Latest / Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families / The Missing Ingredient in Childhood Friendships [with Prof. Nicholas Epley]

Transcript

The Missing Ingredient in Childhood Friendships [with Prof. Nicholas Epley] · Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families

0:05
Speaker 1: This is the Happy Families Podcast.
0:07
Speaker 2: Today on the pod, I am.
0:09
Speaker 1: So wrapped to be able to introduce to you an author,
0:13
Speaker 1: a professor who talks about being a little more Social.
0:18
Speaker 1: There's a brand new book out by Professor Nicholas Epley
0:21
Speaker 1: called A Little More Social, How small choices create unexpected happiness,
0:26
Speaker 1: Health and Connection. Today's conversation about relationships, about making relationships work.
0:31
Speaker 1: Daniel Gilbert, the New York Times best selling author of
0:34
Speaker 1: Stumbling On Happiness, said that a Little More Social explores
0:37
Speaker 1: the power and promise of the human connections that most
0:39
Speaker 1: of us never make, but could make so easily if
0:42
Speaker 1: we just opened our eyes. This is the eye opener,
0:46
Speaker 1: he says. It's insightful, engaging, scientifically grounded, and beautifully written.
0:49
Speaker 1: A Little More Social as one of those rare books
0:51
Speaker 1: that might actually change your life.
0:52
Speaker 2: I've read it.
0:52
Speaker 1: I think that it does. But I wanted to talk
0:55
Speaker 1: to Professor Epley today about what this means for our
0:58
Speaker 1: children and their relationships as well as ours, because the
1:04
Speaker 1: reality is our kids are a little less social than
1:08
Speaker 1: they ever were. That conversation with Professor Nicholas Epley is next.
1:14
Speaker 2: Stay with us.
1:17
Speaker 1: Hello, Welcome to the Happy Family's podcast where you get
1:19
Speaker 1: real parenting solutions every single day. This is Australia's most
1:22
Speaker 1: downloaded parenting podcast. And today I have the honor of
1:27
Speaker 1: having a chat with Professor Nicholas Epley. He's the John
1:29
Speaker 1: Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and faculty director of
1:34
Speaker 1: the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University
1:37
Speaker 1: of Chicago Booth School of Business. Nick, I wouldn't be
1:40
Speaker 1: able to do that without it being written down, and
1:41
Speaker 1: even then it was tricky.
1:44
Speaker 3: It doesn't shot on the back of my jersey very well.
1:47
Speaker 1: Do you actually ever say that that's what your role
1:49
Speaker 1: is or do you only hand the piece of paper
1:51
Speaker 1: to people and say this is what it says.
1:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, my name's Nick. It's good to be with you, justin.
1:56
Speaker 1: I'm so glad to be able to share this conversation
1:57
Speaker 1: with you today. I loved your book a little More Social.
2:01
Speaker 1: I've heard the story of how this came to be
2:04
Speaker 1: a number of times because I listened to so many
2:06
Speaker 1: podcasts and I've heard you so many times.
2:08
Speaker 2: So to have the opportunity to have you on the
2:09
Speaker 2: pods wonderful, I'd said.
2:11
Speaker 1: The vast majority of my listeners won't be familiar with
2:14
Speaker 1: the beginnings of the research that's set in the foundation
2:16
Speaker 1: for this book. For those who haven't heard it, tell
2:19
Speaker 1: me about talking to random people on public transport and
2:23
Speaker 1: how this all came about.
2:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I study mind reading for a living. I
2:26
Speaker 3: study how we make inferences about each other's thoughts, beliefs,
2:29
Speaker 3: and atitudes, and mostly how we screw that up and
2:31
Speaker 3: misunderstand each other in lots of ways. And I was
2:34
Speaker 3: sitting on the train one morning on my way into
2:35
Speaker 3: the University of Chicago, which I'd done for years by
2:38
Speaker 3: that point, writing a chapter from my first book, mind Wise,
2:43
Speaker 3: about how we have a brain that's uniquely equipped for
2:45
Speaker 3: connecting with the minds of others, made happier and healthier
2:48
Speaker 3: by connecting with the minds of others. And yet then
2:51
Speaker 3: there I was. I just looked around and sort of
2:53
Speaker 3: had this Eureka kind of moment. I looked around on
2:56
Speaker 3: the train and realized, here we all were social human
3:01
Speaker 3: beings with a brain uniquely equipped for connecting with each other,
3:04
Speaker 3: made happier and healthier by doing so, And yet here
3:06
Speaker 3: we all were completely ignoring each other, And I wondered,
3:10
Speaker 3: the heck are we all doing it. Does this make sense?
3:13
Speaker 3: It could maybe talking with strangers doesn't actually make us happy,
3:17
Speaker 3: or maybe maybe we're misunderstanding this in some way. So
3:21
Speaker 3: that morning, I had a woman sit down next to
3:24
Speaker 3: me on the train on the way in. She was
3:26
Speaker 3: about fifteen to twenty years older than I was. I
3:28
Speaker 3: would say. She was an African American woman, dressed very
3:32
Speaker 3: professionally for work. She was carrying a big, like a
3:35
Speaker 3: huge purse, like one of these big mom persons. You
3:37
Speaker 3: know that all of humanity thrives, that every need is
3:43
Speaker 3: that in that mom purse. She had that sit round
3:46
Speaker 3: front of her. And she also had this amazing red
3:48
Speaker 3: hat on, like fashion show ready red hat. I'll never
3:52
Speaker 3: forget that. And I decided I was going to try
3:55
Speaker 3: something different on this ride in this morning, And I
3:58
Speaker 3: decided I was going to try to have a conversation
3:59
Speaker 3: with her. I was to put myself in an experiment.
4:02
Speaker 3: And so the moment I had that thought, my brain
4:06
Speaker 3: also started having lots of other thoughts, like, Nah, don't
4:09
Speaker 3: do this. This is a bad idea. She probably doesn't
4:11
Speaker 3: want to talk to you. She's gonna think of some
4:12
Speaker 3: kind of creep trying to hit on her. If she
4:15
Speaker 3: wanted to talk to you, she'd already be talking to
4:16
Speaker 3: you. You don't want to be that guy who drives other
4:19
Speaker 3: people nuts. Nevertheless, I decided to proceed, worked up my courage,
4:23
Speaker 3: came up with a brilliant opening line, and I turned
4:26
Speaker 3: to her and I said, Hi, I'm Nick. I love
4:29
Speaker 3: your hat.
4:30
Speaker 1: I have one just like it, which is a great line.
4:32
Speaker 3: That's such a good look she and she turned to me.
4:35
Speaker 3: You know, she turned to me with a smile and
4:38
Speaker 3: a laugh. It wasn't a great opening line, but it
4:40
Speaker 3: kind of didn't matter. She lit all up. I mean,
4:43
Speaker 3: she turned to me just looking almost like a different person.
4:46
Speaker 3: We talked for, you know, a half hour on my
4:48
Speaker 3: way in till I had to get up and leave.
4:51
Speaker 3: We talked about her job. She wasn't real happy with it.
4:53
Speaker 3: It wasn't her dream job. When I when I got
4:55
Speaker 3: up to leave, she held my wrists. I'm stepping around,
4:58
Speaker 3: you know, the purse to get out into the aisle well,
5:00
Speaker 3: and she held my wrist on the way by, just
5:02
Speaker 3: gently and said thank you so much for talking with
5:04
Speaker 3: me this morning. And as I was walking off the train,
5:09
Speaker 3: two things really struck me there. One was that was
5:13
Speaker 3: nice like all of the research that I'd been reading
5:16
Speaker 3: about and conducting for decades suggesting connecting with other people
5:20
Speaker 3: was pleasant was right there not You know, this wasn't
5:22
Speaker 3: an earth shattering conversation any time, but it was better
5:25
Speaker 3: than what I would have normally done. And the second
5:28
Speaker 3: thing that struck me was that this was surprisingly nice.
5:32
Speaker 3: The gap between my beliefs about how that conversation will
5:35
Speaker 3: go and how it actually went were notably large. And
5:39
Speaker 3: as I'm walking off that train, I remember very distinctly thinking,
5:44
Speaker 3: I think I might be doing this quite a lot,
5:47
Speaker 3: like failing to appreciate how well things would go when
5:51
Speaker 3: I reach out and connect or engage with other people,
5:53
Speaker 3: failing to see opportunities I have to connect with other
5:57
Speaker 3: people and create meaningful me for connections. And then I
6:01
Speaker 3: also thought that this might be something that we're all
6:05
Speaker 3: kind of doing, like a lot of us are doing.
6:07
Speaker 3: We're all sitting on there in that trade. In fact,
6:09
Speaker 3: if you had people being pessimistic like I was mistakenly
6:13
Speaker 3: pessimistic about how other people might respond, you could get
6:15
Speaker 3: a whole trainload of people who'd be happier talking to
6:18
Speaker 3: other people and nobody would ever try. You'd get highly
6:22
Speaker 3: social creatures behaving in a very unsocial way. And that
6:27
Speaker 3: morning was really the start of now, you know, pushing
6:31
Speaker 3: two decades of research, one hundred and twenty published experiments
6:34
Speaker 3: on this topic. You know that has become now massive
6:38
Speaker 3: across many different topics, over thirty thousand people. It's it's
6:43
Speaker 3: become a big thing, a big thing.
6:45
Speaker 1: I want to bring this back to parenting shortly, but
6:47
Speaker 1: there are a couple of the questions that we really
6:49
Speaker 1: need to discuss first, and we may even need to
6:51
Speaker 1: make this a two podcast because there's so much to
6:54
Speaker 1: talk about social connection. You've done these experiments where either
6:58
Speaker 1: you or your experimental team have gone to subway stations.
7:03
Speaker 1: I mean, nobody talks to anyone on public transport. It's
7:05
Speaker 1: the same here as it is there. And you've said,
7:09
Speaker 1: go and do this thing. This is what we're doing.
7:11
Speaker 1: Would you just walk through how that experiment has worked
7:15
Speaker 1: and what you've found.
7:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this was actually the first experiment we ran,
7:21
Speaker 3: you know, fifteen plus years ago, after that morning that
7:24
Speaker 3: I had on the train, the first of what has
7:26
Speaker 3: become many many experiments now. And in this experiment, actually
7:30
Speaker 3: there were two that we ran here. In one experiment
7:34
Speaker 3: we went to Homewood, Illinois, which is the station just
7:36
Speaker 3: north of where I live in Vlosmore, Illinois, on the
7:39
Speaker 3: far south side of Chicago. And we went to that
7:42
Speaker 3: station because it had an underground entry that you could
7:45
Speaker 3: get into it. It was winter here, so freeze and cold,
7:47
Speaker 3: and we recruited people for commuter survey. And in the
7:50
Speaker 3: first experiment, we asked people to just tell us how
7:54
Speaker 3: they thought they would feel if they did one of
7:58
Speaker 3: three things. In one case, we asked them to predict
8:01
Speaker 3: how they'd feel if they just kept to themselves in solitude.
8:03
Speaker 3: Another case asked them to predict how they would feel
8:05
Speaker 3: if they did whatever they normally did, which is usually
8:08
Speaker 3: just kept to themselves in solitude. And in the third condition,
8:10
Speaker 3: we asked them to do something imagine something radical, having
8:14
Speaker 3: somebody come and sit down next to them, and imagine
8:17
Speaker 3: having a conversation with them. These are measuring people's beliefs,
8:20
Speaker 3: just like the beliefs I had before I had the
8:23
Speaker 3: conversation with a woman who sat down next to me
8:25
Speaker 3: that morning. And here the results were crystal clear. People
8:29
Speaker 3: thought talking to a stranger was a bad idea. They
8:31
Speaker 3: thought they'd have a more pleasant commute if they kept
8:33
Speaker 3: to themselves or did whatever they normally did. We found
8:36
Speaker 3: that at the end of the commute, people actually reported
8:39
Speaker 3: having the most pleasant commute when they connected with the
8:43
Speaker 3: stranger who sat down next to them, then when they
8:45
Speaker 3: did whatever they normally did or kept to themselves in solitude.
8:48
Speaker 3: So people's expectations weren't just wrong here, they were like mine.
8:52
Speaker 3: Essentially that morning, precisely backwards.
8:55
Speaker 1: Up to the break, a conversation about how this applause
8:57
Speaker 1: to our kids. Are our kids afraid to talk to
9:00
Speaker 1: people like we are as adults? Are we teaching them that?
9:03
Speaker 1: And when they stop talking to the people around them?
9:07
Speaker 2: What happens? Stay with us.
9:16
Speaker 1: We're back in The Happy Family's podcast, talking with Professor
9:18
Speaker 1: Nicholas Epley, the author of a Little More Social, a
9:21
Speaker 1: book that I loved that's incredibly digestible and will change
9:25
Speaker 1: your life because it will change your relationships. Nick Jonathan
9:28
Speaker 1: Hyde says that humans are ultra social. Someone like Derek Thompson,
9:34
Speaker 1: former Atlantic writer and substacker, calls this the anti social century,
9:40
Speaker 1: and I feel like you're treating this really fine line
9:44
Speaker 1: between these two quite extreme positions. We've got this situation
9:48
Speaker 1: where people seem to be apparently ultrasocial, yet they don't
9:52
Speaker 1: want to talk to anybody, so they're becoming anti social.
9:55
Speaker 2: My question for you is, do.
9:57
Speaker 1: You have any data on how children are going right now?
10:00
Speaker 1: Because my read is that this is supposedly the most
10:06
Speaker 1: connected generation, thank you technology, and yet whenever I talk
10:10
Speaker 1: to children, young people, they seem to be a little
10:13
Speaker 1: less social. There's more anxiety around relationships than any time
10:17
Speaker 1: that I've observed.
10:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, so when we talk about connection, not all connections
10:22
Speaker 3: are created equal. Every parent, every person understands this. Some
10:26
Speaker 3: connections are kind of the equivalent of diet soda. They
10:29
Speaker 3: seem like connections, but there's not really a whole lot there.
10:33
Speaker 3: Those are a lot of the kind of digital distant
10:36
Speaker 3: ones where you're typing with somebody else rather than actually
10:39
Speaker 3: sitting and talking with them. You don't have any actual
10:41
Speaker 3: physical presence, you don't have deeper, meaningful conversations with them.
10:45
Speaker 3: So yes, in some ways, our kids today around the
10:49
Speaker 3: world are more connected to each other than they've ever been,
10:52
Speaker 3: and in some ways this is remarkable. I get emails,
10:56
Speaker 3: I can even zoom with people like I'm doing right
10:58
Speaker 3: now with you on the other side to the planet.
11:00
Speaker 3: In real time. I mean that is amazing. At the
11:03
Speaker 3: same time, they're also not engaging with each other as
11:07
Speaker 3: much as they used to hear In the United States,
11:09
Speaker 3: for instance, researcher Matthias Meal at the University of Arizona
11:14
Speaker 3: analyzed data that he had from two thousand and seven
11:17
Speaker 3: to twenty nineteen that measured essentially how much are people
11:21
Speaker 3: talking across a whole bunch of different experiments that he
11:23
Speaker 3: was collecting data on, and what he found was that
11:26
Speaker 3: in twenty nineteen, people were speaking on average three hundred
11:30
Speaker 3: and thirty eight fewer words a day than they were
11:34
Speaker 3: in two thousand and seven. Now these are mostly like
11:36
Speaker 3: college aged students, right, So that's the trend we see here.
11:40
Speaker 3: Surely that has continued since twenty nineteen. If you look
11:44
Speaker 3: at the amount of time people are spending alone, that's
11:47
Speaker 3: been going up. I mean, that is the radical change
11:50
Speaker 3: in human behavior over the last maybe for most of
11:54
Speaker 3: human existence. Outside of the car, the automobile which allows
11:57
Speaker 3: us to travel lots of places, the internal combustion engine,
12:00
Speaker 3: this is a major change in human life. And yes,
12:03
Speaker 3: there is no doubt that kids are connecting with each
12:06
Speaker 3: other in real time less than they did, say when
12:09
Speaker 3: we were kids, a little more anxious, little more nervous.
12:12
Speaker 3: All of the biases that we describe that lead people
12:15
Speaker 3: to underestimate how interested others aren't engaging with them, how
12:18
Speaker 3: willing others are to engage with them, are likely to
12:21
Speaker 3: be bigger among kids.
12:22
Speaker 1: And I guess if we even push it down to
12:24
Speaker 1: a younger age, parents are less inclined to take their
12:26
Speaker 1: children to the part, children are spending less time in
12:28
Speaker 1: social settings. It just seems as though there's a lot
12:32
Speaker 1: less of the stuff that we need for well being
12:35
Speaker 1: happening in our children's lives. I'd love to know if
12:39
Speaker 1: you have any really strong ideas on what we can
12:43
Speaker 1: do to help our children to strengthen their connections. What
12:47
Speaker 1: do you see as being the critical factors for children
12:51
Speaker 1: and young people to make better relationships and deeper connections.
12:55
Speaker 3: Well, I think the big one that parents can actively
12:57
Speaker 3: do is model. This is how we teach our kids
12:59
Speaker 3: any we do it ourselves. I got a great example,
13:03
Speaker 3: so I have five kids, a big family. A little
13:06
Speaker 3: over a year ago, my daughter and I were in
13:07
Speaker 3: New York City celebrating her seventeenth birthday and the entire
13:12
Speaker 3: weekend I was there when we would go down into
13:15
Speaker 3: the subway in New York City, you know, where you're
13:16
Speaker 3: not supposed to be able to talk to people, where
13:18
Speaker 3: people are dangerous and whatnot. Mostly people are people right.
13:21
Speaker 3: When we would go down to the subway, I would
13:23
Speaker 3: tell Cione watch this word, tell her watch this, and
13:27
Speaker 3: in particular, I would tell her just pay attention to
13:31
Speaker 3: how you're feeling, because what you want to capture is
13:34
Speaker 3: that contrast between our belief about how this would go
13:37
Speaker 3: and how it would actually do. It's that belief that
13:39
Speaker 3: we get wrong. And once you recognize that those red
13:42
Speaker 3: flags that are going off that are keeping you from
13:45
Speaker 3: engaging with perfectly delightful people like the guy with you know,
13:49
Speaker 3: Lisa on his arm, perfectly delightful guy, even if he
13:52
Speaker 3: looked kind of scary. Once you realize that those beliefs
13:55
Speaker 3: are miscalibrated, you start to see the world very, very differently.
13:59
Speaker 3: And so if you're a parent who never engages with strangers,
14:04
Speaker 3: never reaches out to others, never shows how this can
14:06
Speaker 3: be done, well, your kids aren't either, but if you do,
14:10
Speaker 3: they will.
14:11
Speaker 1: I've find it fascinating when a running my sessions, there'll
14:13
Speaker 1: be a couple hundred parents in a room, in a
14:15
Speaker 1: hall somewhere that I'm speaking, and a large part of
14:19
Speaker 1: what I do is I get people to turn around
14:20
Speaker 1: and talk to the person next to them about the
14:21
Speaker 1: stuff that we're discussing. Invariably, there will be a number
14:25
Speaker 1: of people who are sitting alone, and when I invite
14:28
Speaker 1: people to talk, they refuse. Refuses, probably too strong. They
14:32
Speaker 1: don't make the efforts to move three seats across to
14:34
Speaker 1: talk to the person further down. And so what I've
14:36
Speaker 1: started doing is I've started sharing your research over the
14:39
Speaker 1: last couple of months and saying, there's this guy called
14:41
Speaker 1: Professor Epley from the University of Chicago, and here's what
14:44
Speaker 1: he's found. And then I will look at the people
14:46
Speaker 1: who are sitting on their own. I'll point to four
14:48
Speaker 1: or five of them in the room and say you, you, you,
14:49
Speaker 1: even you. You need to make a friend tonight, like
14:52
Speaker 1: move your seat, but do it. And they look at
14:54
Speaker 1: me like they cover their eyes, they put their.
14:56
Speaker 2: Head down, They're like, oh no.
14:58
Speaker 1: And then watch what happens, and I see them start
15:02
Speaker 1: to smile, I see them open up. I love the
15:05
Speaker 1: idea of modeling it. Incidentally, every now and again they
15:07
Speaker 1: don't do that. And what I've noticed this is to
15:10
Speaker 1: me is the critical observation. The people who make the
15:13
Speaker 1: effort to move three seats across and have the conversation,
15:15
Speaker 1: they smile, they engage, they enjoy the night more. The
15:18
Speaker 1: people who don't, they sit there and they look quite sullen.
15:21
Speaker 1: Sometimes they pull out their phone and they wait for
15:23
Speaker 1: the sixty or ninety second or two minute conversation to
15:25
Speaker 1: finish before they put the phone away and start paying
15:27
Speaker 1: attention to me. Again, it's a qualitatively different experience when
15:30
Speaker 1: we connect.
15:32
Speaker 3: Ye. Now, look, I want to be clear here to listeners,
15:36
Speaker 3: our data dots suggests that you ought to be doing
15:38
Speaker 3: this all the time. They just suggest that the beliefs
15:41
Speaker 3: that we have going into a lot of these interactions,
15:43
Speaker 3: whether it's to have a conversation with a stranger, to
15:46
Speaker 3: try to have a more deep and meaningful conversation, those
15:49
Speaker 3: expectations that are keeping us avoidant avoiding other people. We
15:54
Speaker 3: find those are often miscalibrated, often overly pessimistic, and so
15:58
Speaker 3: you're getting the odds wrong if that's what's happening to you, right,
16:01
Speaker 3: and changing those odds being a little more optimistic would
16:04
Speaker 3: put you over the hurdle. Then reach out, but if
16:08
Speaker 3: you don't have to all the time. But we find
16:10
Speaker 3: that people are systematically off.
16:12
Speaker 1: The take a message is that connections matter, and that
16:17
Speaker 1: most people respond much, much, much more warmly to an
16:20
Speaker 1: attempt by us to connect to them than we anticipate,
16:23
Speaker 1: and we enjoy the interaction a lot more than we anticipated.
16:27
Speaker 1: That's what I'm really getting from this conversation. Our times
16:30
Speaker 1: that this is a podcast for time for parents who
16:32
Speaker 1: want answers now, and I feel like that's a really
16:33
Speaker 1: solid place for us to pause. But there's still more
16:36
Speaker 1: to talk about from a parenting point of view. So
16:39
Speaker 1: we're going to continue this conversation tomorrow, go a little
16:42
Speaker 1: bit deeper into this most connected generation that is in
16:45
Speaker 1: so many cases struggling to connect, and really talk about
16:50
Speaker 1: how to help our kids to have a healthy sense
16:52
Speaker 1: of sociality when so much of what they want to
16:57
Speaker 1: do involves disappearing into a screen. Please join us for
17:01
Speaker 1: the conversation tomorrow on the Happy Families podcast, which is
17:03
Speaker 1: produced by Justin ruland from Bridge Media. Mim Hammitt provides
17:07
Speaker 1: our additional support for more information check out a little.
17:10
Speaker 2: More Social Well link to it in the show notes.
17:12
Speaker 1: It's the brand new book by Professor Nicholas Epley and
17:15
Speaker 1: visit Happy Families dot com, dot a