of the trip into Hyde
(07:44):
Park it was about a half hourride.
We had a perfectly lovelyconversation.
I asked her about her job.
I remember telling me that shefelt kind of stuck in her job.
She didn't really like it.
I asked her is this kind ofyour dream job?
No, but she wasn't quite surehow she was going to get out.
She's got kids.
She needed support though.
So she was feeling kind oftrapped and we really kind of
opened up to each other in thatconversation and it was nice.
(08:09):
It wasn't necessarily the bestconversation I'd ever had, but
it was nice and certainly nicerthan a typical train ride I
would have had sitting there allby myself, which would have
passed totally uneventfully.
I mean, I remember it.
Now, 13, 14 years later, Iremember that conversation and I
(08:29):
got off the train and Iremember distinctly thinking
that this might not be unusual.
We've all, I think, hadexperiences where we didn't want
to go to the party but we wentand we were happy we did.
Or we didn't want to make thatcall or have that conversation,
(08:50):
but, god, we were happy, we did.
And here on this train ride.
I was a little nervous abouthaving this conversation Nobody
else was talking, but I was gladthat I did and the conversation
.
What really struck me is thatthe conversation wasn't just
good, it was surprisingly good,and it's that contrast that I
think really matters.
That is, the conversation wasbetter than I expected it would
(09:14):
have been.
Now, as a researcher I'm abehavioral scientist for living,
a single anecdote, a singlestory like that doesn't tell us
much.
Like well, whatever, she wasnice, we found stuff to talk
about.
That was just a one-off thing.
We have no idea, right, what ifI did that a hundred times?
(09:35):
What would that conversation belike?
I don't know, and so, as ascientist, I'm always nervous
about individual stories andanecdotes like that because we
don't know what it means.
Maybe it was just unique to meand it wouldn't show up in other
places or whatever.
But I remember distinctlyfeeling that this feels like
something that could be reliableand robust.
(09:57):
I had a few reasons why Ithought that might be true.
I remember walking the fewblocks here at a campus thinking
about why this might besomething that doesn't just
happen to me but might happen toother people in general with
any kind of conversation.
And that conversation then,when I was done with that, came
(10:18):
back to my office and I startedhaving conversations with our
graduate students, julianaSchroeder in particular.
I was one of my graduatestudents at the time.
We decided to run an experiment.
Look, you see what happens whenwe just ask folks to do this,
like what I did, but we haveother people do it.
Do it a bunch of times and wefound that my experience didn't
(10:39):
seem to be so unique.
On average, people reportedhaving a more positive commute
when we randomly assigned themto a condition where they
engaged in conversation withsomebody than when they kept to
themselves.
And yet when we asked aseparate group of people to tell
us how they thought they wouldfeel, they thought they would
feel happier keeping tothemselves than they were
talking, which makes sense.
(10:59):
Now, why nobody talks on atrain if you think it's going to
be less pleasant talking thankeeping yourself?
Of course, who keeps yourselfevery time?
But from that one little storyit sparked a decade and a half
now of research where we findthat effect that people find
(11:20):
social engagement and socialinteraction not just to be good
but surprisingly good.
We find it over and over andover, and, over and over again.
I think people aren't socialenough for their own well-being.
That was the morning I wasinspired to do all this work.
Max Chopovsky (11:39):
That transcends personality profiles, because
some people are introverts.
Nick Epley (11:44):
There are a few things that are more widely
misunderstood than thatphenomena of introversion and
extroversion.
There's a whole cottageindustry of research on this.
Now it turns out we didn't findany differences between
introverts and extroverts andhow much they enjoyed their
conversations.
This was true in the US.
This was true in London as well, when we replicated that
(12:05):
experiment there.
It's true in calves leavingmidway airport buses downtown.
We've replicated this a ton oftimes now.
Your level of trait introversionor extroversion doesn't matter,
for how much you enjoy theexperiences of these
conversations.
What we sometimes although notalways reliably, but others also
find is that what personalitydoes predict are your beliefs
(12:27):
about how much you're going toenjoy these things.
Oh, interesting.
The way to think aboutpersonality is not a description
of your experience, but ratherof your expectations and choices
.
An extrovert isn't somebody wholikes talking, whereas an
introvert likes doing thingsalone.
An extrovert is someone whochooses to go out and interact,
whereas an extrovert chooses tokeep to themselves.
(12:50):
It's about expectations, notabout experiences.
That's what personality isreally about.
There are lots of myths aboutintroversion and extroversion
Like it's about experience.
Introverts get their happinessfrom quiet pursuits, whereas
extroverts get their happinessfrom connected.
That's just not true, just flatout not true.
(13:11):
If that were true, you'd see afew things.
One thing you'd see is thatpersonality wouldn't be
correlated with happiness,because extroverts get their
happiness from certain things,extroverts get their happiness
from other things, but therewouldn't be a meaningful
difference between them.
We've known now for 50 yearsthat that's not true.
The first study that actuallylooked at the personality
(13:33):
correlates a well-being found ahuge correlation between
extroversion and happiness.
Extroverts are happier.
Full stop Correlations about asbig as the correlation between
the heights of fathers and sons.
Max Chopovsky (13:43):
Big effect Because the extroverts have an
expectation that they will enjoythose conversations more and
therefore they tend to have themmore.
Nick Epley (13:49):
That's exactly right .
Extroverts are happier becausethey act like extroverts more.
If you look over the course ofany given day, you behave in
some ways more extroverted.
We're talking right now.
It's a little more extrovertedexperience here, but before we
were doing this you were settingthis up by yourself, quiet,
alone, over the course of theday.
We vary in how we behave.
(14:10):
Sometimes we're outgoing,sometimes we're quiet.
I'm teaching a class.
Sometimes Other times I'msitting in my office typing.
If researchers come to you andjust tap you on the shoulder,
they don't actually do that.
They tap you on your phone.
They just right and ask you heyMax, how are you feeling right
now?
Hey Max, what are you doingright now?
What you find is that peopletend to report feeling more
(14:30):
positive and less negative whenthey're behaving more
extroverted than when they'rebehaving more introverted.
That's true regardless ofwhether you tend to be an
extrovert or introvert.
Introverts are also happier atthe periods of their day,
feeling more positive in theperiods of the day where they're
acting more outgoing than whenthey're not.
You also see this in experiments.
If you ask people kind of likeweeded on the trains, if you
(14:54):
randomly assign them to act in away that's more extroverted
versus introverted.
There's now kind of a cottageindustry of experiments, of
these sorts of positive activityinterventions, where you just
randomly assign people in amoment, right like in a lab
study, or over the course of aday, or on several days, over
(15:15):
the course of a week or over acouple of weeks, to act in
different, particular ways.
You ask people to act moreextroverted today than you might
normally, or act moreintroverted today than you might
normally.
What you find over and over andover again is that asking
people to act more extroverted,whether in the moment, over the
course of a week, over thecourse of a couple of weeks,
makes them feel more positive.
(15:35):
Again, that's true regardlessof how extroverted or
introverted you are.
The only experiment I've everseen that finds this activity
intervention, this encouragementto act extroverted, affects
extroverts and introvertsdifferently, is a study where
the introverts just didn'tfollow instructions.
To ask more extroverted is whathappened?
(15:58):
Right, they just couldn't do it, for whatever reason, they just
didn't do it.
And so the effect, you know,your willingness to take the
drug in this case, or to followthe instructions, was correlated
with how extroverted you were.
So extroverts went out andacted more extroverted and they
got happier.
The introverts didn't do asmuch what they were asked to do
and they didn't get happier.
So the extent to which you felthappy was a function of the
(16:20):
extent to which you followed theinstructions.
The extent to which youfollowed the instructions was a
function of how extroverted youwere.
It's a little like doctorsfinding that exercise only
improves your health when youactually do it.
That's.
The only exception that I'veever found was one where
people's choice to followthrough on the thing was
affected by their personality.
Max Chopovsky (16:42):
Well, I mean, I don't think that has a good
impact on the experiment,because the experiment is if you
choose to follow it, if youchoose to follow the
instructions, then you will getthe sort of predicted outcome.
Nick Epley (16:51):
Yes, although for psychologists, if you're
interested in what effect thisinstruction has on how you feel
a week or two weeks down theroad, whether you follow the
instruction or not does matterfor the effect of this
instruction on your outcome.
But it is also the case that ifyou do follow the instruction,
if you do act more extroverted,you're going to tend to feel
more positive, and that's whyextroverts tend to be happier,
(17:12):
because they tend to have moreof these positive outgoing
experiences.
And this is not our experimentson the train or these
experiments I'm describing toyou here don't suggest that
there's a certain way everybodyshould behave.
But it's important, I think, tounderstand where our feelings
and our experiences and ouremotions come from, to be able
to understand ourselvesaccurately, because you can then
(17:34):
make wiser choices.
So if I'm sitting on the trainI'm having kind of a bad day, I
know how to make that better.
Sitting right there next to mea source of well-being, right
there it's crazy that thepandemic obviously increased
people's isolation.
Max Chopovsky (17:52):
We know that, obviously when everybody was in
lockdown.
But I think the longer termeffect of the pandemic one of
the many is that it gave rise toa number of services that
actually facilitate fewerinteractions.
You can order food online andnever even interact with your
(18:13):
delivery person.
In fact, they would tell you onAmazon, like, don't come within
six feet of them.
You can order your coffeeonline and just go and pick it
up without talking to a singleperson, and I was thinking about
this the other day.
It's actually incredible howefficient we can be with our day
if we don't go out of our wayand order everything on our
computer.
You and I could have had thisconversation online.
(18:34):
I could have ordered my food atMedici's in advance and just
picked it up, and so we actuallyget to save a lot of time.
As a result of all that, itbecomes very efficient.
But I found, as you would expect, that I was less happy because
I was spending so much time bymyself, clicking, clicking,
(18:54):
clicking and minimizing myinteractions with other people.
So here's a textbook example ofthis when I am by myself, it
feels miserable and I need to bearound people, whether it's
school travel trips, which I'vedone, or I did this program
called Goldman Sachs 10,000Small Businesses.
When I was running my videoproduction company, I was around
(19:17):
30 other Type A CEO, founder,extroverts.
There probably weren't eventhat many takeaways that lasted
from that time, from that class,but all of those times I
remember being happiest, beingat my best, and so it's just so
interesting how, in an attemptto help people, social distance
(19:42):
as a result of the pandemic, wehave accelerated these trends of
isolation.
I mean, I don't know how manyyou've probably looked at this,
but in many, many years we'veprobably accelerated them.
Nick Epley (19:53):
Yeah, so for decades in fact, this has been
happening.
So throughout most of humanhistory, life was a deeply
social affair.
Every day was spent in thepresence of other people.
You had to coordinate withother people for anything.
Most market-based exchangeswere done through reciprocity
and bartering.
Right, you scratch my back, Iscratch yours.
I for an eye, tooth for a tooth, back scratching and eye
(20:13):
gouging.
Deeply social affairs that'show life happened when people
grew up.
They didn't move out and starttheir careers in some far off
city.
They moved over so that theycould stay in the household and
welcome their family as part ofit.
Everybody was local.
The concept, even the use of theword loneliness in the English
(20:34):
language didn't really evenemerge until around the 1800s.
Before then, lonely would beused to describe aloneness,
oneliness, right being by likesolitude, which is not
inherently inversive If you areengaged in something alone.
I spent a lot of time outdoorsin the woods hunting fish and do
(20:55):
those sorts of things.
Being in solitude alone is notinherently aversive, but before
about the 1800s people didn'tseem to feel lonely that much.
That subjective experience offeeling disconnected from other
people or feeling isolated fromother people, or feeling like
(21:17):
you didn't have people aroundwho would help or support you
wasn't common enough for peopleto write about.
It wasn't until the 1800s thatthis other usage of the word
aloneness, loneliness, onelinessstarted to be used.
Now dictionaries before, in the1600s, dictionaries only had
(21:37):
one definition of lonely oralone.
It was being isolated or alonebeing by yourself, being
objectively disconnected fromothers.
Now our dictionaries have two.
They have lonely, thesubjective state of feeling
disconnected from others, thepsychological state.
And, of course, you can feellonely in a crowd of other
people.
You can feel lonely.
(21:58):
Even when you're in a marriageor with your family.
You can still feel lonely.
Our dictionaries now have thesetwo different meanings and I
think there's just a ton oftechnology that we have built
over years that help us to bemore independent from each other
, and there are great benefitsto that.
(22:18):
So I can get in a car and drivesomewhere and I don't need to
work with somebody else to helpget someplace.
I can go to the grocery storeand pay with money.
I don't have to go to thefarmer next door and barter this
for that thing, Because all ofthis just so much technology has
air conditioning, heating,almost everything has allowed us
(22:41):
to live more independently fromeach other.
Technology in recent yearsphones and computers and stuff
have accelerated that to anexponential degree, I would say.
And the pandemic did so tooenabled independence because we
had to be, and there are greatbenefits to that.
(23:01):
It is a great benefit to beable to order your food before
you get there if you want, ifyou want to be efficient, or be
able to hop in your car anddrive somewhere else you want,
or order stuff online.
All of that's great.
But there's also a cost to thatthat I think can be harder to
observe.
You could now spend entire daysalone if you chose to never
interact with another person,and you wouldn't necessarily
(23:22):
know that that was problematicfor you Not necessarily.
You might think that's going tobe much more efficient.
So you choose to do that.
You don't feel the outcomes ofthat, except in a slow crawl
over the long run.
It seems things seem to be alittle off.
I'm just in this funk.
(23:43):
I don't really know why I'm up.
I don't have a whole lot to getexcited for.
A lot of that comes from justbeing disconnected from other
people and that's easy toundervalue.
In fact, psychologists foruntil I would say, around 1950
or so also devalued,underestimated.
(24:03):
The importance of socialconnection, of being with others
, for our health, for ourhappiness, for our well-being,
for our flourishing.
A Maslow famously created thishierarchy of needs, which turns
out not to be true.
It never was supported by theempirical evidence.
Even though it's woven our wayinto our psyche, it turns out to
be nonsense Interesting.
Max Chopovsky (24:23):
I know that.
Nick Epley (24:24):
Yeah, so belonging is on the third level.
There it's like the bronzemedal of importance.
You couldn't care about otherpeople until you have food needs
met, basic needs of food andsleep and so on.
And then the second level,safety and security, and you had
to have that satisfied beforeyou could start caring about
(24:46):
belonging.
He put that in kind of thirdposition.
Did it suggest that's not trueReally?
Max Chopovsky (24:53):
What could you think about being with other
people when you're starving orwhen you're not safe?
Nick Epley (24:58):
So it's not that certain goals don't focus your
attention they do.
When you're starving, you focuson food.
When you're feeling unsafe, youfocus on being safe.
When you're lonely, you focuson other people.
So it's not that those goalsdon't focus your attention they
do.
It's just that they don't seemto operate in any sort of
priority.
It's not that a person who'shungry can't also, at the same
(25:22):
time, feel alone or isolated ordesperately alone.
It's not that a person whofeels unsafe can't also wish, or
feel like they wish, they werebetter connected to others.
Those things can all happen atthe same time.
Max Chopovsky (25:40):
Maybe his perspective is those lower
levels Would crowd out the upperlevels, because if you're
feeling isolated and you're alsohungry and somebody's chasing
you to try to eat you, you'renot gonna think about connecting
with other people until you getaway from that threat.
Nick Epley (25:54):
Yeah, so that was his intuitive perspective.
This makes intuitive sense.
It just doesn't support aboutthe data.
It predicts a negativerelationship.
So people who feel, forinstance, hungry, shouldn't rate
their social connection asbeing as important.
Right, you should see anegative relationship between
these needs, and that just isn'ttrue.
Interesting, isn't true?
Max Chopovsky (26:15):
so let me ask you this how important is the depth
of the conversation to creatingthe intended effect?
In other words, if you talkabout the weather, that's one.
Or if you talk about sort ofwhat makes you happy, what makes
you unhappy.
When the woman said, you know,it started sharing some for
personal problems with you, thatseems a bit unusual.
(26:38):
But I think that's where sortof the deeper connections are
made.
But I want to understand yourperspective is the depth of the
conversation important?
Nick Epley (26:46):
Yeah, we've done a ton of research on this.
In fact, all of our incomingMBA students, in fact, this fall
they're doing a session with meon building Culture, on culture
, here at booth.
That's really about buildingcommunity, and they're gonna do
this experiment I'm about todescribe to you in just a minute
.
So We've been doing thisresearch now for a number of
(27:07):
years and I guess one way tothink about it is that almost
every, almost every socialinteraction From whether I talk
to you to what do we talk aboutto do I express this kind
thought.
I, you know, give you a sharecomplement with to you, express
gratitude to you.
All of these social engagementscome with a moment where you
have to decide do I?
(27:27):
reach out and engage, or do Ihold back and avoid?
These are classic approachavoidance Decisions that people
have and they're, you knowdifferent weights that you feel
right.
Sometimes you'd want to reachout but you're a little nervous
about this right and essentiallythe way to characterize the
research that we've done overthe last decade and a half or so
that's now published and wellover a dozen empirical papers,
(27:52):
is that that approach, avoidancecalculation we seem to just get
wrong.
And the weight we put, the fearwe have About approaching others
, the avoidance motivation thatwe have it's just a little too
strong, not wildly so right now.
We're not idiots.
Recognize somebody coming downthe alley with a knife towards
(28:13):
us?
I want to avoid that guy, right?
Yeah, it's not that we'reidiots about it, it's just we're
off of it that thisconversation, like I had with
the woman on the train thatmorning, it's a little worried
how it would go.
It's a little off on that turnout didn't even need to be that
worried.
Yeah, when we're thinking aboutwhat to talk about with
somebody, we might want to havea meaningful conversation.
I want to find out, right,what's your life really like?
(28:34):
Tell me about who you are, whatyou care about.
Maybe you don't want to talk,maybe so too personal, maybe
it's a little nervous about that.
It looks like we're a littleoff about that too.
So in our experiments, what wedo is we Ask people to have
different kinds of conversations, and sometimes we do this by
letting them decide what to talkabout.
So we have them write down somequestions.
(28:57):
We did this in Millennium Parkin downtown Chicago.
So if you're ever out there ona nice summer afternoon you
might see us out there runningexperiments.
We have them write down acouple questions that you know
they might talk to somebody elseabout in conversation and we
pair them up with somebody elsedown the park that day too and
have that Conversation.
Or we have them come up with acouple of questions that are
deeper than they would normallyask another person about
(29:18):
Conversation, and then we justhave them discuss one of those
two sets of questions.
Or we give them differentquestions, right.
So in some experiments we havepeople relatively shallow
questions, right, tell me aboutthe last time you walked for
more than an hour.
Or can you tell me what you Didlast Halloween?
Or we give them questions thatare Notably deeper, like what
(29:39):
are you most grateful for aboutin your life?
Tell me about it.
Can you tell me about one ofthe last times you cried in
front of another person?
Right, and we just asked themto discuss those different
questions and we find two things.
So first, before they have thisconversation, we ask them to
tell us how they think it'sgonna go.
We asked them to predict howpositive they'll feel about the
(30:01):
conversation, how much they'lllike the other person, how
strong a bond they'll feel withthe other person, how awkward
the conversation is gonna be,mm-hmm, right, and then, after
they're done with theconversation, they come back and
they tell us how they actuallyfeel, how awkward it actually is
, how much actually like theother person much they enjoyed,
how strong about they felt okay,and we find a consistent gap
between those two things.
Over and over again, just likewe did on the train, people
thought these conversationsmight not be as good as keeping
(30:23):
themselves.
As far as we can tell, exactlythe opposite was true.
If we have people haveconversations with strangers,
just kind of, in general, theytend to go better than they
expect.
That's just a very, very robusteffect, and that gap between how
positive I think thisconversation is gonna be and how
positive it actually is, or,conversely, how negative and
(30:45):
awkward it's gonna be versus hownegative and awkward it
actually is the gap between thatis bigger for the deep
questions and it is for theshallow questions right, it's
bigger.
Interestingly, not hugely bigger.
So one thing that wassurprising to me actually Was
that even when we give peoplethe shallow questions, they
still like that more than theyexpect.
(31:06):
And the conversation I meankind of the nature of
conversation, the nature ofdyadic conversation, what you
and I are doing right now thenature of dyadic conversation
that often moves deeper overtime as you're in it.
So the very first time I everdid this I remember, never
forget this with our booth MBAstudents, we randomly assigned
half of this group of you know300 to have a relatively shallow
(31:29):
conversation, a relatively deepconversation.
They didn't know that they hadgotten different questions.
Okay, I'm then revealing this,you know, after we've conducted
this experiment, and I'm talkingabout what happened and I'm
telling the deep Condition sidethat you guys just had a deeper
conversation.
Then these folks over here whowere assigned to the shallower
condition and the shallowCondition people like rose up in
(31:52):
protest that way wait.
No, no, no we really had ameaningful conversation.
That question about Halloweenled to all of these other things
, right, and indeed, if we lookat the data, it kind of did that
is.
There was still a.
You know, people say they don'tlike small talk, and I think
that's right.
They don't like small talk,right.
So if you sticks to that.
But these conversations aboutsmaller topics that we had
(32:13):
people start in were, gateway isthe deeper things that they
talked about as they went on andthat made it more positive than
they expected.
But for the folks in that thatwe start off with the deep
questions, they go even deeper,they like it more and it's even
more of a surprise now to themhow positive the experience is
gonna go.
Max Chopovsky (32:31):
That's interesting.
So the slope is the same, thatI don't actually know.
It could be.
They just start.
The people that start shallowergo deeper, the people that
start deeper.
Nick Epley (32:39):
It could be or they start deep and they stay deep,
right, I don't know how muchdeeper.
Yeah right, tell me about thelast time you cried in front of
another person.
We're already kind of tuggingon your heart strings.
Yeah right, we're probably notgonna go a lot deeper than that.
So you ask an interestingquestion there.
We've never done as.
We only asked people beforethey go into the conversation
afterwards.
Some of my colleagues and otherresearchers in the field will
(33:01):
sometimes monitor this as theygo along.
We don't record theseconversations.
We don't want yeah yeah, peopleto to filter what they're doing
, like what we're doing rightnow.
We're gonna go out to your ninemillion subscribers, right?
We?
We don't do that to ourparticipants, so we just assess
it beforehand and afterwards.
But it would be interesting toask them how intimate or deep is
(33:21):
the conversation as it goes on?
I don't know what that'sactually looks like.
Max Chopovsky (33:26):
I feel like that's less important than the
fact that it starts deeper andstays deep, or Starts a bit
shallower but ends up deeper.
I think the point is depth.
Nick Epley (33:35):
Yeah, so what we could get that?
We could certainly get that inour shallow conditions if we
just ask people how intimatethey think the conversation is
gonna be in compare with howintimate they think it actually
is at the end.
Right, so that we could do that.
That I may do you.
You just, you've just improvedour research there.
We'll do that.
We'll do that in one of thesefuture, future conversations.
Max Chopovsky (33:57):
Sure you know, I Just got back from a cruise with
my family, yeah, and I spent alot of time with my older two
daughters just kind of wanderingthe ship and and there were
obviously a ton of other kids onthis Disney cruise and I found
it fascinating.
My middle one, who just turnedsix, I Found it fascinating to
(34:20):
observe her interact with otherkids because she is fearless
from a social perspective and myolder one is more shy.
My youngest one can't talk yet.
So yeah it was fascinating towatch her do this, because she
would find somebody they'd bewalking together, you know, to
(34:41):
the restaurant or to meet, acharacter kind of like sitting
together on a train.
Nick Epley (34:45):
Mm-hmm.
Max Chopovsky (34:46):
Obviously she's never taken your class, yeah,
but she just turns to the girland goes hey, I like your shoes,
right, yeah, I was like, oh,thank you, yeah.
And then she says to her whereyou from and I just observing
this being like I'm learning,yeah, like this is a reminder to
(35:07):
me that hey, start with acompliment, yeah, right, huge,
yeah.
That opens people up, then askan open-ended question.
But that is fascinating to meto see her do it naturally and
it's frankly, it makes me feelbetter about when we start as
(35:29):
kids, that we can actuallynaturally make connections,
depending on personality type.
Of course, by the end of thecruise she knew so many kids
because she was like I rememberyou from kids club, I remember
you from the restaurant and it'sall.
Because she doesn't have thissort of Stigma, this fear that
we would have when we're sittingon a train trying to talk to
somebody.
She doesn't have that.
She'll just make conversation.
(35:50):
She makes a different choice.
Nick Epley (35:52):
She doesn't know that there's another choice.
No, right, but she choosesdifferently than other kids do,
right?
So if she were quieter shewouldn't have made that
connection with the kid.
For sure she was right, forsure.
Our daughter, our youngestdaughter, 7 Lindsay, she has
Down syndrome and she has nosocial filter either and she
says hello to everybody, yeah,and To watch the world kind of
(36:14):
come alive when she's around isjust so heartwarming and it's so
informative too.
It's not something that endswith childhood.
I often think of it as a switch.
We all have it on our back andmost people walk around with it
turned off.
Yeah, they got their headphonesin, whatever they're looking at
(36:34):
their phone anymore.
But when someone engages withyou, it's like flipping the
switch on their back, like thewoman who sat down next to me
that morning.
She was quiet, right, she'dtaken her hat off, she was Alone
, keeping it to herself.
I made this joke boom, it waslike a switch.
She lit up, she smiled, shesaid hi, she came alive.
(36:55):
Yeah, right, there's a guy whohere is in the, in one of our
language departments.
I won't, won't embarrass him bycalling out his name here, but
he looks scary, like a scary guy.
He looks kind of like.
Close your eyes and imagineEastern Orthodox.
You're from Ukraine, right.
Imagine Russian or UkrainianOrthodox priest right, it's big,
(37:18):
long be.
He's actually French, but big,long, kind of gray scraggly
beard right and eyebrows thatonly point down the furrowed
brow right.
Yeah, that's what he looks likeand I Remember I got off the
train one morning.
We're both walking in.
I chat people up walking infrom the train all the time.
(37:38):
I met a guy named John thismorning, a guy named Nick two
days ago, and we were there,stopped at the side where he had
his headphones in and it looksscary as all get out right.
You know Ukrainian Orthodoxpriest and I just tapped him on
the shoulder and I wave and said, hi, I'm Nick.
And his face just lit up, likehe became a different person.
(37:58):
If you were to show these twopictures the pictures of him
side by side it's not obviousyou'd recognize this is even the
same guy.
Like his face is totallychanged.
And all because I reached outand engaged with him.
He lit up.
I mean, we are, we reciprocateeach other, that's just.
That is the way social lifeworks is through reciprocity.
And you know, if I had notengaged with him at that moment,
(38:22):
he would not have engaged backwith me at all.
Yeah right, I would never haveknown that he could look like
that.
And now every time I see him, wetalked to each other.
We, if I see him on the traingoing home.
We sit and talk to each otheron the way home.
I've learned super meaningfulthings about his life and his
family and we developed aconnection, all because I knew
he had that switch on his backand if I could flip it, be a
(38:46):
different person.
Yeah right, and you see thatwith kids kids who are, they
don't even know the other peopleswitch, they're just flipping
it all the time, right, they'rejust nice.
They're just nice, that's allit is.
They're nice and they'reinterested.
Go around like people up ourdaughter, lindsay, when she
leaves the class, right, so wepicked her up early all last
year.
The kids would knock on thewindow waving at her when she
(39:10):
was leaving.
She walked down the hall high,high, high.
Everybody knows who she is.
But it's not different.
As adults we just often chooseto behave differently.
We don't choose to flip peopleswitches like that.
Max Chopovsky (39:20):
Yeah, it's Fascinating how somebody could
change visually after you gettheir attention.
It's interesting when peoplesay to you, to anyone, when they
say, how are you?
I'm sure you probably looked atthis too when they say how are
(39:41):
you, Most people answer I'm good, I'm well whatever they say,
they don't answer.
Nick Epley (39:46):
right, they don't really answer.
Max Chopovsky (39:48):
Yeah, they're an autopilot.
Yeah, what's interesting is ifyou look at other cultures, like
the Soviet culture, like any ofthose countries, when people
say how are you, you'll get ananswer.
You'll find out how they are.
I have started doing it alittle differently.
Instead of saying how are you,which triggers this autopilot
(40:09):
response, I will say how's yourday going so far.
It's so funny because people'sreactions range from a double
take like well, that's not whatI'm used to hearing, or they'll
just go right into it if theyalso happen to be more of an
extrovert.
(40:30):
But I find that interactions areobviously more fulfilling when
you ask the question.
That demands a thought-outanswer.
If they ask you a question,what I've found begets the most
interesting conversation,irrespective of where you are,
(40:50):
is if you are vulnerable withthem.
So you can have an entirelysuperficial conversation Outside
of one of your studies where atleast there's some semblance of
, by at least one party, ofunderstanding what they're there
for.
There was a guy that I would runinto all the time, dropping my
little one off at daycare foryears and we would chat and have
(41:13):
these superficial conversations.
Then at one point we just stoodoutside the daycare and he
asked me something about mybrother.
My brother and I were.
Our relationship was not in agood place at the time and I
shared that with him Shortlyafter that.
He was like we should go outand get drinks at some point, as
(41:34):
I'm sure.
Well, you're probably anoutlier, but for most people
it's harder to meet people whenyou get older, when you have
kids, you're not in the sameplace at the same time.
Enough to sort of.
Nick Epley (41:43):
Yeah, it's hard, for me too it's hard when you're an
adult.
Max Chopovsky (41:46):
What I found is being vulnerable with relatively
random person made me moreappealing to them, at least
socially, when for the longesttime it was like it'd be nice to
get to hang out with him.
It seems like a cool guy.
But then nothing actuallyhappened until we were having a
generally superficialconversation.
(42:06):
And then I decided to bevulnerable.
In one moment he was like, ohcool.
Like A he's open enough withhimself that he's not just
trying to protect his feelingsand emotions.
B it's kind of interesting.
I'm dealing with somethingsimilar, but I feel like I guess
my gut would tell me and I knowyour data says otherwise but my
(42:27):
gut would tell me that if youare more vulnerable in a
conversation like that, it maybeaccelerates how quickly it goes
deeper.
Nick Epley (42:38):
Oh no, I think that's absolutely certainly
facilitates friendship andconnection.
We do that when we talk aboutmeaningful stuff.
There's no question about that.
What we struggled with a littlebit was getting people to stay
as shallow as we wanted them toTotally, totally.
Max Chopovsky (42:51):
They couldn't just talk about the?
Nick Epley (42:52):
weather forever.
But yeah, no, absolutelyopening up.
It's interesting to use theword vulnerable.
People use that word a lot andthey were quite know how to take
it.
So what I think people reallymisunderstand in social
interaction is the power ofreciprocity.
So in our deep conversations,what people will often say
they're nervous about is thatthey'll open up but the other
(43:14):
person won't totally open itback.
Occasionally that happens.
Occasionally folks will saythat happens, but super rare.
Instead, the typical experienceis I opened up and the shared
this thing and then they did too.
Yeah, from my perspective, atthis point I'm thinking yeah, of
course they did, becausethey're human beings.
That's what people do,overwhelmingly.
That's what people do.
Yeah, but it's not quite whatwe expect and it's not what we
(43:38):
fear will happen.
What we fear will happen isyou'll say something meaningful
about your brother and what.
This guy will laugh at you orsay boy, sucks to be you.
No, that's not the way realhuman beings are in conversation
.
But we fear that.
Well, we fear that.
That's right.
We fear that.
We unwisely fear that, in thesame way that we fear snakes and
spiders and we are not we fearpeople being meaner in
(44:02):
conversation than they actuallyare.
Max Chopovsky (44:05):
When you're sitting next to somebody and you
want to start a conversationwith them, what do you say to
them?
Nick Epley (44:12):
I want to reorient that question just a little bit.
It's not what I say that Ithink is so important, it's the
perspective I adopt on theconversation.
It's not so much what I saythat I think is important, it's
the perspective that I adopt onthe conversation.
What we find is that whenpeople take an interest in other
(44:33):
people, then they know what tosay.
What I say in any givenconversation varies from one to
another to another.
I don't always say the samething.
That woman that morning on thetrain had a red hat on the guy
who I met along the sidewalk hadseen him around a while, but
(44:53):
not recently, and so thatallowed me to connect with him.
That way, I like to sweater.
What you say to somebody canvary depending on the context
you're in.
When you adopt a perspective oftaking an interest in somebody,
you do what your daughter did.
Hey, I like those shoes.
Hey, where are you from?
Hey, what do you do?
Hey, how is your day going?
(45:14):
Not how are you, how is yourday going.
That comes from taking aninterest in somebody, just being
interested in who they are andwhat they're like and how they
are genuinely doing at thatmoment.
Then the rest of it, I think,flows more naturally.
That's what I tried to do alittle more.
I was more interested in otherpeople.
(45:37):
I was on a plane coming backfrom Atlanta a few weeks ago and
sat down next to somebody and Ididn't ask him how I was doing.
I asked him what had he beendoing?
He was in Cuba fishing Superinteresting, I love to fish.
Who were you with?
How was that experience?
How did you feel during that?
I asked about what it was liketo be him in those experiences
(46:00):
because I wanted to know,because I was interested.
Then all of that flowed in theconversation.
I think changing your mindsetabout the conversation might be
a more effective way to engagewith people than trying to focus
on exactly what to say, becauseexactly what you say varies
depending on who you're with.
But that interest can oftenprompt things that, whatever is.
Max Chopovsky (46:23):
It's a wonderful North Star that, I think, will
inform obviously everything yousay.
I ask because sometimes peoplesay, hey, how's it going?
I will find myself, before Ieven realize it, complaining
about something.
I do my best not to complainabout the weather or traffic.
Nick Epley (46:43):
I just don't hear that right Exactly.
Max Chopovsky (46:45):
They'll be like oh, the kids are driving me
crazy, or there's something thatwe're dealing with, or whatever
.
Then the interaction will beover and I'll just think to
myself damn, I sounded like acurmudgeon.
Inevitably some joke will comeup about alcohol.
Oh man, there's this big kidsevent.
They should have some booze forthe parents or something like
that.
I'll walk away from thatinteraction, being like damn, I
(47:09):
didn't seem to have any depth inthat interaction whatsoever.
I'll just be hard on myselfabout that.
You could have done better bybeing your more natural,
positive self and maybecomplaining a little less.
I'm surprised myself sometimeswhen I have those interactions.
Nick Epley (47:25):
Yeah, you respond with what you're thinking about.
In order to change how yourespond in an interaction, you
have to be thinking about theinteraction itself and how you
appear to others.
That can sometimes be hard.
Max Chopovsky (47:38):
See what I found is actually.
Upon thinking about it, Irealized that I respond with
something that I feel they wouldidentify with, even if it's
maybe a stretch from myemotional state.
But I say it because I feellike it's more likely to create
a connection.
Then I say it.
I'm like, well, that wasn't100% authentic.
(47:58):
I really mostly said it becauseI feel like they'll identify
with me.
Nick Epley (48:04):
I see.
So those are cases where youactually are trying to connect
and you think that's likely tobe effective or something.
Max Chopovsky (48:09):
Totally, that's what pops into your head,
totally.
Nick Epley (48:11):
Yeah, I don't know what to do with that.
Mostly what we're contrastingin our research are cases where
you have that engagement versushave none at all Totally, and
even complain with someone isprobably better than not at all.
Max Chopovsky (48:25):
Better than not at all yeah.
Nick Epley (48:26):
Nevertheless, sharing positive stories is good
.
Sometimes I'll ask people whatthey're looking forward to that
day or what was the coolestthing you did this summer.
Like, if I'm meeting somebody,I haven't seen him for a while
what was the coolest thing youdid this summer?
What are you looking forward tothis fall?
Sometimes you can directconversation that way if it
makes sense, if that's whatyou're interested in hearing
about.
That'll help.
Max Chopovsky (48:48):
I heard a question recently that was
wonderfully open-ended anddirect and immediately got
people thinking which is whatare you excited about right now?
People are like wait a second,think about that?
Nick Epley (48:58):
Yeah, right, it tells us what's on your mind if
it takes you a while to thinkabout it.
Right?
It tells you what you'realready thinking about.
Max Chopovsky (49:04):
It just demonstrates how unprepared to
answer such a question thatperson is.
I'm not operating in that stateright now.
You're asking me something thatrequires searching my database
and then kind of unlocking thatpart of myself for the purpose
of the conversation.
You've talked about this,obviously, in your research on
today, but if you were to sum itup, what is the moral of the
(49:28):
story that you told?
Nick Epley (49:30):
The moral is that the anxiety we have about
engaging with other people isjust off.
It's like our fear of snake orsharks.
It's justified in some cases,but often over-applied.
Because of that exaggeratedfear or anxiety about how these
interactions are going to go, wekeep ourselves overly lonely.
We refer to it, the phenomenon,as under-sociality.
(49:53):
We're not social enough for ourown well-being or for the
well-being of others around uswho, frankly, are also happier
when they are being engaged with.
The girl who your daughtercomplimented about her shoes was
much happier in that momentthan she would have been if your
daughter had not said anything.
I'm confident that the person Italked to on that morning had a
(50:15):
more positive trainer just likeI did because I engaged with her
to begin with than she wouldhave otherwise.
I'm 100% sure that the friendsI've made walking three blocks
from the train over there to myoffice here, are happier for
those little interactions.
When I get on the train goinghome I almost always know people
.
How cool is that I've gotfriends.
(50:36):
You make the world a littlesmaller.
But if you're reluctant to reachout and engage, if that
introverted inclination thatkeeps you from engaging, or even
as extroverts, I become a moreextroverted person because I've
made different choices.
It's just in the same way.
You can become somebody whoexercises more.
By choosing to exercise more,that's true.
(50:57):
I make the choice to engageothers more often, and it
sprinkles my life with morepositive experiences than it
would have otherwise.
It also has affected some ofour major life decisions too.
We've adopted three children,one in particular, most recently
, our youngest, lindsay.
We adopted after we lost a babywho had down syndrome six
(51:20):
months into my wife's pregnancy.
There is no question in my mindwhatsoever that this research
we've done and all these datapoints that I've seen made it
clear to me that if we openedourselves and brought her into
our lives, we did that, thatthings would go well.
We would make them go wellbecause that's what human?
(51:43):
beings tend to do the fear thatwe have about reaching out and
engaging or connecting withothers off of that misplaced and
we're under social for it, toour own detriment and to those
around us too.
Max Chopovsky (51:58):
Yeah, that is so true.
Nick Epley (52:02):
We're social animals right Social animals, but we
don't always act like it.
Max Chopovsky (52:06):
Right, we don't always act like it.
Technology allows us to not actlike it.
Nick Epley (52:09):
Some technology.
But even Stanley Milgram, who'sa famous psychologist, in the
1960s and 70s did experiments onobedience to authority that if
you took an intra-site class youwould have seen.
Right the shock generatorexperiments or many of your
listeners I'm sure have heard ofStanley Milgram's obedience
experiments.
When he got older.
In his research he gotinterested in anomalies of urban
(52:31):
life and one of them is thatfolks living in cities tend to
report being more lonely thanpeople living out in the country
.
Studying New York in the 1970s,he went down to the subway, saw
exactly the same thing that Isee on my trains in Chicago,
even after Steve Jobs hascreated the iPhone.
He saw it decades before thathappened.
He said the norm of socialbehavior on the subways is, on
(52:53):
the face of it, pretty clear.
One is that people take seatsfirst come, first serve.
The other is that there's anorm that nobody talks to each
other.
Those are in the 1970s.
It's interesting.
Yeah, I think modern life hasaccelerated some of that
disconnection, but is notentirely responsible to it.
It's down deep in all of usthat makes us a little nervous
(53:15):
to reach out and engage thatanxiety when you feel that.
I think it's helpful to knowit's probably off of it.
Max Chopovsky (53:22):
That's really good to know, because I do think
there are a lot of people outthere that just assume people
don't want to be bothered.
Nick Epley (53:28):
For sure, for sure.
That was the big reason whyfolks said they didn't want to
talk to strangers on the trainbecause they didn't think the
other person was interested intalking to them.
How would you know?
How would you know Well,they're not talking to me, but
you're also not talking to themeither If two people sitting
right next to each other whowould be delighted to talk, who
never talk because they thinkthe person sitting next to them
isn't interested because theyhaven't spoken up Totally.
(53:50):
Psychologists call thatpluralistic ignorance Plurality
of people being ignorant aboutwhat other people believe.
You get a trainload of folkswho'd be delighted to talk, who
never do because they thinkother people aren't interested.
They don't know, they don't findout if they don't say hi.
Max Chopovsky (54:05):
I had a guy on the show a few episodes back
named Jake Nickel, who is thefounder and CEO of Threadless
they're the crowdsourced t-shirtcompany.
He's very much an introvert.
Very much the story he told onthe episode is they went to
Sweden.
I believe they found out aboutthis tradition that, fun enough,
(54:30):
turned out to not be atradition at all, but started
this practice that he has tothis day, which is when they
have a meeting with new peoplethat they haven't met yet, they
will start that meeting by goingaround the table and giving a
five minutes inopsis of theirlife.
Nick Epley (54:45):
Nothing is off limits.
Max Chopovsky (54:48):
They'll go as deep as they're comfortable
going.
He goes after we have theseconversations.
We all feel so much closerbecause you realize how many
similar experiences you've hadto somebody else in the room and
it humanizes them.
He goes ever since that meeting, which was 10 years ago.
(55:11):
Wherever he is with his buddythat went with him, who was
working for him at the time.
They will do this.
It immediately accelerates thecloseness that they feel with
these people.
Nick Epley (55:23):
It just brings them together right away, for sure,
absolutely, no doubt.
Max Chopovsky (55:27):
Such an interesting.
Nick Epley (55:29):
I've experimented on that and confirmed that
observation.
I'm sure, Totally 100% sure.
Max Chopovsky (55:34):
Let's talk about stories telling just for a
minute.
You tell a lot of stories andI'm sure that you've noticed
that when you start a class witha story which I bet you do
quite a bit it engagesimmediately, grabs attention.
You've also heard a lot of goodstories, because you've met
some fascinating people.
(55:55):
What do good stories have incommon?
Nick Epley (55:59):
I think they engage you, they make you part of it as
a listener.
That's the big thing.
If I start a class, I rememberwhen I was in graduate school,
my advisor, Tom Gillovich, who'sat Cornell, was just a
masterful advisor and awonderful human being.
I remember watching I justwatched everything he did very
(56:20):
carefully because I was going tohave to do that myself.
I was going to have to teacheventually, do research
eventually.
He always started papers with astory which is very unusual in
academia, particularly with thetime but would start with an
individual story.
That right away, if you pulledyou into it so you could feel
(56:40):
like you were part of it, andthen you understood oh, I get
what the paper's about.
I don't even need to read therest of the data.
The rest of the data there isto support the cleverly crafted
story at the beginning In class.
I'll do that too.
He would always come up in frontof the room.
He crosses arm.
He had this way of standing,this Gillovich sort of stance.
He would start every lecturewith a story.
(57:02):
He would never wouldn't say hey, welcome to class.
Everybody, blah, blah.
He would just start writingwith a story.
The whole class would be quietand he would pull them in.
Pull them in A good story, Ithink, walks you along through
it so that you feel like you'rekind of there, kind of there too
(57:22):
, like you were there.
It's a challenge for me.
A lot of the stories that Iwant to tell in my classes, when
I teach, for instance, or whenI write, or when I talk about
research, they're aboutexperiments.
That's, 500 people doingsomething.
That's not a story there.
What you try to do when you'retelling that story, when you
(57:43):
describe in that experiment orthat research to people, is you
try to put them in theexperience as if they were in it
, that can feel themselves goingthrough the thing.
Even when you're describing anexperiment, if you tell it in a
way that allows my students tofeel like they're going through
the experiment, they see theresults, they're like get it.
(58:04):
Oh yeah, there it is, I get it.
I think a good story engagesthe listener so that you feel
like you're part of it.
Max Chopovsky (58:13):
Totally.
When I was in high school Itook a class at UofL and it was
intro to psych.
I've always been fascinatedwith psychology and human
behavior.
My favorite part of the classwas the story at the beginning,
a lot of the experiments.
You could actually just talkabout the experiment and it's an
interesting story.
The experiment that they didwith where they dressed up kids
(58:37):
as prison guards and anothergroup of kids as the inmates.
You just listen to that andyou're like, oh my God, what a
crazy story.
I've always found that sofascinating.
You can imagine yourself in it.
Yeah, I did think about that.
Those stories always grab me.
I think it's definitely a greatway to start.
What is one of your favoritebooks that gets storytelling
(59:00):
right?
Nick Epley (59:01):
I think Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is
a really good example.
This is a story about us hikingalong the Appalachian Trail.
For me as a researcher, as ascientist, I'm writing, trying
to communicate ideas, and Idon't do this in the way that he
(59:23):
does.
That book is super fun to readbecause he's walking the trail.
You feel like you're there withhim, you're feeling the
experience, but then he uses itto spin all of these tangents
about facts and real things,about bears and berries and the
(59:43):
history of the trail and whatnot.
It's like a tree with all thesebranches that stick off of them
where there's facts and realdata and stuff the kind of stuff
that I would like he gets tothose by through this thread of
walking down this trail.
I think that's an anybody whocan pass along those facts while
(01:00:10):
telling the story.
I mean any good, any reallyreally good nonfiction writers
does that masterfully.
I think he's really good atthat.
He does that a lot.
A lot of his books are of thatstory, that nature, but that one
in particular, because he washiking the trail, that was kind
of the story, that's what kindof pulled you in and he used all
(01:00:30):
these little signposts as hewas going along to go off in
these tanges.
That would be the whole rest ofthe chapter.
But you were engaged with thosebecause of this.
You were following this threadof the story that he was going,
and that is so I think you knowa lot of.
When we think about a goodstory, we often think about the
thread of that story itself.
(01:00:51):
Right, the narrow telling ofthat story, but really masterful
storytellers can hang all kindsof other stuff onto it.
That's impressive.
Max Chopovsky (01:01:00):
I love that.
That's impressive.
I meant to ask you, by the way,as an extrovert, is it hard for
you to write, given that you'realone when you're writing?
Nick Epley (01:01:11):
So I would back off on that.
I would even stop where you'rethat assumption.
I act extroverted, but I am notan extrovert.
To call somebody a particularpersonality, it seems to
describe something about whothey are and how they experience
the world, rather than thechoices they make.
(01:01:32):
So I would think of that as anexcursion.
I am someone who chooses toengage.
Is it hard for me to be alonein my office writing?
Yes, damn hard, it sucks.
It's hard for anybody to sitalone in their office and write
all the time.
That's hard.
I promise that some peoplewrite easier than others.
(01:01:52):
For sure, absolutely.
That's true.
There's a little bit of wrinklein variance, yes, but I promise
every author is happier whenthey're out with their buddies
at a bar having a beer on aFriday night.
I promise you.
Max Chopovsky (01:02:02):
They're happier.
Nick Epley (01:02:03):
I promise.
Everybody who writes is hard,hard.
Just sit there and write byyourself.
It's hard and it's not as funas hanging out with your kids.
They're going on a vacationwith folks you love or going out
to dinner with your spousethat's always way more fun.
So the huge effect for peopleis that they tend to be happier
(01:02:25):
when they're with others doingfun things than when they're
alone by themselves.
There is some wrinkle, somevariance in that experience when
you're alone and writing andstuff, but that tends to be
pretty small.
But yes, the hardest part aboutmy job is the amount of time I
spend in that office, 15 feetfrom where we are right now, by
(01:02:47):
myself.
Max Chopovsky (01:02:48):
It's so hard.
I find it excruciatingsometimes, once I get into the
flow, if I'm doing somethinglike writing or something like
that.
Nick Epley (01:02:55):
But you're engaged, absolutely yeah.
Max Chopovsky (01:02:58):
Then the time kind of flies quicker.
I mean everything you knowabout being in flow, but it
could be brutal.
Nick Epley (01:03:06):
It's very hard.
Yeah, it's very hard.
Max Chopovsky (01:03:08):
All right.
So last question If you had afew minutes with your
20-year-old self now, suspenddisbelief on the grandfather
paradox.
Suspend the assumption thatyour 20-year-old self might not
listen to you right now.
What would you say to your20-year-old self if you could
(01:03:31):
say one thing?
Nick Epley (01:03:33):
I think I'll say keep at it.
One thing I tell my kids a lotis that they will make
themselves happy.
I think that's something thatwe don't intuitively believe.
We believe that we have to makethe right kinds of choices as
(01:03:54):
we go along and things have towork out.
I was in graduate school or incollege when I was in my 20s
right, and thought if I maybeget this girl to agree to marry
me which she did, so we've beenmarried for 27 years If I can
get this grad school applicationto work out, all that stuff
happens, then I'll be happy, andif it doesn't happen, I'll feel
(01:04:15):
like hell.
You kind of need that to keepmoving along.
Yes, but at the same time, thedata on well-being and happiness
suggests that people kind ofmake themselves happy with their
own outcomes once they'recommitted to them.
So had I not gotten intograduate school and done
something else, I'd have figuredout how to make myself happy
(01:04:37):
over there too, and I think alot of the anxiety that I had
when I was younger about thingsnot working out was just kind of
misplaced.
If I hadn't gotten into graduateschool, I'd have done something
else and I would have figuredout how to make myself happy
there too.
And if Jen had decided shewasn't going to agree to marry
me when we were juniors incollege, we'd get married after
(01:04:58):
we graduated.
But that was when I proposed toher.
She said she wasn't going to dothat.
Well, I would have carried onand I would have found somebody
else I hope, who I would havebeen connected to and try to
tell my kids that too, that whenin life commit yourself to
something, you will makeyourself happy with that thing.
(01:05:19):
You'll figure out a way to makeyourself happy with that thing.
I think that would have taken.
I don't know that that wouldhave changed anything that
actually did.
But so much of our life, justlike with social interactions,
comes with this kind of razor'sedge of anxiety that we live
with.
But I think it's just a littletoo sharp.
Max Chopovsky (01:05:40):
Yeah.
Nick Epley (01:05:41):
It's a little too sharp.
Yeah, I support a family.
I had a lot of support aroundthings Before I went to graduate
school, before I went tointerview for my first job as a
Princeton.
I was a wreck.
I didn't sleep for two weeks.
I lost like 20 pounds because Icouldn't eat.
I was just total wreck.
Max Chopovsky (01:05:59):
Yeah.
Nick Epley (01:06:01):
Like that was needless misery.
I didn't get that job.
I did a lot of the life Icarried on.
I did fine, All right.
So I think I would have told my20-year-old self just to keep
at it.
Things turn out okay often.
Max Chopovsky (01:06:17):
Perspective that we can only get, I think, when
we get older.
Nick Epley (01:06:21):
Yeah, I think yeah, so you have the benefit of
looking back and seeing howthings did work out, right?
Yeah, and it's easy to imagineif someone else had changed,
things would have been maybe notso great, but they would have
just been different.
They would have just beendifferent.
I try to remember that asapparent, with my kids.
That, and it's hard for me toworry about how things are going
(01:06:44):
to turn out.
And, oh my gosh, are theychanneling themselves in this
direction?
That's going to be a totaldisaster and I have to
constantly remember myself.
They'll make themselves happy,they'll figure it out and all
likely they will figure it out.
Obviously we have to be safe.
I mean, let's be careful ofcertain things.
But they'll figure it out,they'll make themselves happy
(01:07:05):
about it.
So I would have encouragedmyself to keep at it.
Max Chopovsky (01:07:09):
Yeah, we all make our own happiness.
Nick Epley (01:07:11):
We do.
I think so.
I think so we can do better.
I think our research suggestsour ways.
We can be a little happier, butin general folks get along okay
.
Max Chopovsky (01:07:20):
Yeah, what a great note to end on Nick.
Thanks man.
Yeah, this was so great.
Nick Epley (01:07:26):
It was a very fun conversation.
I'm going to meet you and shoutout to Mark Agnew one of your
prior guests who connected ustogether.
I'm grateful to Mark for that.
Max Chopovsky (01:07:32):
Agnew is the man.
Yeah, I'm really happy heconnected us.
Well, that does it.
Nick Epley.
Professor, author, researcher,avid outdoorsman and liver of
life to the fullest.
Thank you for being on the show.
Thanks, max, for show notes andmore.
(01:07:53):
Head over to MossPodorg.
Find us on Apple Podcasts,spotify, wherever you get your
podcast on.
This was Morrill of the Story.
I'm Max Jepowsky.
Thank you for listening.
Talk to you next time.
A.
This is Moral of the Story interesting people
telling their favorite shortstories and then breaking them
down to understand what makesthem so good.
I'm your host, max Dripofsky.
Today's guest is Nick Epley,the John Templeton Keller
Distinguished Service Professorof Behavioral Science and
Faculty Director of the RomanFamily Center for Decision
Research at the University ofChicago Booth School of Business
(00:24):
.
Aside from his professorialduties, nick is a bestselling
author and an award-winningresearcher whose work has
appeared in the New York Times,the Wall Street Journal, cnn,
wired, npr and many others.
He's been named a professor towatch by the Financial Times,
one of the world's best 40 under40 business school professors,
by poets and quants, and one ofthe 100 most influential in
(00:48):
business ethics by Ethosphere,among many other honors.
Nick's class at Booth,designing a Good Life, is one of
the most highly rated andsought-after classes at one of
the most highly rated andsought-after business schools in
the country, at a grad schoolknown for its quant focus.
Students have come to love theclass, where principles include
doing good, feels surprisinglygood.
(01:08):
Perhaps this is because Nickunderstands one of the most
important life lessons it's notall about the numbers.
The real KPIs are harder toquantify good conversations,
meaningful relationships, acareer you love making an impact
, and as Nick teaches hisstudents, there isn't much of a
trade-off between self-interestand social interest.
(01:29):
It's a refreshingly atypicalperspective.
But Nick is a refreshinglyatypical educator.
Growing up in Cedar Rapids, iowa, and a family full of farmers,
nick fell in love with theoutdoors at an early age.
He played football in collegebut, fortunately for the
thousands of students whoselives he would positively impact
, he broke his nose in his firstgame and decided that academics
(01:50):
might offer a more promisingand less violent future career
than the offensive line.
After earning a PhD inpsychology from Cornell, nick
began his teaching career atHarvard.
His first day was September 12,2001.
Needless to say, lecturing wasnot top of mind and he and his
PhD seminar students sat aroundthe table and just talked,
(02:11):
processing their emotions in thewake of the terrorist attacks.
It was this vulnerable,down-to-earth, real-world
approach to education that gotNick voted one of Harvard's
favorite professors three yearsin a row.
And although Nick hasn't foundhimself on the gridiron of late,
the father of five hasmaintained his love for the
outdoors, turning his suburbanChicago home into an urban farm
(02:33):
with fruit trees, a large garden, a flock of chickens and a
large family to help tend it all.
So when he's not teachingbehavior, you might find him
feeding his chickens, splittingwood and picking fruit.
And that's Nick's way of livinga well-designed life teaching
others about perspective whilemaintaining a healthy one
himself.
Nick, welcome to the show.
(02:53):
Thank you, max.
Nick Epley (02:54):
That was lovely, I need to hire you as my PR guy.
Max Chopovsky (02:57):
That's great.
I love writing the bios.
So you are here to tell us astory Before we get into it.
Set the stage.
Is there anything we shouldknow about the story before we
get started?
Nick Epley (03:11):
So the story seems small but, like, I think, most
good stories, it grew intosomething really, really big for
me and it's something I thinkabout a lot.
It's one small experience andit was one that I never would
have imagined I would reallyremember.
(03:32):
It's one that's touched myprofessional life.
It kind of changed thedirection of my research over
the last decade or so, but it'shit me in home a lot too, hit my
personal life a lot, and it haschanged the way I live my life
more than any other researchI've ever done.
Stem from this, I think, fromthis little experience.
Max Chopovsky (03:55):
That sounds profound.
Yeah, all right, let's get intoit.
Nick Epley (03:58):
Tell me a story.
So I take the train into Chicagoevery day from my home in
Flossmore on the far south side,where we have the fruit tree
and garden and chickens, andevery day I see the same kind of
drill, and I don't pay it awhole lot of mind.
One morning, though, I got onthe train and I just noticed the
situation in a way I kind ofhadn't noticed it before.
(04:21):
So I was writing my first book,which is called Mindwise, and
the book is all about theresearch that I do here as a
behavioral scientist, studyingsocial cognition.
These are the inferences wemake about each other's thoughts
and beliefs and attitudes, andmostly I study how we screw that
up and misunderstand each otherin lots of different ways.
And this capacity to connectwith or to think about the minds
(04:44):
of others is the thing thatreally makes us unique on this
planet as human beings.
It's the reason our brains arethree times bigger than our
nearest primate, relative to thechimpanzee, and yet and it's
also the thing, it turns outthat makes us happiest when we
connect with others, we tend tobe happier than when we're alone
.
Being alone is one of the mostmiserable states that we can be
in.
And yet every morning I get onthis train and I see the same
(05:09):
drill happen time after timeafter time.
And this morning.
I find that morning I finallynoticed it.
Everybody gets on the train,lines up along the outside
window, hugging that window asif it's like the last safe space
on the planet.
And then people come in and sitdown next to them and we've got
a 45-minute ride into Chicagoand for those 45 minutes people
(05:33):
sit there and essentially ignoreeach other, just totally ignore
each other.
And this one morning I saw thisand it clicked in me that this
just seems weird.
What are we all doing here?
Is this really the best we cando?
We're all sitting with ourneighbors, other folks who are
perfectly delightful or just asinteresting as we are, and here
(05:54):
we all are sitting there staringat our stupid phones or reading
a book or whatever other thingwe think we might like to do at
this time.
And I'd ridden the train foryears by then.
But this morning it just struckme as odd and so I decided to
try something else.
That morning a woman had gottenon the train.
(06:16):
I'm usually the last one to havesomeone sit down next to me on
a train car if I'm riding bymyself.
I'm not a kind of guy.
Somebody comes and naturallysits down next to me.
I'm kind of big.
I don't know, I'm often avoided.
But eventually a woman came andsat down next to me.
She was probably in her 50s Iwould have been in my upper 30s
(06:38):
at that time, or so mid to upper30s and she came and sat down
next to me.
She had this beautiful red haton it's a big red hat and took
it off when she sat down next tome African American woman and I
decided I'm going to trysomething different today.
I'm just going to try to have alittle conversation here.
So I did and you can imaginethe feeling of sitting there.
(07:02):
Somebody comes down, you'regoing to have a conversation.
It was like I was hitting awall there.
I had this anxiety.
Maybe she's going to think I'mweird or trying to hit on her or
something, or she's going to beuncomfortable.
What do I have to say to thisperson?
She doesn't seem interested,she's not talking to me.
All this anxiety that we havein many of these social
(07:23):
situations about reaching outand engaging, I had right there.
Nevertheless, I tried.
I remember making a joke abouther hat.
I said something like I loveyour hat, I've got one Just like
it, and she kind of chuckled.
I said hello, I introducedmyself, said who I was, she
introduced herself and then forthe rest of the trip into Hyde
(07:44):
Park it was about a half hourride.
We had a perfectly lovelyconversation.
I asked her about her job.
I remember telling me that shefelt kind of stuck in her job.
She didn't really like it.
I asked her is this kind ofyour dream job?
No, but she wasn't quite surehow she was going to get out.
She's got kids.
She needed support though.
So she was feeling kind oftrapped and we really kind of
opened up to each other in thatconversation and it was nice.
(08:09):
It wasn't necessarily the bestconversation I'd ever had, but
it was nice and certainly nicerthan a typical train ride I
would have had sitting there allby myself, which would have
passed totally uneventfully.
I mean, I remember it.
Now, 13, 14 years later, Iremember that conversation and I
(08:29):
got off the train and Iremember distinctly thinking
that this might not be unusual.
We've all, I think, hadexperiences where we didn't want
to go to the party but we wentand we were happy we did.
Or we didn't want to make thatcall or have that conversation,
(08:50):
but, god, we were happy, we did.
And here on this train ride.
I was a little nervous abouthaving this conversation Nobody
else was talking, but I was gladthat I did and the conversation
.
What really struck me is thatthe conversation wasn't just
good, it was surprisingly good,and it's that contrast that I
think really matters.
That is, the conversation wasbetter than I expected it would
(09:14):
have been.
Now, as a researcher I'm abehavioral scientist for living,
a single anecdote, a singlestory like that doesn't tell us
much.
Like well, whatever, she wasnice, we found stuff to talk
about.
That was just a one-off thing.
We have no idea, right, what ifI did that a hundred times?
(09:35):
What would that conversation belike?
I don't know, and so, as ascientist, I'm always nervous
about individual stories andanecdotes like that because we
don't know what it means.
Maybe it was just unique to meand it wouldn't show up in other
places or whatever.
But I remember distinctlyfeeling that this feels like
something that could be reliableand robust.
(09:57):
I had a few reasons why Ithought that might be true.
I remember walking the fewblocks here at a campus thinking
about why this might besomething that doesn't just
happen to me but might happen toother people in general with
any kind of conversation.
And that conversation then,when I was done with that, came
(10:18):
back to my office and I startedhaving conversations with our
graduate students, julianaSchroeder in particular.
I was one of my graduatestudents at the time.
We decided to run an experiment.
Look, you see what happens whenwe just ask folks to do this,
like what I did, but we haveother people do it.
Do it a bunch of times and wefound that my experience didn't
(10:39):
seem to be so unique.
On average, people reportedhaving a more positive commute
when we randomly assigned themto a condition where they
engaged in conversation withsomebody than when they kept to
themselves.
And yet when we asked aseparate group of people to tell
us how they thought they wouldfeel, they thought they would
feel happier keeping tothemselves than they were
talking, which makes sense.
(10:59):
Now, why nobody talks on atrain if you think it's going to
be less pleasant talking thankeeping yourself?
Of course, who keeps yourselfevery time?
But from that one little storyit sparked a decade and a half
now of research where we findthat effect that people find
(11:20):
social engagement and socialinteraction not just to be good
but surprisingly good.
We find it over and over andover, and, over and over again.
I think people aren't socialenough for their own well-being.
That was the morning I wasinspired to do all this work.
Max Chopovsky (11:39):
That transcends personality profiles, because
some people are introverts.
Nick Epley (11:44):
There are a few things that are more widely
misunderstood than thatphenomena of introversion and
extroversion.
There's a whole cottageindustry of research on this.
Now it turns out we didn't findany differences between
introverts and extroverts andhow much they enjoyed their
conversations.
This was true in the US.
This was true in London as well, when we replicated that
(12:05):
experiment there.
It's true in calves leavingmidway airport buses downtown.
We've replicated this a ton oftimes now.
Your level of trait introversionor extroversion doesn't matter,
for how much you enjoy theexperiences of these
conversations.
What we sometimes although notalways reliably, but others also
find is that what personalitydoes predict are your beliefs
(12:27):
about how much you're going toenjoy these things.
Oh, interesting.
The way to think aboutpersonality is not a description
of your experience, but ratherof your expectations and choices
.
An extrovert isn't somebody wholikes talking, whereas an
introvert likes doing thingsalone.
An extrovert is someone whochooses to go out and interact,
whereas an extrovert chooses tokeep to themselves.
(12:50):
It's about expectations, notabout experiences.
That's what personality isreally about.
There are lots of myths aboutintroversion and extroversion
Like it's about experience.
Introverts get their happinessfrom quiet pursuits, whereas
extroverts get their happinessfrom connected.
That's just not true, just flatout not true.
(13:11):
If that were true, you'd see afew things.
One thing you'd see is thatpersonality wouldn't be
correlated with happiness,because extroverts get their
happiness from certain things,extroverts get their happiness
from other things, but therewouldn't be a meaningful
difference between them.
We've known now for 50 yearsthat that's not true.
The first study that actuallylooked at the personality
(13:33):
correlates a well-being found ahuge correlation between
extroversion and happiness.
Extroverts are happier.
Full stop Correlations about asbig as the correlation between
the heights of fathers and sons.
Max Chopovsky (13:43):
Big effect Because the extroverts have an
expectation that they will enjoythose conversations more and
therefore they tend to have themmore.
Nick Epley (13:49):
That's exactly right .
Extroverts are happier becausethey act like extroverts more.
If you look over the course ofany given day, you behave in
some ways more extroverted.
We're talking right now.
It's a little more extrovertedexperience here, but before we
were doing this you were settingthis up by yourself, quiet,
alone, over the course of theday.
We vary in how we behave.
(14:10):
Sometimes we're outgoing,sometimes we're quiet.
I'm teaching a class.
Sometimes Other times I'msitting in my office typing.
If researchers come to you andjust tap you on the shoulder,
they don't actually do that.
They tap you on your phone.
They just right and ask you heyMax, how are you feeling right
now?
Hey Max, what are you doingright now?
What you find is that peopletend to report feeling more
(14:30):
positive and less negative whenthey're behaving more
extroverted than when they'rebehaving more introverted.
That's true regardless ofwhether you tend to be an
extrovert or introvert.
Introverts are also happier atthe periods of their day,
feeling more positive in theperiods of the day where they're
acting more outgoing than whenthey're not.
You also see this in experiments.
If you ask people kind of likeweeded on the trains, if you
(14:54):
randomly assign them to act in away that's more extroverted
versus introverted.
There's now kind of a cottageindustry of experiments, of
these sorts of positive activityinterventions, where you just
randomly assign people in amoment, right like in a lab
study, or over the course of aday, or on several days, over
(15:15):
the course of a week or over acouple of weeks, to act in
different, particular ways.
You ask people to act moreextroverted today than you might
normally, or act moreintroverted today than you might
normally.
What you find over and over andover again is that asking
people to act more extroverted,whether in the moment, over the
course of a week, over thecourse of a couple of weeks,
makes them feel more positive.
(15:35):
Again, that's true regardlessof how extroverted or
introverted you are.
The only experiment I've everseen that finds this activity
intervention, this encouragementto act extroverted, affects
extroverts and introvertsdifferently, is a study where
the introverts just didn'tfollow instructions.
To ask more extroverted is whathappened?
(15:58):
Right, they just couldn't do it, for whatever reason, they just
didn't do it.
And so the effect, you know,your willingness to take the
drug in this case, or to followthe instructions, was correlated
with how extroverted you were.
So extroverts went out andacted more extroverted and they
got happier.
The introverts didn't do asmuch what they were asked to do
and they didn't get happier.
So the extent to which you felthappy was a function of the
(16:20):
extent to which you followed theinstructions.
The extent to which youfollowed the instructions was a
function of how extroverted youwere.
It's a little like doctorsfinding that exercise only
improves your health when youactually do it.
That's.
The only exception that I'veever found was one where
people's choice to followthrough on the thing was
affected by their personality.
Max Chopovsky (16:42):
Well, I mean, I don't think that has a good
impact on the experiment,because the experiment is if you
choose to follow it, if youchoose to follow the
instructions, then you will getthe sort of predicted outcome.
Nick Epley (16:51):
Yes, although for psychologists, if you're
interested in what effect thisinstruction has on how you feel
a week or two weeks down theroad, whether you follow the
instruction or not does matterfor the effect of this
instruction on your outcome.
But it is also the case that ifyou do follow the instruction,
if you do act more extroverted,you're going to tend to feel
more positive, and that's whyextroverts tend to be happier,
(17:12):
because they tend to have moreof these positive outgoing
experiences.
And this is not our experimentson the train or these
experiments I'm describing toyou here don't suggest that
there's a certain way everybodyshould behave.
But it's important, I think, tounderstand where our feelings
and our experiences and ouremotions come from, to be able
to understand ourselvesaccurately, because you can then
(17:34):
make wiser choices.
So if I'm sitting on the trainI'm having kind of a bad day, I
know how to make that better.
Sitting right there next to mea source of well-being, right
there it's crazy that thepandemic obviously increased
people's isolation.
Max Chopovsky (17:52):
We know that, obviously when everybody was in
lockdown.
But I think the longer termeffect of the pandemic one of
the many is that it gave rise toa number of services that
actually facilitate fewerinteractions.
You can order food online andnever even interact with your
(18:13):
delivery person.
In fact, they would tell you onAmazon, like, don't come within
six feet of them.
You can order your coffeeonline and just go and pick it
up without talking to a singleperson, and I was thinking about
this the other day.
It's actually incredible howefficient we can be with our day
if we don't go out of our wayand order everything on our
computer.
You and I could have had thisconversation online.
(18:34):
I could have ordered my food atMedici's in advance and just
picked it up, and so we actuallyget to save a lot of time.
As a result of all that, itbecomes very efficient.
But I found, as you would expect, that I was less happy because
I was spending so much time bymyself, clicking, clicking,
(18:54):
clicking and minimizing myinteractions with other people.
So here's a textbook example ofthis when I am by myself, it
feels miserable and I need to bearound people, whether it's
school travel trips, which I'vedone, or I did this program
called Goldman Sachs 10,000Small Businesses.
When I was running my videoproduction company, I was around
(19:17):
30 other Type A CEO, founder,extroverts.
There probably weren't eventhat many takeaways that lasted
from that time, from that class,but all of those times I
remember being happiest, beingat my best, and so it's just so
interesting how, in an attemptto help people, social distance
(19:42):
as a result of the pandemic, wehave accelerated these trends of
isolation.
I mean, I don't know how manyyou've probably looked at this,
but in many, many years we'veprobably accelerated them.
Nick Epley (19:53):
Yeah, so for decades in fact, this has been
happening.
So throughout most of humanhistory, life was a deeply
social affair.
Every day was spent in thepresence of other people.
You had to coordinate withother people for anything.
Most market-based exchangeswere done through reciprocity
and bartering.
Right, you scratch my back, Iscratch yours.
I for an eye, tooth for a tooth, back scratching and eye
(20:13):
gouging.
Deeply social affairs that'show life happened when people
grew up.
They didn't move out and starttheir careers in some far off
city.
They moved over so that theycould stay in the household and
welcome their family as part ofit.
Everybody was local.
The concept, even the use of theword loneliness in the English
(20:34):
language didn't really evenemerge until around the 1800s.
Before then, lonely would beused to describe aloneness,
oneliness, right being by likesolitude, which is not
inherently inversive If you areengaged in something alone.
I spent a lot of time outdoorsin the woods hunting fish and do
(20:55):
those sorts of things.
Being in solitude alone is notinherently aversive, but before
about the 1800s people didn'tseem to feel lonely that much.
That subjective experience offeeling disconnected from other
people or feeling isolated fromother people, or feeling like
(21:17):
you didn't have people aroundwho would help or support you
wasn't common enough for peopleto write about.
It wasn't until the 1800s thatthis other usage of the word
aloneness, loneliness, onelinessstarted to be used.
Now dictionaries before, in the1600s, dictionaries only had
(21:37):
one definition of lonely oralone.
It was being isolated or alonebeing by yourself, being
objectively disconnected fromothers.
Now our dictionaries have two.
They have lonely, thesubjective state of feeling
disconnected from others, thepsychological state.
And, of course, you can feellonely in a crowd of other
people.
You can feel lonely.
(21:58):
Even when you're in a marriageor with your family.
You can still feel lonely.
Our dictionaries now have thesetwo different meanings and I
think there's just a ton oftechnology that we have built
over years that help us to bemore independent from each other
, and there are great benefitsto that.
(22:18):
So I can get in a car and drivesomewhere and I don't need to
work with somebody else to helpget someplace.
I can go to the grocery storeand pay with money.
I don't have to go to thefarmer next door and barter this
for that thing, Because all ofthis just so much technology has
air conditioning, heating,almost everything has allowed us
(22:41):
to live more independently fromeach other.
Technology in recent yearsphones and computers and stuff
have accelerated that to anexponential degree, I would say.
And the pandemic did so tooenabled independence because we
had to be, and there are greatbenefits to that.
(23:01):
It is a great benefit to beable to order your food before
you get there if you want, ifyou want to be efficient, or be
able to hop in your car anddrive somewhere else you want,
or order stuff online.
All of that's great.
But there's also a cost to thatthat I think can be harder to
observe.
You could now spend entire daysalone if you chose to never
interact with another person,and you wouldn't necessarily
(23:22):
know that that was problematicfor you Not necessarily.
You might think that's going tobe much more efficient.
So you choose to do that.
You don't feel the outcomes ofthat, except in a slow crawl
over the long run.
It seems things seem to be alittle off.
I'm just in this funk.
(23:43):
I don't really know why I'm up.
I don't have a whole lot to getexcited for.
A lot of that comes from justbeing disconnected from other
people and that's easy toundervalue.
In fact, psychologists foruntil I would say, around 1950
or so also devalued,underestimated.
(24:03):
The importance of socialconnection, of being with others
, for our health, for ourhappiness, for our well-being,
for our flourishing.
A Maslow famously created thishierarchy of needs, which turns
out not to be true.
It never was supported by theempirical evidence.
Even though it's woven our wayinto our psyche, it turns out to
be nonsense Interesting.
Max Chopovsky (24:23):
I know that.
Nick Epley (24:24):
Yeah, so belonging is on the third level.
There it's like the bronzemedal of importance.
You couldn't care about otherpeople until you have food needs
met, basic needs of food andsleep and so on.
And then the second level,safety and security, and you had
to have that satisfied beforeyou could start caring about
(24:46):
belonging.
He put that in kind of thirdposition.
Did it suggest that's not trueReally?
Max Chopovsky (24:53):
What could you think about being with other
people when you're starving orwhen you're not safe?
Nick Epley (24:58):
So it's not that certain goals don't focus your
attention they do.
When you're starving, you focuson food.
When you're feeling unsafe, youfocus on being safe.
When you're lonely, you focuson other people.
So it's not that those goalsdon't focus your attention they
do.
It's just that they don't seemto operate in any sort of
priority.
It's not that a person who'shungry can't also, at the same
(25:22):
time, feel alone or isolated ordesperately alone.
It's not that a person whofeels unsafe can't also wish, or
feel like they wish, they werebetter connected to others.
Those things can all happen atthe same time.
Max Chopovsky (25:40):
Maybe his perspective is those lower
levels Would crowd out the upperlevels, because if you're
feeling isolated and you're alsohungry and somebody's chasing
you to try to eat you, you'renot gonna think about connecting
with other people until you getaway from that threat.
Nick Epley (25:54):
Yeah, so that was his intuitive perspective.
This makes intuitive sense.
It just doesn't support aboutthe data.
It predicts a negativerelationship.
So people who feel, forinstance, hungry, shouldn't rate
their social connection asbeing as important.
Right, you should see anegative relationship between
these needs, and that just isn'ttrue.
Interesting, isn't true?
Max Chopovsky (26:15):
so let me ask you this how important is the depth
of the conversation to creatingthe intended effect?
In other words, if you talkabout the weather, that's one.
Or if you talk about sort ofwhat makes you happy, what makes
you unhappy.
When the woman said, you know,it started sharing some for
personal problems with you, thatseems a bit unusual.
(26:38):
But I think that's where sortof the deeper connections are
made.
But I want to understand yourperspective is the depth of the
conversation important?
Nick Epley (26:46):
Yeah, we've done a ton of research on this.
In fact, all of our incomingMBA students, in fact, this fall
they're doing a session with meon building Culture, on culture
, here at booth.
That's really about buildingcommunity, and they're gonna do
this experiment I'm about todescribe to you in just a minute
.
So We've been doing thisresearch now for a number of
(27:07):
years and I guess one way tothink about it is that almost
every, almost every socialinteraction From whether I talk
to you to what do we talk aboutto do I express this kind
thought.
I, you know, give you a sharecomplement with to you, express
gratitude to you.
All of these social engagementscome with a moment where you
have to decide do I?
(27:27):
reach out and engage, or do Ihold back and avoid?
These are classic approachavoidance Decisions that people
have and they're, you knowdifferent weights that you feel
right.
Sometimes you'd want to reachout but you're a little nervous
about this right and essentiallythe way to characterize the
research that we've done overthe last decade and a half or so
that's now published and wellover a dozen empirical papers,
(27:52):
is that that approach, avoidancecalculation we seem to just get
wrong.
And the weight we put, the fearwe have About approaching others
, the avoidance motivation thatwe have it's just a little too
strong, not wildly so right now.
We're not idiots.
Recognize somebody coming downthe alley with a knife towards
(28:13):
us?
I want to avoid that guy, right?
Yeah, it's not that we'reidiots about it, it's just we're
off of it that thisconversation, like I had with
the woman on the train thatmorning, it's a little worried
how it would go.
It's a little off on that turnout didn't even need to be that
worried.
Yeah, when we're thinking aboutwhat to talk about with
somebody, we might want to havea meaningful conversation.
I want to find out, right,what's your life really like?
(28:34):
Tell me about who you are, whatyou care about.
Maybe you don't want to talk,maybe so too personal, maybe
it's a little nervous about that.
It looks like we're a littleoff about that too.
So in our experiments, what wedo is we Ask people to have
different kinds of conversations, and sometimes we do this by
letting them decide what to talkabout.
So we have them write down somequestions.
(28:57):
We did this in Millennium Parkin downtown Chicago.
So if you're ever out there ona nice summer afternoon you
might see us out there runningexperiments.
We have them write down acouple questions that you know
they might talk to somebody elseabout in conversation and we
pair them up with somebody elsedown the park that day too and
have that Conversation.
Or we have them come up with acouple of questions that are
deeper than they would normallyask another person about
(29:18):
Conversation, and then we justhave them discuss one of those
two sets of questions.
Or we give them differentquestions, right.
So in some experiments we havepeople relatively shallow
questions, right, tell me aboutthe last time you walked for
more than an hour.
Or can you tell me what you Didlast Halloween?
Or we give them questions thatare Notably deeper, like what
(29:39):
are you most grateful for aboutin your life?
Tell me about it.
Can you tell me about one ofthe last times you cried in
front of another person?
Right, and we just asked themto discuss those different
questions and we find two things.
So first, before they have thisconversation, we ask them to
tell us how they think it'sgonna go.
We asked them to predict howpositive they'll feel about the
(30:01):
conversation, how much they'lllike the other person, how
strong a bond they'll feel withthe other person, how awkward
the conversation is gonna be,mm-hmm, right, and then, after
they're done with theconversation, they come back and
they tell us how they actuallyfeel, how awkward it actually is
, how much actually like theother person much they enjoyed,
how strong about they felt okay,and we find a consistent gap
between those two things.
Over and over again, just likewe did on the train, people
thought these conversationsmight not be as good as keeping
(30:23):
themselves.
As far as we can tell, exactlythe opposite was true.
If we have people haveconversations with strangers,
just kind of, in general, theytend to go better than they
expect.
That's just a very, very robusteffect, and that gap between how
positive I think thisconversation is gonna be and how
positive it actually is, or,conversely, how negative and
(30:45):
awkward it's gonna be versus hownegative and awkward it
actually is the gap between thatis bigger for the deep
questions and it is for theshallow questions right, it's
bigger.
Interestingly, not hugely bigger.
So one thing that wassurprising to me actually Was
that even when we give peoplethe shallow questions, they
still like that more than theyexpect.
(31:06):
And the conversation I meankind of the nature of
conversation, the nature ofdyadic conversation, what you
and I are doing right now thenature of dyadic conversation
that often moves deeper overtime as you're in it.
So the very first time I everdid this I remember, never
forget this with our booth MBAstudents, we randomly assigned
half of this group of you know300 to have a relatively shallow
(31:29):
conversation, a relatively deepconversation.
They didn't know that they hadgotten different questions.
Okay, I'm then revealing this,you know, after we've conducted
this experiment, and I'm talkingabout what happened and I'm
telling the deep Condition sidethat you guys just had a deeper
conversation.
Then these folks over here whowere assigned to the shallower
condition and the shallowCondition people like rose up in
(31:52):
protest that way wait.
No, no, no we really had ameaningful conversation.
That question about Halloweenled to all of these other things
, right, and indeed, if we lookat the data, it kind of did that
is.
There was still a.
You know, people say they don'tlike small talk, and I think
that's right.
They don't like small talk,right.
So if you sticks to that.
But these conversations aboutsmaller topics that we had
(32:13):
people start in were, gateway isthe deeper things that they
talked about as they went on andthat made it more positive than
they expected.
But for the folks in that thatwe start off with the deep
questions, they go even deeper,they like it more and it's even
more of a surprise now to themhow positive the experience is
gonna go.
Max Chopovsky (32:31):
That's interesting.
So the slope is the same, thatI don't actually know.
It could be.
They just start.
The people that start shallowergo deeper, the people that
start deeper.
Nick Epley (32:39):
It could be or they start deep and they stay deep,
right, I don't know how muchdeeper.
Yeah right, tell me about thelast time you cried in front of
another person.
We're already kind of tuggingon your heart strings.
Yeah right, we're probably notgonna go a lot deeper than that.
So you ask an interestingquestion there.
We've never done as.
We only asked people beforethey go into the conversation
afterwards.
Some of my colleagues and otherresearchers in the field will
(33:01):
sometimes monitor this as theygo along.
We don't record theseconversations.
We don't want yeah yeah, peopleto to filter what they're doing
, like what we're doing rightnow.
We're gonna go out to your ninemillion subscribers, right?
We?
We don't do that to ourparticipants, so we just assess
it beforehand and afterwards.
But it would be interesting toask them how intimate or deep is
(33:21):
the conversation as it goes on?
I don't know what that'sactually looks like.
Max Chopovsky (33:26):
I feel like that's less important than the
fact that it starts deeper andstays deep, or Starts a bit
shallower but ends up deeper.
I think the point is depth.
Nick Epley (33:35):
Yeah, so what we could get that?
We could certainly get that inour shallow conditions if we
just ask people how intimatethey think the conversation is
gonna be in compare with howintimate they think it actually
is at the end.
Right, so that we could do that.
That I may do you.
You just, you've just improvedour research there.
We'll do that.
We'll do that in one of thesefuture, future conversations.
Max Chopovsky (33:57):
Sure you know, I Just got back from a cruise with
my family, yeah, and I spent alot of time with my older two
daughters just kind of wanderingthe ship and and there were
obviously a ton of other kids onthis Disney cruise and I found
it fascinating.
My middle one, who just turnedsix, I Found it fascinating to
(34:20):
observe her interact with otherkids because she is fearless
from a social perspective and myolder one is more shy.
My youngest one can't talk yet.
So yeah it was fascinating towatch her do this, because she
would find somebody they'd bewalking together, you know, to
(34:41):
the restaurant or to meet, acharacter kind of like sitting
together on a train.
Nick Epley (34:45):
Mm-hmm.
Max Chopovsky (34:46):
Obviously she's never taken your class, yeah,
but she just turns to the girland goes hey, I like your shoes,
right, yeah, I was like, oh,thank you, yeah.
And then she says to her whereyou from and I just observing
this being like I'm learning,yeah, like this is a reminder to
(35:07):
me that hey, start with acompliment, yeah, right, huge,
yeah.
That opens people up, then askan open-ended question.
But that is fascinating to meto see her do it naturally and
it's frankly, it makes me feelbetter about when we start as
(35:29):
kids, that we can actuallynaturally make connections,
depending on personality type.
Of course, by the end of thecruise she knew so many kids
because she was like I rememberyou from kids club, I remember
you from the restaurant and it'sall.
Because she doesn't have thissort of Stigma, this fear that
we would have when we're sittingon a train trying to talk to
somebody.
She doesn't have that.
She'll just make conversation.
(35:50):
She makes a different choice.
Nick Epley (35:52):
She doesn't know that there's another choice.
No, right, but she choosesdifferently than other kids do,
right?
So if she were quieter shewouldn't have made that
connection with the kid.
For sure she was right, forsure.
Our daughter, our youngestdaughter, 7 Lindsay, she has
Down syndrome and she has nosocial filter either and she
says hello to everybody, yeah,and To watch the world kind of
(36:14):
come alive when she's around isjust so heartwarming and it's so
informative too.
It's not something that endswith childhood.
I often think of it as a switch.
We all have it on our back andmost people walk around with it
turned off.
Yeah, they got their headphonesin, whatever they're looking at
(36:34):
their phone anymore.
But when someone engages withyou, it's like flipping the
switch on their back, like thewoman who sat down next to me
that morning.
She was quiet, right, she'dtaken her hat off, she was Alone
, keeping it to herself.
I made this joke boom, it waslike a switch.
She lit up, she smiled, shesaid hi, she came alive.
(36:55):
Yeah, right, there's a guy whohere is in the, in one of our
language departments.
I won't, won't embarrass him bycalling out his name here, but
he looks scary, like a scary guy.
He looks kind of like.
Close your eyes and imagineEastern Orthodox.
You're from Ukraine, right.
Imagine Russian or UkrainianOrthodox priest right, it's big,
(37:18):
long be.
He's actually French, but big,long, kind of gray scraggly
beard right and eyebrows thatonly point down the furrowed
brow right.
Yeah, that's what he looks likeand I Remember I got off the
train one morning.
We're both walking in.
I chat people up walking infrom the train all the time.
(37:38):
I met a guy named John thismorning, a guy named Nick two
days ago, and we were there,stopped at the side where he had
his headphones in and it looksscary as all get out right.
You know Ukrainian Orthodoxpriest and I just tapped him on
the shoulder and I wave and said, hi, I'm Nick.
And his face just lit up, likehe became a different person.
(37:58):
If you were to show these twopictures the pictures of him
side by side it's not obviousyou'd recognize this is even the
same guy.
Like his face is totallychanged.
And all because I reached outand engaged with him.
He lit up.
I mean, we are, we reciprocateeach other, that's just.
That is the way social lifeworks is through reciprocity.
And you know, if I had notengaged with him at that moment,
(38:22):
he would not have engaged backwith me at all.
Yeah right, I would never haveknown that he could look like
that.
And now every time I see him, wetalked to each other.
We, if I see him on the traingoing home.
We sit and talk to each otheron the way home.
I've learned super meaningfulthings about his life and his
family and we developed aconnection, all because I knew
he had that switch on his backand if I could flip it, be a
(38:46):
different person.
Yeah right, and you see thatwith kids kids who are, they
don't even know the other peopleswitch, they're just flipping
it all the time, right, they'rejust nice.
They're just nice, that's allit is.
They're nice and they'reinterested.
Go around like people up ourdaughter, lindsay, when she
leaves the class, right, so wepicked her up early all last
year.
The kids would knock on thewindow waving at her when she
(39:10):
was leaving.
She walked down the hall high,high, high.
Everybody knows who she is.
But it's not different.
As adults we just often chooseto behave differently.
We don't choose to flip peopleswitches like that.
Max Chopovsky (39:20):
Yeah, it's Fascinating how somebody could
change visually after you gettheir attention.
It's interesting when peoplesay to you, to anyone, when they
say, how are you?
I'm sure you probably looked atthis too when they say how are
(39:41):
you, Most people answer I'm good, I'm well whatever they say,
they don't answer.
Nick Epley (39:46):
right, they don't really answer.
Max Chopovsky (39:48):
Yeah, they're an autopilot.
Yeah, what's interesting is ifyou look at other cultures, like
the Soviet culture, like any ofthose countries, when people
say how are you, you'll get ananswer.
You'll find out how they are.
I have started doing it alittle differently.
Instead of saying how are you,which triggers this autopilot
(40:09):
response, I will say how's yourday going so far.
It's so funny because people'sreactions range from a double
take like well, that's not whatI'm used to hearing, or they'll
just go right into it if theyalso happen to be more of an
extrovert.
(40:30):
But I find that interactions areobviously more fulfilling when
you ask the question.
That demands a thought-outanswer.
If they ask you a question,what I've found begets the most
interesting conversation,irrespective of where you are,
(40:50):
is if you are vulnerable withthem.
So you can have an entirelysuperficial conversation Outside
of one of your studies where atleast there's some semblance of
, by at least one party, ofunderstanding what they're there
for.
There was a guy that I would runinto all the time, dropping my
little one off at daycare foryears and we would chat and have
(41:13):
these superficial conversations.
Then at one point we just stoodoutside the daycare and he
asked me something about mybrother.
My brother and I were.
Our relationship was not in agood place at the time and I
shared that with him Shortlyafter that.
He was like we should go outand get drinks at some point, as
(41:34):
I'm sure.
Well, you're probably anoutlier, but for most people
it's harder to meet people whenyou get older, when you have
kids, you're not in the sameplace at the same time.
Enough to sort of.
Nick Epley (41:43):
Yeah, it's hard, for me too it's hard when you're an
adult.
Max Chopovsky (41:46):
What I found is being vulnerable with relatively
random person made me moreappealing to them, at least
socially, when for the longesttime it was like it'd be nice to
get to hang out with him.
It seems like a cool guy.
But then nothing actuallyhappened until we were having a
generally superficialconversation.
(42:06):
And then I decided to bevulnerable.
In one moment he was like, ohcool.
Like A he's open enough withhimself that he's not just
trying to protect his feelingsand emotions.
B it's kind of interesting.
I'm dealing with somethingsimilar, but I feel like I guess
my gut would tell me and I knowyour data says otherwise but my
(42:27):
gut would tell me that if youare more vulnerable in a
conversation like that, it maybeaccelerates how quickly it goes
deeper.
Nick Epley (42:38):
Oh no, I think that's absolutely certainly
facilitates friendship andconnection.
We do that when we talk aboutmeaningful stuff.
There's no question about that.
What we struggled with a littlebit was getting people to stay
as shallow as we wanted them toTotally, totally.
Max Chopovsky (42:51):
They couldn't just talk about the?
Nick Epley (42:52):
weather forever.
But yeah, no, absolutelyopening up.
It's interesting to use theword vulnerable.
People use that word a lot andthey were quite know how to take
it.
So what I think people reallymisunderstand in social
interaction is the power ofreciprocity.
So in our deep conversations,what people will often say
they're nervous about is thatthey'll open up but the other
(43:14):
person won't totally open itback.
Occasionally that happens.
Occasionally folks will saythat happens, but super rare.
Instead, the typical experienceis I opened up and the shared
this thing and then they did too.
Yeah, from my perspective, atthis point I'm thinking yeah, of
course they did, becausethey're human beings.
That's what people do,overwhelmingly.
That's what people do.
Yeah, but it's not quite whatwe expect and it's not what we
(43:38):
fear will happen.
What we fear will happen isyou'll say something meaningful
about your brother and what.
This guy will laugh at you orsay boy, sucks to be you.
No, that's not the way realhuman beings are in conversation
.
But we fear that.
Well, we fear that.
That's right.
We fear that.
We unwisely fear that, in thesame way that we fear snakes and
spiders and we are not we fearpeople being meaner in
(44:02):
conversation than they actuallyare.
Max Chopovsky (44:05):
When you're sitting next to somebody and you
want to start a conversationwith them, what do you say to
them?
Nick Epley (44:12):
I want to reorient that question just a little bit.
It's not what I say that Ithink is so important, it's the
perspective I adopt on theconversation.
It's not so much what I saythat I think is important, it's
the perspective that I adopt onthe conversation.
What we find is that whenpeople take an interest in other
(44:33):
people, then they know what tosay.
What I say in any givenconversation varies from one to
another to another.
I don't always say the samething.
That woman that morning on thetrain had a red hat on the guy
who I met along the sidewalk hadseen him around a while, but
(44:53):
not recently, and so thatallowed me to connect with him.
That way, I like to sweater.
What you say to somebody canvary depending on the context
you're in.
When you adopt a perspective oftaking an interest in somebody,
you do what your daughter did.
Hey, I like those shoes.
Hey, where are you from?
Hey, what do you do?
Hey, how is your day going?
(45:14):
Not how are you, how is yourday going.
That comes from taking aninterest in somebody, just being
interested in who they are andwhat they're like and how they
are genuinely doing at thatmoment.
Then the rest of it, I think,flows more naturally.
That's what I tried to do alittle more.
I was more interested in otherpeople.
(45:37):
I was on a plane coming backfrom Atlanta a few weeks ago and
sat down next to somebody and Ididn't ask him how I was doing.
I asked him what had he beendoing?
He was in Cuba fishing Superinteresting, I love to fish.
Who were you with?
How was that experience?
How did you feel during that?
I asked about what it was liketo be him in those experiences
(46:00):
because I wanted to know,because I was interested.
Then all of that flowed in theconversation.
I think changing your mindsetabout the conversation might be
a more effective way to engagewith people than trying to focus
on exactly what to say, becauseexactly what you say varies
depending on who you're with.
But that interest can oftenprompt things that, whatever is.
Max Chopovsky (46:23):
It's a wonderful North Star that, I think, will
inform obviously everything yousay.
I ask because sometimes peoplesay, hey, how's it going?
I will find myself, before Ieven realize it, complaining
about something.
I do my best not to complainabout the weather or traffic.
Nick Epley (46:43):
I just don't hear that right Exactly.
Max Chopovsky (46:45):
They'll be like oh, the kids are driving me
crazy, or there's something thatwe're dealing with, or whatever
.
Then the interaction will beover and I'll just think to
myself damn, I sounded like acurmudgeon.
Inevitably some joke will comeup about alcohol.
Oh man, there's this big kidsevent.
They should have some booze forthe parents or something like
that.
I'll walk away from thatinteraction, being like damn, I
(47:09):
didn't seem to have any depth inthat interaction whatsoever.
I'll just be hard on myselfabout that.
You could have done better bybeing your more natural,
positive self and maybecomplaining a little less.
I'm surprised myself sometimeswhen I have those interactions.
Nick Epley (47:25):
Yeah, you respond with what you're thinking about.
In order to change how yourespond in an interaction, you
have to be thinking about theinteraction itself and how you
appear to others.
That can sometimes be hard.
Max Chopovsky (47:38):
See what I found is actually.
Upon thinking about it, Irealized that I respond with
something that I feel they wouldidentify with, even if it's
maybe a stretch from myemotional state.
But I say it because I feellike it's more likely to create
a connection.
Then I say it.
I'm like, well, that wasn't100% authentic.
(47:58):
I really mostly said it becauseI feel like they'll identify
with me.
Nick Epley (48:04):
I see.
So those are cases where youactually are trying to connect
and you think that's likely tobe effective or something.
Max Chopovsky (48:09):
Totally, that's what pops into your head,
totally.
Nick Epley (48:11):
Yeah, I don't know what to do with that.
Mostly what we're contrastingin our research are cases where
you have that engagement versushave none at all Totally, and
even complain with someone isprobably better than not at all.
Max Chopovsky (48:25):
Better than not at all yeah.
Nick Epley (48:26):
Nevertheless, sharing positive stories is good
.
Sometimes I'll ask people whatthey're looking forward to that
day or what was the coolestthing you did this summer.
Like, if I'm meeting somebody,I haven't seen him for a while
what was the coolest thing youdid this summer?
What are you looking forward tothis fall?
Sometimes you can directconversation that way if it
makes sense, if that's whatyou're interested in hearing
about.
That'll help.
Max Chopovsky (48:48):
I heard a question recently that was
wonderfully open-ended anddirect and immediately got
people thinking which is whatare you excited about right now?
People are like wait a second,think about that?
Nick Epley (48:58):
Yeah, right, it tells us what's on your mind if
it takes you a while to thinkabout it.
Right?
It tells you what you'realready thinking about.
Max Chopovsky (49:04):
It just demonstrates how unprepared to
answer such a question thatperson is.
I'm not operating in that stateright now.
You're asking me something thatrequires searching my database
and then kind of unlocking thatpart of myself for the purpose
of the conversation.
You've talked about this,obviously, in your research on
today, but if you were to sum itup, what is the moral of the
(49:28):
story that you told?
Nick Epley (49:30):
The moral is that the anxiety we have about
engaging with other people isjust off.
It's like our fear of snake orsharks.
It's justified in some cases,but often over-applied.
Because of that exaggeratedfear or anxiety about how these
interactions are going to go, wekeep ourselves overly lonely.
We refer to it, the phenomenon,as under-sociality.
(49:53):
We're not social enough for ourown well-being or for the
well-being of others around uswho, frankly, are also happier
when they are being engaged with.
The girl who your daughtercomplimented about her shoes was
much happier in that momentthan she would have been if your
daughter had not said anything.
I'm confident that the person Italked to on that morning had a
(50:15):
more positive trainer just likeI did because I engaged with her
to begin with than she wouldhave otherwise.
I'm 100% sure that the friendsI've made walking three blocks
from the train over there to myoffice here, are happier for
those little interactions.
When I get on the train goinghome I almost always know people
.
How cool is that I've gotfriends.
(50:36):
You make the world a littlesmaller.
But if you're reluctant to reachout and engage, if that
introverted inclination thatkeeps you from engaging, or even
as extroverts, I become a moreextroverted person because I've
made different choices.
It's just in the same way.
You can become somebody whoexercises more.
By choosing to exercise more,that's true.
(50:57):
I make the choice to engageothers more often, and it
sprinkles my life with morepositive experiences than it
would have otherwise.
It also has affected some ofour major life decisions too.
We've adopted three children,one in particular, most recently
, our youngest, lindsay.
We adopted after we lost a babywho had down syndrome six
(51:20):
months into my wife's pregnancy.
There is no question in my mindwhatsoever that this research
we've done and all these datapoints that I've seen made it
clear to me that if we openedourselves and brought her into
our lives, we did that, thatthings would go well.
We would make them go wellbecause that's what human?
(51:43):
beings tend to do the fear thatwe have about reaching out and
engaging or connecting withothers off of that misplaced and
we're under social for it, toour own detriment and to those
around us too.
Max Chopovsky (51:58):
Yeah, that is so true.
Nick Epley (52:02):
We're social animals right Social animals, but we
don't always act like it.
Max Chopovsky (52:06):
Right, we don't always act like it.
Technology allows us to not actlike it.
Nick Epley (52:09):
Some technology.
But even Stanley Milgram, who'sa famous psychologist, in the
1960s and 70s did experiments onobedience to authority that if
you took an intra-site class youwould have seen.
Right the shock generatorexperiments or many of your
listeners I'm sure have heard ofStanley Milgram's obedience
experiments.
When he got older.
In his research he gotinterested in anomalies of urban
(52:31):
life and one of them is thatfolks living in cities tend to
report being more lonely thanpeople living out in the country
.
Studying New York in the 1970s,he went down to the subway, saw
exactly the same thing that Isee on my trains in Chicago,
even after Steve Jobs hascreated the iPhone.
He saw it decades before thathappened.
He said the norm of socialbehavior on the subways is, on
(52:53):
the face of it, pretty clear.
One is that people take seatsfirst come, first serve.
The other is that there's anorm that nobody talks to each
other.
Those are in the 1970s.
It's interesting.
Yeah, I think modern life hasaccelerated some of that
disconnection, but is notentirely responsible to it.
It's down deep in all of usthat makes us a little nervous
(53:15):
to reach out and engage thatanxiety when you feel that.
I think it's helpful to knowit's probably off of it.
Max Chopovsky (53:22):
That's really good to know, because I do think
there are a lot of people outthere that just assume people
don't want to be bothered.
Nick Epley (53:28):
For sure, for sure.
That was the big reason whyfolks said they didn't want to
talk to strangers on the trainbecause they didn't think the
other person was interested intalking to them.
How would you know?
How would you know Well,they're not talking to me, but
you're also not talking to themeither If two people sitting
right next to each other whowould be delighted to talk, who
never talk because they thinkthe person sitting next to them
isn't interested because theyhaven't spoken up Totally.
(53:50):
Psychologists call thatpluralistic ignorance Plurality
of people being ignorant aboutwhat other people believe.
You get a trainload of folkswho'd be delighted to talk, who
never do because they thinkother people aren't interested.
They don't know, they don't findout if they don't say hi.
Max Chopovsky (54:05):
I had a guy on the show a few episodes back
named Jake Nickel, who is thefounder and CEO of Threadless
they're the crowdsourced t-shirtcompany.
He's very much an introvert.
Very much the story he told onthe episode is they went to
Sweden.
I believe they found out aboutthis tradition that, fun enough,
(54:30):
turned out to not be atradition at all, but started
this practice that he has tothis day, which is when they
have a meeting with new peoplethat they haven't met yet, they
will start that meeting by goingaround the table and giving a
five minutes inopsis of theirlife.
Nick Epley (54:45):
Nothing is off limits.
Max Chopovsky (54:48):
They'll go as deep as they're comfortable
going.
He goes after we have theseconversations.
We all feel so much closerbecause you realize how many
similar experiences you've hadto somebody else in the room and
it humanizes them.
He goes ever since that meeting, which was 10 years ago.
(55:11):
Wherever he is with his buddythat went with him, who was
working for him at the time.
They will do this.
It immediately accelerates thecloseness that they feel with
these people.
Nick Epley (55:23):
It just brings them together right away, for sure,
absolutely, no doubt.
Max Chopovsky (55:27):
Such an interesting.
Nick Epley (55:29):
I've experimented on that and confirmed that
observation.
I'm sure, Totally 100% sure.
Max Chopovsky (55:34):
Let's talk about stories telling just for a
minute.
You tell a lot of stories andI'm sure that you've noticed
that when you start a class witha story which I bet you do
quite a bit it engagesimmediately, grabs attention.
You've also heard a lot of goodstories, because you've met
some fascinating people.
(55:55):
What do good stories have incommon?
Nick Epley (55:59):
I think they engage you, they make you part of it as
a listener.
That's the big thing.
If I start a class, I rememberwhen I was in graduate school,
my advisor, Tom Gillovich, who'sat Cornell, was just a
masterful advisor and awonderful human being.
I remember watching I justwatched everything he did very
(56:20):
carefully because I was going tohave to do that myself.
I was going to have to teacheventually, do research
eventually.
He always started papers with astory which is very unusual in
academia, particularly with thetime but would start with an
individual story.
That right away, if you pulledyou into it so you could feel
(56:40):
like you were part of it, andthen you understood oh, I get
what the paper's about.
I don't even need to read therest of the data.
The rest of the data there isto support the cleverly crafted
story at the beginning In class.
I'll do that too.
He would always come up in frontof the room.
He crosses arm.
He had this way of standing,this Gillovich sort of stance.
He would start every lecturewith a story.
(57:02):
He would never wouldn't say hey, welcome to class.
Everybody, blah, blah.
He would just start writingwith a story.
The whole class would be quietand he would pull them in.
Pull them in A good story, Ithink, walks you along through
it so that you feel like you'rekind of there, kind of there too
(57:22):
, like you were there.
It's a challenge for me.
A lot of the stories that Iwant to tell in my classes, when
I teach, for instance, or whenI write, or when I talk about
research, they're aboutexperiments.
That's, 500 people doingsomething.
That's not a story there.
What you try to do when you'retelling that story, when you
(57:43):
describe in that experiment orthat research to people, is you
try to put them in theexperience as if they were in it
, that can feel themselves goingthrough the thing.
Even when you're describing anexperiment, if you tell it in a
way that allows my students tofeel like they're going through
the experiment, they see theresults, they're like get it.
(58:04):
Oh yeah, there it is, I get it.
I think a good story engagesthe listener so that you feel
like you're part of it.
Max Chopovsky (58:13):
Totally.
When I was in high school Itook a class at UofL and it was
intro to psych.
I've always been fascinatedwith psychology and human
behavior.
My favorite part of the classwas the story at the beginning,
a lot of the experiments.
You could actually just talkabout the experiment and it's an
interesting story.
The experiment that they didwith where they dressed up kids
(58:37):
as prison guards and anothergroup of kids as the inmates.
You just listen to that andyou're like, oh my God, what a
crazy story.
I've always found that sofascinating.
You can imagine yourself in it.
Yeah, I did think about that.
Those stories always grab me.
I think it's definitely a greatway to start.
What is one of your favoritebooks that gets storytelling
(59:00):
right?
Nick Epley (59:01):
I think Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is
a really good example.
This is a story about us hikingalong the Appalachian Trail.
For me as a researcher, as ascientist, I'm writing, trying
to communicate ideas, and Idon't do this in the way that he
(59:23):
does.
That book is super fun to readbecause he's walking the trail.
You feel like you're there withhim, you're feeling the
experience, but then he uses itto spin all of these tangents
about facts and real things,about bears and berries and the
(59:43):
history of the trail and whatnot.
It's like a tree with all thesebranches that stick off of them
where there's facts and realdata and stuff the kind of stuff
that I would like he gets tothose by through this thread of
walking down this trail.
I think that's an anybody whocan pass along those facts while
(01:00:10):
telling the story.
I mean any good, any reallyreally good nonfiction writers
does that masterfully.
I think he's really good atthat.
He does that a lot.
A lot of his books are of thatstory, that nature, but that one
in particular, because he washiking the trail, that was kind
of the story, that's what kindof pulled you in and he used all
(01:00:30):
these little signposts as hewas going along to go off in
these tanges.
That would be the whole rest ofthe chapter.
But you were engaged with thosebecause of this.
You were following this threadof the story that he was going,
and that is so I think you knowa lot of.
When we think about a goodstory, we often think about the
thread of that story itself.
(01:00:51):
Right, the narrow telling ofthat story, but really masterful
storytellers can hang all kindsof other stuff onto it.
That's impressive.
Max Chopovsky (01:01:00):
I love that.
That's impressive.
I meant to ask you, by the way,as an extrovert, is it hard for
you to write, given that you'realone when you're writing?
Nick Epley (01:01:11):
So I would back off on that.
I would even stop where you'rethat assumption.
I act extroverted, but I am notan extrovert.
To call somebody a particularpersonality, it seems to
describe something about whothey are and how they experience
the world, rather than thechoices they make.
(01:01:32):
So I would think of that as anexcursion.
I am someone who chooses toengage.
Is it hard for me to be alonein my office writing?
Yes, damn hard, it sucks.
It's hard for anybody to sitalone in their office and write
all the time.
That's hard.
I promise that some peoplewrite easier than others.
(01:01:52):
For sure, absolutely.
That's true.
There's a little bit of wrinklein variance, yes, but I promise
every author is happier whenthey're out with their buddies
at a bar having a beer on aFriday night.
I promise you.
Max Chopovsky (01:02:02):
They're happier.
Nick Epley (01:02:03):
I promise.
Everybody who writes is hard,hard.
Just sit there and write byyourself.
It's hard and it's not as funas hanging out with your kids.
They're going on a vacationwith folks you love or going out
to dinner with your spousethat's always way more fun.
So the huge effect for peopleis that they tend to be happier
(01:02:25):
when they're with others doingfun things than when they're
alone by themselves.
There is some wrinkle, somevariance in that experience when
you're alone and writing andstuff, but that tends to be
pretty small.
But yes, the hardest part aboutmy job is the amount of time I
spend in that office, 15 feetfrom where we are right now, by
(01:02:47):
myself.
Max Chopovsky (01:02:48):
It's so hard.
I find it excruciatingsometimes, once I get into the
flow, if I'm doing somethinglike writing or something like
that.
Nick Epley (01:02:55):
But you're engaged, absolutely yeah.
Max Chopovsky (01:02:58):
Then the time kind of flies quicker.
I mean everything you knowabout being in flow, but it
could be brutal.
Nick Epley (01:03:06):
It's very hard.
Yeah, it's very hard.
Max Chopovsky (01:03:08):
All right.
So last question If you had afew minutes with your
20-year-old self now, suspenddisbelief on the grandfather
paradox.
Suspend the assumption thatyour 20-year-old self might not
listen to you right now.
What would you say to your20-year-old self if you could
(01:03:31):
say one thing?
Nick Epley (01:03:33):
I think I'll say keep at it.
One thing I tell my kids a lotis that they will make
themselves happy.
I think that's something thatwe don't intuitively believe.
We believe that we have to makethe right kinds of choices as
(01:03:54):
we go along and things have towork out.
I was in graduate school or incollege when I was in my 20s
right, and thought if I maybeget this girl to agree to marry
me which she did, so we've beenmarried for 27 years If I can
get this grad school applicationto work out, all that stuff
happens, then I'll be happy, andif it doesn't happen, I'll feel
(01:04:15):
like hell.
You kind of need that to keepmoving along.
Yes, but at the same time, thedata on well-being and happiness
suggests that people kind ofmake themselves happy with their
own outcomes once they'recommitted to them.
So had I not gotten intograduate school and done
something else, I'd have figuredout how to make myself happy
(01:04:37):
over there too, and I think alot of the anxiety that I had
when I was younger about thingsnot working out was just kind of
misplaced.
If I hadn't gotten into graduateschool, I'd have done something
else and I would have figuredout how to make myself happy
there too.
And if Jen had decided shewasn't going to agree to marry
me when we were juniors incollege, we'd get married after
(01:04:58):
we graduated.
But that was when I proposed toher.
She said she wasn't going to dothat.
Well, I would have carried onand I would have found somebody
else I hope, who I would havebeen connected to and try to
tell my kids that too, that whenin life commit yourself to
something, you will makeyourself happy with that thing.
(01:05:19):
You'll figure out a way to makeyourself happy with that thing.
I think that would have taken.
I don't know that that wouldhave changed anything that
actually did.
But so much of our life, justlike with social interactions,
comes with this kind of razor'sedge of anxiety that we live
with.
But I think it's just a littletoo sharp.
Max Chopovsky (01:05:40):
Yeah.
Nick Epley (01:05:41):
It's a little too sharp.
Yeah, I support a family.
I had a lot of support aroundthings Before I went to graduate
school, before I went tointerview for my first job as a
Princeton.
I was a wreck.
I didn't sleep for two weeks.
I lost like 20 pounds because Icouldn't eat.
I was just total wreck.
Max Chopovsky (01:05:59):
Yeah.
Nick Epley (01:06:01):
Like that was needless misery.
I didn't get that job.
I did a lot of the life Icarried on.
I did fine, All right.
So I think I would have told my20-year-old self just to keep
at it.
Things turn out okay often.
Max Chopovsky (01:06:17):
Perspective that we can only get, I think, when
we get older.
Nick Epley (01:06:21):
Yeah, I think yeah, so you have the benefit of
looking back and seeing howthings did work out, right?
Yeah, and it's easy to imagineif someone else had changed,
things would have been maybe notso great, but they would have
just been different.
They would have just beendifferent.
I try to remember that asapparent, with my kids.
That, and it's hard for me toworry about how things are going
(01:06:44):
to turn out.
And, oh my gosh, are theychanneling themselves in this
direction?
That's going to be a totaldisaster and I have to
constantly remember myself.
They'll make themselves happy,they'll figure it out and all
likely they will figure it out.
Obviously we have to be safe.
I mean, let's be careful ofcertain things.
But they'll figure it out,they'll make themselves happy
(01:07:05):
about it.
So I would have encouragedmyself to keep at it.
Max Chopovsky (01:07:09):
Yeah, we all make our own happiness.
Nick Epley (01:07:11):
We do.
I think so.
I think so we can do better.
I think our research suggestsour ways.
We can be a little happier, butin general folks get along okay
.
Max Chopovsky (01:07:20):
Yeah, what a great note to end on Nick.
Thanks man.
Yeah, this was so great.
Nick Epley (01:07:26):
It was a very fun conversation.
I'm going to meet you and shoutout to Mark Agnew one of your
prior guests who connected ustogether.
I'm grateful to Mark for that.
Max Chopovsky (01:07:32):
Agnew is the man.
Yeah, I'm really happy heconnected us.
Well, that does it.
Nick Epley.
Professor, author, researcher,avid outdoorsman and liver of
life to the fullest.
Thank you for being on the show.
Thanks, max, for show notes andmore.
(01:07:53):
Head over to MossPodorg.
Find us on Apple Podcasts,spotify, wherever you get your
podcast on.
This was Morrill of the Story.
I'm Max Jepowsky.
Thank you for listening.
Talk to you next time.
A.
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