Chicago Booth Review Podcast Why Selfies Harm Your Happiness

Nicholas Epley: When we actually put people through these experiences, they actually find that the deep conversation is not as awkward as they thought it would be, and they dramatically underestimate how positive deep conversation is going to be because they underestimate how much another person will open up when you open up to them.

Hal Weitzman: How could we have deeper conversations, connect more with others, and ultimately be happier? 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. This is the second episode in which we're talking about the book. What can we do to be more social? And what effects could it have on our happiness, wellbeing, and perhaps even on society at large?

Nick Epley, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Nicholas Epley: Thanks for having me again, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: We had such a fun time with you last time talking about your book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection, that we want to get your advice about how to actually do that. How do we create that happiness?

Nicholas Epley: Do a little better, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: You've sold us. We agree. Now we want to do it. And so last time we talked about the choice. Extroverts choose to be social. Introverts choose not to be social. Extroverts are happier. So what could we start to do to make the choice that will actually make us happier, regardless of what we think might happen?

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So there's nothing particularly magical here about the social nature of these choices. This is really a behavior change phenomena. And when psychologists look at behavior change, there are few things that we know. One is to change our behavior kind of routinely and reliably and robustly, you can't do it once, and you're not going to do it just by knowing some result. It's not just reading about research that's going to change how you behave. You need to put these things into practice regularly, routinely, so that they become habits. So that's one thing.

The other thing is that you shouldn't start huge. You should start small. You don't move a mountain by pushing it all at once. You move a mountain slowly, shovel full by shovel full by shovel full. And that's, I think, the way you want to start thinking about making social changes in ways that might enrich your life. It can be hard to do. It can be very hard to start. So don't start with the hard things. Pick the easy things.

One suggestion for how to start is to just look for opportunities. So one of the things that I think can happen is that once you start looking around for opportunities you have to be a little more social, opportunities where maybe you've got expectations that are holding you back from doing something that might otherwise be pleasant. Those are the places where it would be easy to do that you can start to change.

So let me give you one simple example. At the University of Chicago where we both work in the Harper Center, I walk in to the south side of the building every day from the train in the morning. And I have then maybe a 200 yard walk or so from the entrance of the building up the elevator to my office on the fourth floor. And I realized one morning that I was making that walk always kind of with efficiency in mind, with my head down, trying to get to the office so I could start working. And so I decided to make just a little change. Instead, I would keep my head up and I would say hello to people I passed.

And that little 200 yard walk instantly got a little better. So I'd pass people in the winter garden. So Nigel was always there. This winter, one of our MBA students, he always staked out one table. I got to know him a little better just from seeing him. He was in my class too. And so I'd say hi to him in the morning. And Keith, one of our custodial staff, [inaudible 00:04:08] who's got the biggest smile in the building, I'd often see Keith or Mario or Maria. So I'd say hi as I'm walking by and I'd get up the elevator up to my fourth floor. And as I'd walk by my colleagues, Jane and Erica and Virginia and Emma and Christina and Joe, I'd just say hi if they were there as I was walking by. So I went on this little hello walk and it didn't take me any more time.

Hal Weitzman: And you're just saying hello?

Nicholas Epley: Just saying hi. "Hi, Eric. Hi, Virginia. Morning, Emma." Just very simple. And those aren't big things, but it made that stretch a little bit better. So I arrive at the office a little bit happier. And those I think are the things to start looking for. Maybe you've got a commute where you could, instead of sitting there alone, you could maybe choose that as a time to call an old friend or to call a parent or to call one of your kids. Maybe you've got lunch that you eat alone and you could choose to have somebody else join you. Maybe you go down and get coffee during the day. And instead of going by yourself, you could, like my colleagues, [inaudible 00:05:13] and Jane did this morning, they could go down together and get coffee. You're looking for those moments where you are choosing to keep to yourself where it might be really easy and not that hard to try engaging with other people. And once you start looking for those moments, I think you're going to find some.

Hal Weitzman: Last time we talked about an introvert listening to this podcast and saying, "This sounds great. The book sounds great, I'll read it, but I'm not going to do anything different." And I'm wondering if there might be some people listening who think, "Well, this sounds like a social activity, but it's not going to make me happier." Tell us how robust the connection is between being more social and being happier.

Nicholas Epley: So you can see this in multiple ways. So one of the very first personality psychology papers published that tested the relationship between people's reported personality on a personality scale and their wellbeing, this was in 1980, reported a correlation of around 0.5 between extroversion and wellbeing or happiness. So you can see it across people. You can also see it across the course of people's days. So you spend your moments differently over the course of a given day. Sometimes as a professor, I'm doing things that are pretty extroverted. I'm talking with people like we're doing now or I'm teaching. I'm in front of people or I'm having lunch with a colleague. Other times I'm sitting in my office typing away. Those are little flat or duller moments. I'm being productive. I'm getting things done, but I'm typing away.

And if you just look over the course of people's days and you ask them, how are you feeling over the course of your day, people report feeling more positive affect, more positive mood when they're interacting, connecting with others than when they're by themselves and alone. And that's true of people who typically report themselves as being extroverted or introverted. That's true across both.

You also see, if you look at the activities that generally leave people feeling positive, they tend to be social activities. The socializing with friends or family, going to a worship service with other people, intimate relations with your partner. That's how psychologists write about sex in journals. They talk about intimate relations in surveys. That tends to be like the best part of people's day, when you're most closely connected with the person that you love the most. Whereas the least positive activities tend to be things like commuting or doing housework, for instance. So you see the effect of sociality on wellbeing show up almost every way you look.

Hal Weitzman: If you did housework with somebody else?

Nicholas Epley: Better. In fact, there's a paper recently just came out. One of the co-authors was Elizabeth Dunn, who's a fabulous psychologist at the University of British Columbia. And the title of the paper was Everything Is Better With Others. I think that's the title. I might be getting it wrong, but I think that was the title. And essentially what they found was that if you look at time use surveys of what people are doing and who they're with, every activity they've measured that could be done with others or by themselves, including housework, was better when others were there than when you were by yourself.

Hal Weitzman: So if you have something unpleasant to do, invite somebody to come along and do it with you?

Nicholas Epley: 100%. You know what that's called? Exercising with a friend. That's what that is.

Hal Weitzman: Let's not go too far. Steady on. Okay. So this also fascinated me because we're in Chicago. There's nothing that people would rather talk about than the weather, which changes every five seconds.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: But let's not go down that rabbit hole. So you say that most of us claim to hate small talk, sorry. And yet we so often find ourselves stuck in small talk. Why is that?

Nicholas Epley: So we find that people think that deeper and more meaningful conversations are going to be a little more awkward. They'll create a little stronger bond and they'll enjoy a little bit more, but mostly they think it's going to be weird. And they're worried that the other person in a meaningful conversation isn't going to be as interested in the stuff they have to say as they are themselves. So if I open up to you, I'm worried you might not open up back to me, and then that conversation's going to be really awkward. So what we do instead is we test the waters. We start talking about the weather and sometimes we get stuck there because we're too nervous about going deeper in conversation. And so we end up having conversations that are perhaps more mediocre than they could be.

In our research, what we do is we look at what happens when people dive into deep conversations quickly. So psychologists years ago, back in the 1990s learned that having deeper conversations tended to leave people feeling more connected to each other than shallow conversations. Two psychologists, Art and Elaine Aron created a procedure to do this called the Fast Friends Procedure that was made famous in a New York Times op-ed titled How to Fall in Love with Anyone. And it's a series of 36 questions that get increasingly intimate. And Art and Elaine Aron thought that you needed this increasing reciprocal exchange in order to actually become close with another person. We actually find that that's not true.

So in our experiments, what we do is we just give people relatively shallow conversation questions to discuss. "When did you last walk for more than an hour? And have you ever had a bad haircut experience?" Kind of shallow things, or to talk about the weather, or to have deeper conversation like, "Can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person?" Or, "What are you most grateful for in your life? Tell me about it." They expect that the deep conversation is going to be more awkward than the shallow one, and they expect that they'll be somewhat similar in how connected that they will feel to the other person. When we actually put people through these experiences, they actually find that the deep conversation is not as awkward as they thought it would be. And they dramatically underestimate how positive deep conversation is going to be because they underestimate how much another person will open up when you open up to them. So the reason why we stay stuck in small talk that we claim to hate is because we're overly afraid of opening up and-

Hal Weitzman: ... It also seems, I want you to be more practical with us because it seems, "Morning, how was your weekend? When was the last time you cried?"

Nicholas Epley: No, that's a little abrupt. Maybe that doesn't work. That doesn't work.

Hal Weitzman: How does it work?

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So we don't have a recipe on these question cards, but I will tell you how it works. So Art and Elaine Aron thought you needed 36 steps to get to this really deep stuff. "Is there anything you regret in your life? What would you do to change it?" That was one of the deeper questions. So 36 steps. You can get there most times in two. So maybe you'd sit down next to me on the train one morning and I'd introduce myself. "Hi, my name's Nick. What is it you do for a living? Can you tell me?"

Hal Weitzman: I work at a podcast.

Nicholas Epley: You work at a podcast. And then I maybe would say, "Do you love your job? Why do you love it?"

Hal Weitzman: It gets me interesting ...

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. I mean, that's how you do it. So on the second question, I've asked about something you love.

Hal Weitzman: Is that because it's an open question?

Nicholas Epley: Maybe a little bit, but it's also because I choose to go there. I don't say, "What do you talk about?" I ask you questions about your emotions, something meaningful, something you feel. That's what I do. I don't stay on the outside. The weather's all stuff on the outside. It's impersonal stuff. The way you go deep with somebody is you get to something on the inside. So do you love what you do? Had you always wanted to do this? What do you hope to be doing down the road?

One of my favorite ways to start a conversation with somebody is to ask them to, "Tell me your story. How did you get here today?" And usually by that, they know what I mean. They don't mean like, I don't know, how did I walk here today? They mean, tell me your story over the course of your life to how did you get to this point right here? And that usually is full of meaning and purpose and twists and turns and interesting things. And it's something that's relevant to people. And you don't have to wait 36 questions in. If you want to have a more meaningful conversation, take an interest in somebody, try to get to know them, respect them for who they are. They've got an interesting story to tell you that they would love to tell you if you take an interest in them and ask them to tell you.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It's called Nine Questions. Join Professor Eric Oliver as he poses the nine most essential questions for knowing yourself to some of humanity's wisest, the most interesting people. Nine Questions with Eric Oliver, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

Nick, in the first half, we talked more about your book, A Little More Social, and how we can start to go deeper, how we can start in our daily lives to make these connections that ultimately are going to make us happier, make other people around us happier as well. Questions, the superficial questions and getting away from them. And we were talking about how to do that with strangers, but it strikes me that many of our loved ones, the people around us all the time, we're also stuck in superficial conversations. Who's picking up the kids? What'd you get for dinner? Should we get tacos, et cetera? That's probably not adding a lot of happiness.

Nicholas Epley: No. I mean, look, there are demands of daily life. Sometimes you got to figure out who's-

Hal Weitzman: ... Tacos are important.

Nicholas Epley: They are. Yes. You got to do with that stuff. But Jen and I, my wife and I have taken to spending some of our evenings instead of sitting down and watching a movie, going through some question cards. You can buy these packs of conversation cards that are kind of fun to go through that get you to think about things you might not otherwise think about or talk about. And we enjoy those date nights a lot. Yeah. You can talk about more meaningful stuff.

One thing that I think people can really do this with is with their family members, particularly parents, with your parents. I suspect there are many folks who are my age, I'm in my 50s, who might regret never having meaningful conversations say with their grandparents about what their lives were like and what they loved and didn't love and if they wish they'd have done anything different. And now's the time to have those conversations with your parents, with your family members that you might not have otherwise. And often it's not hard to do that. You can do that over dinner, but you got to choose to want to do it. Choose to try it.

Hal Weitzman: The thing I love about that as well is when you ask, if I can share a personal frustration, when you ask your parents about their lives, it's very much kind of the resume. "We did this, we moved there, your father got this job, we bought this house," but there's no texture or detail.

Nicholas Epley: There's no love. Yeah. Tell me, who did you love when you were young? What did you like to do? Tell me a fun story that you remember. Yeah, it's too-

Hal Weitzman: And when we have those conversations, we're happier?

Nicholas Epley: They're better conversations and when we're having better conversations, we tend to feel better. Yes.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Last episode, we talked about self-care and some of your concerns about self-care and turning inwards rather than turning outwards. And the other thing, the other similar thing I wanted to ask you about was selfie sticks. You got this great bit about selfie sticks. You're campaigning against them. Well, I think you may have won.

Nicholas Epley: [inaudible 00:16:43]. I'm on the war path.

Hal Weitzman: I feel like I haven't seen one for a while-

Nicholas Epley: People figured out out they're stupid. Yeah. But they still carry phones in their pockets that do the same thing.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So tell us.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah. So there are certain consumer products that I think are marketed to a mistake, marketed to a mistaken preference about what would actually make us happy. And the selfie stick is a good example. So there are times where you need help in life, where you need to turn to other people to get assistance with one thing or another. And often we're reluctant to do that. We're reluctant to ask for help when we need it because we don't want to, I don't know, look weak, sometimes people might think. Or the big thing is, just like on trains, buses and cabs where we have people try to have a conversation, you think that other people don't want to be bothered with this or burdened with this. That's a belief about how others will respond when you reach out to say, ask them for help at work or ask them for help in the neighborhood or ask them for help at home or ask for help wherever you happen to be. You think they're not going to respond very well.

We tested that belief in a few different ways. So in some experiments, we had people in laboratory situations needing to go and ask another person to help them with something they were working on. The other person was happier to help them when we thought, than they thought. We also went downtown in downtown Chicago to Garfield Park Conservatory at a place where we saw people often needing help, but being reluctant to reach out and ask other people to do it, which is namely to take pictures of them. So this is a whole new thing. People falling off the edge of the Grand Canyon trying to take a selfie of themselves because they didn't turn to somebody else and ask for it. So this comes up, I think-

Hal Weitzman: It's really the selfie you're against, it's not the stick.

Nicholas Epley: That's right. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. That's a way to think about it. So why is it we have phones that face towards us? Well, one thing is that in the olden days, you needed to ask somebody else for help to do this. We ran an experiment to see, well, what happens if you were to ask somebody to help take a picture of you? We went to Garfield Park Conservatory. There's a beautiful spot there where you could have a picture taken. And we gave people an old school camera, like an instant camera that spit out a picture. And what we asked them to do was to go and find somebody in the conservatory and ask if they'd be willing to take a picture of them in front of this kind of pretty scene.

Before they went out, they made some predictions about how the person they asked would feel, how willing they would be to help, how happy they would feel after helping, how inconvenienced they would feel, how obligated they would feel to help and so on.

They then went out and actually found somebody to ask for help. And after they took the picture, basically everybody who asked for help was helped. So they were almost never rejected. We then asked the person who took the picture, "Would you be willing to fill out a survey right now just about how you feel?" And they filled out the survey. And then we compared the askers, the requester's expectations with the helper's actual experiences. And what we found is that the helpers were significantly more willing to help, happier to have helped the other person than the requesters expected. So when you go up and ask somebody to do this nice thing for you, they feel better. They've just done this kind act for you. We know from decades of research that acts of kindness, doing an act of kindness for another person creates a warm glow. You feel better for having helped this person. And when you ask someone for help, when they can do it makes them not feel obligated or burdened, but rather it often makes them happier, at least happier than we think that they will.

And so you don't need to put the cell phone in front of your face. You can just hand it to somebody else and ask, "Hey, would you be willing to do this for us?" You will have two things positive come out of that. One, you'll get a better picture. Second, you'll leave another person feeling happier as well. I've actually come to think through this research of asking for help very, very differently. And I've come to think of not asking for help from someone when they could provide it. Advice on how to write a paper, help with something that I know they could do pretty easily to help me with this thing. I've come to think of not asking for help as an act of unkindness. It's unkind not to let you help me in a way that would leave you feeling happier. It's changed the way I think about it. And I don't own a selfie stick.

Hal Weitzman: I think at one point, the Chicago Booth, actually, if I can confess, I think we used to give away branded selfie sticks.

Nicholas Epley: God forbid you'd actually have to talk to somebody, ask them for help doing something.

Hal Weitzman: So after these conversations with you, Nick, I'm wondering, what do you think, if we all were able to do a little bit more, what do you think the societal effects would be?

Nicholas Epley: It would feel different. The whole aura of the place would feel different. So Sonja Lyubomirsky, who's a psychologist at UC Riverside, ran an experiment in a Coca-Cola plant in Iberia, Spain, where she tested what happens if you create just a little more social kinder environment. And she had givers, so randomly assigned people to be givers, receivers, or a control condition. The givers were asked to do five acts of kindness one day a week for a period of four weeks over the course of a month. They're just doing acts of kindness for somebody, for different people one day a week. The givers are the recipients of this and the control condition are extra people who are just going about their days as normal. And track this over the course of the month that they were doing these acts and then over the next three months afterwards.

And they found a few things. One is the culture at the plant started to change, at the company started to change, the receivers started to see more kindness. It started to seem like a more positive place. And they were also kinder to other people as well. They passed it along to other people. That's what psychologists refer to as indirect reciprocity.

You also saw both givers and receivers, but particularly givers reported feeling happier in their job, reported more meaning and purpose in their job, reported higher job satisfaction. You also saw decreases in depressive symptomatology. Depression is often related to a sense kind of a lack of meaning or purpose of what you're doing. And you saw a drop in 4 weeks that they were doing it out 8 weeks in the experiment and even out to 16 full weeks. So three months after the experiment was done, the givers reported significantly less depressive symptomatology than the recipients even, and then the controls did.

Lifting your mood with positive habits like this can change the way you act in a way that makes you happier, but also gives you a little more sense of meaning and purpose in your life. And if you were all to do that in a community, you'd create a friendlier place where people were better connected. They felt safer. They felt warmer. Everything felt friendlier. I think you would see less depression if you could do this at scale.

Now, you can't do this systematically at scale through interventions that we would necessarily be able to put in place, that can be hard to do, but you can certainly destroy it. And you can destroy it through things like acts of war. And so when the World Happiness Report comes out every year reporting the happiest places to live on the planet, the places that come up at the top are typically like the Nordic countries who have ... There's just not a lot of misery there. They have very well-functioning systems. The communities themselves are generally pretty friendly, cohesive places. And the least positive places to live are those that have civil war and strife and rampant inequality where people don't connect well with each other. So I think it would make a huge difference. It would be like changing the water that a fish swims in to be more conducive to a happy life or less.

Hal Weitzman: And it all starts with saying hello.

Nicholas Epley: It certainly can. It can start with you.

Hal Weitzman: Nick Epley, thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Both Review Podcast. It's been great chatting with you over these two episodes.

Nicholas Epley: Thank you very much, 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.