Chicago Booth Review Podcast Why Do We Avoid Talking to People?

Nicholas Epley: The data suggests that reliable happiness comes from doing kind things for others, doing things that make other people's days better. There's at least a lot of wellbeing that can come from that. A sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of competency, that you're capable of doing good things. It can be really uplifting to go out and help somebody in a way that works.

Hal Weitzman: Do you ever find yourself on a crowded train, surrounded by people all looking at their phones and not speaking to each other? What do you think would happen if you tried to strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today, I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Nick Epley about his book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection. Epley thinks that if we made the choice to have that conversation, it would be a lot more pleasant than we expect. So why do we set up our lives to avoid talking to others? Nick Epley, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Nicholas Epley: Thanks, Hal. It's great to be here.

Hal Weitzman: Well, we're delighted to have you to talk about your new book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection. It's a great read, so congratulations on the book.

Nicholas Epley: Thank you. Thank you. It took a long time to get there. It took a long time writing the book.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, I'm sure. Well, I want to hear ... So tell us about it, but first I want to hear why. Why do you want to write this book? How long were you thinking about it? You said it took a long time. And what was the moment when you said, "Right now, I have to write it"?

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So I'll question the question just a little bit. It implies that I wanted to. Actually, the experience was quite a bit different. So this is my second book. My first one was titled Mindwise, and that was very, very hard to do. It's very, very hard to write a book. It's countless hours by yourself with your door closed. Normally, we do collaborative work, we're doing research with other people all the time, but writing a book is a long song on your own. So I told Jen, my wife, after my first one, "This is going to be it. I'm not going to do another one." But then we kept finding these results that I thought were really, really important, of people being overly reluctant, I think, to reach out and engage with other people, underestimating how positively others would respond when you reach out to connect to them. People holding themselves back from a happier, more meaningful, kinder, better life, mistakenly, and I just thought that was a huge mistake.

It's one thing to see people out in the world avoiding other people wisely, but when you see it happening and you know it's a mistake, it just feels like a tragedy. And so I got to a point, this was right around 2019, early 2020, I was taking a leave of absence that year to just think about whether I wanted to do something bigger again, and I decided I felt like I had to write the book. I remember calling up a friend of mine, Dan Gilbert, who's in the psych department at Harvard, and he told me, "Nick, don't write this book unless you feel like you have to. " I felt like I had to. I felt like this was just a story I needed to tell and I would regret if I didn't.

Hal Weitzman: And you had to because other people need to get this message, that it's not as terrifying.

Nicholas Epley: Nothing has changed the way I live my life more than the research that I describe in this book, top to bottom, from little things to really, really big things, and I think it's important. And if you do research that you think is really, really important, I think this is important, you want people to know about it, and they're not going to read my papers, but they might read a book.

Hal Weitzman: Right. As you say, you've made it very practical and very inspiring by telling these stories about other people, not only your own life, but other people's lives that have been changed by the insights that your research has uncovered as well. So it's funny because, Nick, I feel like every time I go to an airport and look at the books in the business section, they always have the secrets of and the hidden and the surprising thing. But actually, I'm going to give you a pass because the unexpected in your subtitle, it really is unexpected. It does a lot of heavy lifting throughout the book. A lot of it hinges on this gap between what we think these interactions are going to be like.

And I was reading your book on spring break when I was on the plane and on the subway New York thinking, "Is it safe to talk to someone?" And I did have something, my kids were laughing at me because I was much more gregarious than I ... I'm normally pretty social, but I was trying to be even more, and they were saying, "God, dad, we need to move on. You're always talking to someone."

But we do all have this, and as you describe it, there's a moment when you see someone, they're reading a book that you loved or you hated or whatever and you want to make the contact and then you second guess it, you don't do it. The unexpected part, were you constantly surprised by finding that things were much better than we expected?

Nicholas Epley: Well, so the unexpected part is central to our research. I study mind reading for a living. I study how we make inferences about other people's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and mostly what's interesting about that are the times we systematically screw that up and misunderstand each other. And when it comes to why that matters, why social cognition matters or why our thoughts about other people matters is because it can guide our beliefs about how interaction's going to go, and therefore our choices of how to interact with other people. And our choices are guided not by our experiences that we have, so my decision to talk to you or not isn't driven by how much I'm going to enjoy talking to you because I don't know. We haven't talked. It's guided by how much I think we're going to enjoy the conversations, guided by my expectations.

And so those expectations are central to our research and for a variety of reasons, understanding those expectations. And for a variety of reasons, our expectations tend to be overly pessimistic. I was surprised by the magnitude of these gaps from time to time between our beliefs about how others will respond to us and how other people actually respond to us, but the entire book is about that gap, is about that gap between our beliefs about each other and reality. And that gap between our expectations and our experience is, I think, super fundamental, extremely important, because the gap between those two bars is where wisdom lies. That's where you have a chance to improve your life, where I think the world is this way, short and nasty and brutish and mean, and it turns out it's only because I'm not engaging you yet.

Hal Weitzman: And the way you describe that is you have a choice. It brings the locus of control back to you as an individual, doesn't it?

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So those expectations highlight that social connection is really a choice. If I'm going to talk to you, I need to make a choice to reach out and approach you. So you see the person sitting next to you on the plane who's got a book that you've seen before, and you have two minds maybe at that point. I'd like to say hello to you, but I don't know, you got your headphones in, you look like maybe you might not be interested in me. There could be some cost, and when you're in a moment like that where both you have an inclination to approach and to avoid, you're in approach, avoidance, conflict, and that's where the choice gets hard.

But in the book, I refer to that moment, that moment that you have before almost any interaction where you can choose to reach out and engage or hold back and keep to yourself. I refer to it as the choice. I put it in italics because I think it is the most important choice that we make over and over and over and over and over and again in our lives because it governs the nature of our social relationships, and our social relationships govern our happiness, our health, our success in life, and so if we make that choice wrong, it's costly.

Hal Weitzman: So just to go back to your research, when you were uncovering these experiments where you tested this time and time again, and every time, people, regardless really of who they were, felt happier once they'd actually made that choice to engage others.

Nicholas Epley: On average, yes.

Hal Weitzman: Were you surprised by that research?

Nicholas Epley: So I continue being a little surprised by it sometimes, so I'll give you one example. When I give a public presentation, I will often have people have a deep conversation. I've done this with thousands of people now. All of our incoming Booth MBA students do this now during their orientation. They talk about, "What are you most grateful for in your life? Tell me about it." Or, "Can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person?" And I've done this with lots of different groups of people. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was in Milwaukee doing this demonstration in a senior living center and with people who were there for a symposium on aging. And before a lot of these sessions, I will go in and think, "Oh, it might not show up with this one, so I got to be prepared if for some reason, something goes awry or whatever. It might not work." And then just every time, the gaps are always there.

I'm not as nervous, it's kind of been driven out of me some, but still. Like this group that I did at this senior living center, these are the biggest gaps I'd ever seen. I thought these are older people.

Hal Weitzman: You talk about the gap between what people think-

Nicholas Epley: Their expectation.

Hal Weitzman: ... the conversation's going to be like and how much they actually enjoyed it.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah, yeah. It was the biggest I'd ever seen. I was out in New York a couple of years ago doing an event with an international construction firm. All these guys look like the left tackle from my college football team. The CEO beforehand tells me, "You're going to have a tough time with this crowd." And I'm thinking, "All right, this is a group of dudes who are not getting together to talk about the last time they cried."

Hal Weitzman: The last time they cried.

Nicholas Epley: I was nervous. I tell you, they came back ... When I was talking about the experience, a group of guys in the front row were tearing up, all of them. They were thinking about something big. So yeah, I still get it a little bit too. In my daily life, in my personal life, I feel this less, but sometimes in our research, yeah, you always wonder, is this going to ...

Hal Weitzman: But it's very robust.

Nicholas Epley: It's super robust.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, okay. So one thing that I wanted to ask you about, because I'm sure some people will be listening to this saying, "Not me."

Nicholas Epley: Not me.

Hal Weitzman: "That is hell. I'm not going to talk to the person next to me. Who knows what they might be, particularly if you're New York Subway."

Nicholas Epley: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: But this robust finding that you have really cuts across what we think of as extroverts and introverts, and I wonder if we're thinking about extroversion and introversion in entirely the wrong way.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So the way that people typically think about personalities is the type of person you are, and that predicts then that if people vary across sociability, say, that there are people who are more extroverted, people who are more introverted, extroverts like talking to people and introverts like keeping to themselves and maybe are less happy engaging or talking with other people. The belief is about people's experience, but if we actually look at people's experience as psychologists have done now for decades and decades, the actual experience in conversation tends not to vary much across extroversion and introversion.

If you look, if you have people in a short experiment, like a 30-minute session or an hour session or over the course of several days or over the course of a week or over the course of two weeks as psychologists have done in many, many different ways, tested what happens if you ask people to act more extroverted? It turns out when you act more extroverted, both extroverts and introverts are made happier, and when you act more introvertedly, both extroverts and introverts, that is people who score higher or lower on a personality test of extroversion and introvertion, are less happy when they act introverted.

They don't vary so much across experiences. What they vary more across are their expectations, their beliefs about social interaction. So personality seems to be a little more about not the type of person you are, not the experiences you actually have, but your beliefs about yourself and your beliefs about the type of person you are. And so the way to think about personality, I think, are the types of choices you make, and therefore, the kinds of habits you form. The difference between folks who are more extroverted versus introverted isn't enjoying interaction more or less. It's choosing to engage with others more or less, and that's something you can change.

In fact, psychologists have learned that personality is really more like a set of habits. You can think about it like exercise. Nobody thinks I'm an exerciser or not as the type of person you're are. Some people choose to exercise and some people choose not to. That's the way to think about personality, and when psychologists ask people to act more extroverted over a period of time, the way they score on a personality test also changes. Personality are the habits you build, and if you would like those to change, you can change.

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Nick, in the first half, we talked about your fantastic book and your insights, like all great insights, very simple, that you make a choice when you choose to speak to someone, not speak to someone, and that choice has huge consequences. Now, you referred to some of your research with audiences, but you've also done this out in the field on trains, buses, cabs in Chicago, in London, elsewhere. First of all, why are you doing behavioral science in these places?

Nicholas Epley: Yeah, where we normally do research.

Hal Weitzman: Right.

Nicholas Epley: I had this eureka moment one morning on my train ride into Chicago, into Hyde Park here. So we live in Flossmoor, far South Side of Chicago, and I was writing a chapter from Mindwise, my first book, describing how we have a brain that's uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others. We're made happier and healthier connecting with other people, and yet I was sitting on the train this morning and I looked around, and here we've got a car load full of happy people, happier connecting with other people, with brains uniquely equipped for connecting with other people, and yet you could have heard a pin drop that morning. And I was struck by the juxtaposition between what I thought would make us feel better, happier, have better lives, better moments, and what we were actually doing at that moment, and it just struck me like a lightning bolt.

And so that morning, I decided to experiment on myself a little bit. So a woman came and sat down next to me. She was probably mid 50s, African American woman, I would have been in my mid 30s at that time, had this fabulous red hat on, which I will never forget. She sits down next to me. I just said, "I'm going to have a conversation. I'm going to try to get to know her a little bit." And so she sits down and I turn to her and I say, "I love your hat. I have one just like it," which is not the best opening line in the world, but she chuckled a little bit and she turned to me and we just started talking. She was all lit up, just big smile when I engaged with her.

She got on, had this dead face, like going off to work, sullen, quiet. She just lit up, and we had a lovely conversation for the half hour. Not life changing in the conversation itself, although I have to say that was a spark that did change my life, but I got up to leave and she held my wrist and she said, "Thank you so much for talking with me this morning," just appreciating that you were acknowledged.

And we got into each other's lives a little bit, talked about where she really wanted to see herself in 10 to 15 years. Anyway, I got off just struck by that conversation not just being good, but surprisingly good, and it's the surprising part. It's that gap between how I thought that conversation might go - this might be a little weird. I'm not sure if she wants to talk to me or not - and how it actually went, which was really nice. And I thought, maybe our beliefs in these cases are off the mark in ways we've been documenting for a decade and a half or so before, but never tested in this particular way or with our choice to reach out and interact with other people.

Hal Weitzman: So just to stop there for a second, what are the ways that you would traditionally have tested it? We always-

Nicholas Epley: I would have put people in the lab.

Hal Weitzman: We have a lab here.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So just explain to us a little bit about what that looks like and how it's different.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So we would bring two people in, and we've done these kinds of experiments now too, but we'd bring, like we're doing right now, you and me in, and we'd sit down at a table like this and we would just have a simple conversation, try to get to know each other a little bit. And maybe I'd give you some questions to discuss or maybe I wouldn't, but we would do it in a stylized environment like this. We would not typically ... Well, some people would, but often, our first thought is not to go into the wild like that because there's so much you can't control. So do people actually talk? How long do they talk? Do they find somebody to talk to? Oh, do they follow your instructions or not? All of that stuff when you're running experiments out in the wild gets out of your control.

And if we were to run an experiment on the train, they come to us at the beginning and then they leave. So wait, how do we get the response from them in the end, because they're not with us anymore? So there are lots of reasons why we run experiments in a laboratory setting to control things that we care about. At the same time, what we want to speak to is the world out there. I very vividly remembered my PhD advisor, Tom Gilovich, professor of psychology at Cornell, tell me one day early on in my graduate career, "Nick, we don't study this over here," pointing to his journals. "We study that out there," pointing to his window and the world outside, and that's what we want to speak to, the world out there.

So we decided to brave it and we ran our first experiments on this research in the train that I ride on coming into Chicago. We didn't use the Flossmoor station. We used the Homewood station, which is just north of us, because it's got an underground entryway where we could run experiments in February when it gets a little cold here, and we signed people up for a commuter study. If they were interested in participating, they signed up, and then and only then did we randomly assign them to condition. So that's the key to any experiment is random assignment to a condition. They're not choosing what condition to be in in this experiment.

So in one condition, we told them, "What we'd like you to do on your commute today is just keep to yourself. Just enjoy your solitude, okay? Focus on your day ahead." Another condition, we told them, "Just do whatever you normally do." That's our control condition. Third condition, we told them to do something radical. We said, "When somebody comes and sits down next to you," this was early in the train line so people were coming and sitting down next to you, you weren't so much choosing who to sit with. "When somebody comes and sits down next to you, try to make a connection. Try to get to know him or her a little bit, try to have a conversation." We then handed them an envelope with a survey inside and sent them on their way.

At the end of the ride, we told them to pull the survey out of the envelope, fill it out, put it back in the envelope and send it back to us. About 85% of people across conditions did, equal across conditions, which is important. And then we asked them a few questions in that survey, some about introversion and extroversion later. We had a personality test, but the first ones were what we were interested in. We asked them a few questions that simply allowed us to measure, how positive was your commute today? We also asked how productive their commute was.

First, on productivity, we found no differences across conditions. People reported it being equally productive. That didn't matter. They did vary in how positive they found it to be, and actually, those in the connection condition reported having the most positive commute, and those in the solitude condition reported having the least positive commute. Now that's bizarre because nobody talks on the train, ever. It's just almost always quiet, so why? Usually, we're not choosing to make ourselves unhappy, so if talking is better, why aren't people doing it?

To find that out, we had to run another experiment that measured not people's experiences, but their expectations, their beliefs about how this would turn out, because if you enjoy this but you don't think you will enjoy it, you won't ever try it. So in this other experiment that we ran, we recruited people from the same Homewood, Illinois train station, but instead of asking them to do those three things, we asked them to predict how they would feel if they did actually these three things, so we asked them about their expectations. How did they expect to feel? They actually expected they would have the most positive commute in the solitude condition and the least positive commute in the connection condition. Their expectations weren't just off, they were precisely backwards.

But now you can understand why people behave as they do on the train. They're behaving rationally in Gary Becker's sense of the term, which requires behaving ways that are aligned with your expectations, your beliefs about what will bring you utility. People were acting in line with their beliefs. They thought talking to a stranger would suck and so they weren't doing it. It just turned out those beliefs were wrong. Rationality doesn't require omniscience, it requires consistency. But if you thought talking to someone would be unpleasant, you wouldn't try it. How would you ever find out that you were wrong?

Hal Weitzman: Right. And the other interesting thing you point out is that the structure of our lives, we're social animals, but the structure of our lives, particularly when it comes to commuting, is set up to be individual. We have the quiet carriage on the train, or even I think about the way in America, we really downgrade public transport. It's the poor people who have to go on, no offense, but you know what I mean.

Nicholas Epley: Yes. So people don't have any other options.

Hal Weitzman: The least desirable way of traveling is public transport because you have to mingle with it. You might, as you say, "Oh my God, I might have to talk to someone," as opposed to driving in a highway where I can sit in my little box. So it's all about the structure that we have and the structures are not set up to make us happy, are they? Ultimately, you were saying that if we did engage with other people, we'd be happier, and yet we act in ways that don't do that and we build structures that don't enable that.

Nicholas Epley: Right. So I think our expectations also guide lots of other things like how we build structures. If you think that you'll be happier keeping to yourself, you'll move out to the distant suburbs in your 0.5 acres of land with your high fences all the way around and live a nicely secluded life away from your neighbors and folks you might otherwise engage with. And a lot of the choices that we make about how to structure our laws focus on not necessarily happiness or wellbeing, they focus on efficiency. How can we make this quick and easy and efficient?

One fun story that Lori Santos, who does the Happiness Lab, in a earlier podcast with me years ago, one interesting story she told and did this lovely interview with the guy who created the ATM machine, and that was to make it efficient, so you didn't have to go in and bother with the bank teller. If you need money, just get your money and you'd be done with it. And look, there's a case to be made for efficiency, sure. You don't want to waste your time on things. It turns out though that this man's wife never used it. She never used the ATM because she loved talking to the teller. She had relationships with all of them, she liked going in and saying hi and catching up on people's lives quickly. It took a little longer, but she walked out of there happier than her husband did. And I was coming home a couple of weeks ago from San Diego. I gave a talk out there, and I come through the airport and you see so many things that are now oriented increasingly to more efficiency and away from social-

Hal Weitzman: The McDonald's and the Starbucks and everywhere we ordering on the app or on the screen or whatever.

Nicholas Epley: Exactly. Everybody's standing there staring at their screen, punching their thing into some faceless television set where your food comes out onto a table, no human interaction involved. Not a smile, not a hello.

Hal Weitzman: If you're in Japan, you can eat it in a cubicle. You don't even have to interact with anyone at all.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah, that's right. Can we just get it injected intravenously? That would save us a whole lot of time.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah. Okay. So two implications I wanted to ask you about. Well, the first is you make this really interesting point about self-care, which is wellness, something that appears to be wellness but maybe isn't actually making us better.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So often when people ... And there's some interesting research by Iris Mauss, who's a psychologist at UC Berkeley. When you ask people to go out and make themselves happier, they sometimes come back, at least in the US and the research that she's done here, they sometimes actually come back feeling worse, a little worse than they had beforehand, and part of the reason seems to be is that when people go out and try to make themselves happy, they focus on themselves. They go get a manicure or a massage or buy something nice for myself, but the data suggests that reliable happiness comes from doing kind things for others, doing things that make other people's days better. There's at least a lot of wellbeing that can come from that, a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of competency, that you're capable of doing good things. It can be really uplifting to go out and help somebody in a way that works.

And so the self-care industry is all self-oriented, but research suggests that maybe a better way, if you want to have a good moment at any given time, think about how to go out and make somebody else's day better. That's going to be, I think, more reliably uplifting. A good way to take care of yourself is to figure out how to lift somebody else up.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is this gap in expectations is also reflected in a gap about polarization. So there's a political, societal aspect to this. Tell us about that.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So politics has always been divisive, but it's continuing to get more and more extreme. What seems to be driving a lot of that polarization isn't that the two political sides are getting more extreme, it's that their beliefs about the other side are getting more extreme. And so the folks on the other side are increasingly crazy or demented or evil or bad people. That kind of language-

Hal Weitzman: You make me think about that, "I wouldn't let my daughter marry a Democrat," which is-

Nicholas Epley: That is a relatively new thing in US history. It has not historically been that way. We've recognized that people are more than their politics, but once you start thinking that way about the other side, it makes you more extreme as well, or at least it can.

Hal Weitzman: So what's interesting, the perception there, and isn't perception reality in that case?

Nicholas Epley: No, no. Well, so there is a reality here. So I can predict your beliefs on the other side of the political spectrum and I compare them against your actual belief, and the gaps between perceived beliefs and actual beliefs are huge. People tend to think that the other side is much more extreme than they actually are, and that has several consequences. One is you start to see the other side as evil or problematic and you can't really deal with them, so that harms your ability to interact with them, to talk with them, pretty much everything, but the other thing is that it creates barriers to even trying to engage with other people. So if I think that you are so extreme, our conversation's maybe going to be pretty terrible and so I won't even try having that conversation, and increasingly, people are having fewer and fewer conversations with folks who think differently than they do, at least real conversations, face to face or with your voice. They're typing to each other a little more, but that increase in perceived polarization can also drive actual polarization, mistakenly dividing us further.

And that's the thing that really hurts to see if you know what's driving that wedge. If you're a social psychologist and you know that our beliefs about the other side are overly extreme, to watch what's happening with political division isn't just unwise, it's tragic.

Hal Weitzman: But in your mind, it comes from a misconception.

Nicholas Epley: A misconception, yeah, and we see this in our data. So when you have people have conversations with folks that believe different things from them, they tend to go much, much better than you expect that they will, for two reasons. One is that you learn the other person's not quite as crazy as you think they are, but the other is when you actually have a conversation with each other, you tend to find a little more common ground with each other than you might've imagined beforehand. And most of conversation has forces or conversation itself has forces that pull us together, and so people are the most mistaken we find when they have conversations with strangers who they know disagree with them. That's where they're most off.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Nick Epley, thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast. It's been an absolutely fascinating conversation about your book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection. Thanks, Nick.

Nicholas Epley: Thank you, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis and insights, visit our website, chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.