#799 - David Robson - The Science Of Building Genuine Friendships

Chris Williamson
Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Robson. He's a science writer, journalist and an author. Loneliness is the real pandemic.

Many people are yearning for connection but struggle to hold onto it. David has uncovered 13 laws of human connection which you can apply to build and deepen relationships with the people in your life. Expect to learn whether we are actually in a loneliness crisis, how solitude impacts our health, why people are struggling to make deeper connections, how you can express appreciation more freely to others, how you can heal bad feelings, why asking for help is actually important, why it's so crucial to get better at forgiving others, and much more. David wrote the expectation effect. He came on the show maybe three years ago, two years ago, and that book was so fantastic.

Awesome insights and today is the same. He must drop 20 studies, 20 different stories about some lab somewhere that found something out and it's been replicated. So much fun. Lots and lots to apply to your life. Great for interpersonal stuff, building new relationships and deepening connections.

He's awesome. I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. Don't forget that the next few weeks have some huge guests coming on and the only way that you can ensure you will not miss those is by pressing subscribe. So please navigate to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you are listening and press the follow button or the plus in the top right hand corner. I really do appreciate it.

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Are we in a loneliness crisis? What does the data say? Yeah, I mean, you see this like everywhere. Like I think every week there's a new newspaper article saying that we're in this kind of loneliness epidemic. And like, there's no doubt that, like the surveys showed that lots of people feel lonely.

David Robson
Like as many as 50% of people feel pretty lonely, like regular points in their lives. So yeah, it is a kind of crisis. But whether this is like a new phenomenon that is really up for debate, because if you look back at the historic data, which is imperfect, but you can go back like 60, 70 years, and people were reporting high levels of loneliness back then too. So even though I'm sure that some elements of our society today are kind of driving people apart, people don't live in their family so much. Often we're kind of based in different continents, even people are living alone a lot more.

I'm sure all of that is super relevant, but I dont think its the only reason that people are feeling lonely. And I think the research really shows that there must be some kind of psychological barriers. The problem lies within us as much as in our environment. And thats why people have felt lonely for decades, centuries, potentially. Oh, thats interesting.

Chris Williamson
So theres an ambient level of human loneliness thats just endemic to being us. And then we have this sort of new world of technology and atomization and isolation and digital communication and stuff. And maybe a lot of people are laying what is a much more sort of ancestral, archaic problem at the feet of the new technology. Is that kind of how you frame it? Yeah, exactly.

David Robson
Every time a new technology comes along, we blame it for everything. So back in Jane Austen's time, people were saying that reading novels was driving the youth into madness. So I think technology like our cell phones are just tools. They can be used to enhance connection, or they can be used to just engage in social comparison and make us feel really shit about ourselves compared to other people. But the tool itself isn't the problem, it's the way we're using it.

So that's where I'm coming from, really. It's all about mindfully knowing how we handle our relationships. That's important. Yeah, I think to me I would say there is a step change in the power that these devices have over us compared with previous ones. Yes.

Chris Williamson
Maybe the wireless in 1912 or something was these kids, they're just going to be listening to the news all day or whatever. And then the television as well was a huge concern, especially when it was in more households. This is going to turn everybody into sort of adults, totally useless citizens. I do think that there's a step change. I do think that social media and smartphones are a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree of what we're talking about here, but at the same time, how easy and convenient it is to now have a legitimate excuse and a genuine enemy that you can say this.

This is why I don't connect with people the way that I want to. This is why I don't have any social depth with the people that are around me. This is why I don't seem to be able to find a deeper meaning in my relationships. It's the boogeyman. It's like the smartphone of the gaps.

For all of your social ills. Yeah, it totally is. I mean, like, you can blame it on the technology and you can just kind of take this attitude that you're kind of helpless to solve your loneliness. Or you can look at the kind of psychological literature and actually, like, what's come out in the last, like, five or ten years is that actually there are lots of things that we can do to enhance the relationships that we do have or to build new relationships, which is often a lot easier than we expect. I mean, that's something that comes out in the literature all the time, that we're probably much better at being social and kind of having these authentic, deep relationships than we believe we are.

David Robson
We just have to know how to. Do it correctly just to set the scene. How important is social connection? I mean, it's so important. So I think, like, we all know, you know, it's nice to kind of have a group of friends who you can rely on and to have, like, meaningful relationships with your family, like, to live with a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend, you know, like we know.

I think everyone knows that that's super important for kind of mental health and happiness. But what has become so apparent is that social connection is fundamental for your health. I mean, accumulating evidence from 50 years shows that it's actually one of the big predictors of mortality. So you have things like smoking, drinking, your BMI, whether you do exercise, you know, whether you're kind of taking care of things like your blood pressure. But social connection is right up there with all of these.

It's as important, if not more important, than all of these other core lifestyle factors. So you really can't actually overestimate how important social connection is. It's just fundamental to living a good and healthy life. Yeah, I was looking at some of the different correlations that you'd found. Immunity, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's neurodegeneration.

Chris Williamson
Friendships are the panacea. They're the ultimate cure to whatever it is that ails you. Right? Yeah, exactly. I see it as being like exercise.

David Robson
You know, like, exercise basically reduces your risk of, like, all illness. Social connection is pretty much the same, and there are really strong evolutionary arguments for why that is and essentially, when we were kind of, you know, in prehistory, it was like we were living in nature that was really dangerous with the threat of predators or other groups who might have attacked our group. Like, you really had to have a solid alliances with the people around you. So if you were excluded or if your ties were quite weak, you were in danger. So the body, first of all, it evolved this kind of strong signal to kind of warn you that something was up and that you had to remedy that.

So in the same way that you feel physical pain, to kind of warn you that you've got a wound that needs to be tended, you would feel social pain to warn you that your relationships really aren't as secure as they need to be to keep you physically safe. So that's why loneliness is so painful emotionally. And then we also, that is accompanied by a physiological reaction as well. So you see an increase in inflammation, because if you're isolated, you're at more risk of injury. So you have this kind of low level inflammation that's going to protect you from infection.

If you do get injured, you have, like, a higher, higher levels of blood clotting factors, which would stop you losing blood if you're attacked. Inflammation and blood clotting might be good in the short term if you do have a wound, but actually in the long term, they're going to increase your risk of things like Alzheimer's or a stroke or a heart attack. And actually, those stroke and heart attack are the two things that are most strongly linked to loneliness. And you can really see the mechanism is so, so totally bound into our kind of evolutionary history. So everyone that's listening has been red pilled about a lot of evolutionary psychology.

Chris Williamson
They understand that a human on its own, 50,000 years ago, is a human that doesn't survive for very long. So I think everyone can understand the ultimate reason for why loneliness would hurt, right. From the ultimate proximate paradigm. The mechanism is something that I didn't know about, and that is so cool. What are some of the other mechanisms?

Because this is a big question that I had. Why do friends make such a difference? Our body's got some weird Facebook friend tick counter thing in the back of its mind. What's it doing to detect this? What's being mediated by the people that are around us?

That mechanism thing, to me, is really important. Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating, and it's still being kind of researched and developed this theory. You can see in other social animals, like even rodents do, depend on living in groups that they have these loneliness neurons that are a little like the areas of the brain that deal with hunger. So it's like you feel satiated after you've eaten, so your hunger kind of decreases, and then it increases when you're going to run out of energy. Well, it seemed to be the same with the loneliness neurons that it's like when you've been apart from people for a while, or if you feel isolated from those who are around you, but you just don't feel close to them.

David Robson
It seems those loneliness neurons become more active. They're telling you, they're giving you this warning, you need to tend your relationships. And then when you've spent time with your friends or your family, the loneliness neurons stop firing so much until you. Until you're kind of in that danger zone again. So, yeah, we are keeping track of our social connection very tightly, automatically.

It's kind of a low level desire, just like hunger, thirst, like all of the other things that we need to survive. Lots of people will say, I don't need anybody. I'm a lone ranger. Maybe I've been in friendships before and I've been betrayed. Maybe I've tried to make friends and I've really struggled.

Chris Williamson
I don't even care about the world. I've absconded. I've gone full Ted Kaczynski mode. I'm out in the equivalent of the digital woods in my apartment or whatever. How much are these effects of loneliness outside of our conscious awareness that we feel lonely?

Do you know what I mean? There's some people who will not be around many people and go, God, I just really do feel lonely. The solitude is hurting me. And then there's other people who either genuinely or sort of deceptively don't have that sensation. Is it your belief that pretty much everybody's brain is still playing the ticker sort of loneliness neuron thing is firing regardless of whether you think, fuck the world, or actually, I really want a lot of friends.

David Robson
Yeah, I do think it's like that. I mean, I think, like, you know, pretty much everyone is going to need some kind of level of social contact. I think it's differs depending on whether you're introverted or extroverted for what that kind of social connection will look like. So some people, I think, are very happy with having 100 weak ties that they see semi regularly, but they maybe don't have such a close bond with each one of those. For others, it might be important just to have their spouse or one close friend who they really rely on.

But I think fundamentally, some kind of social connection is this kind of basic human urge. I do kind of see, looking at the literature and kind of reading between the lines, that there might be some people who, like you say, they're kind of neglecting this basic need in the same way that someone with an eating disorder might kind of start to neglect their need to eat. So you can isolate yourself, and it's almost like you just stop listening to the kind of brain or the body signals for what you desire, but then your mental health is going to suffer in other ways. You might not be linking it to that cause, but I think there's no way that you're not going to suffer some consequences from that. Yeah, I was trying to sort of correlate it to your last book, the expectation effect, which everybody needs to go and read, by the way.

Chris Williamson
Fantastic. I was wondering whether the story that you tell yourself about your degree of loneliness mediates this sort of loneliness neuron activation and the platelets being closer to coagulate all that stuff. I think it probably does a little bit because, say, we know that your attitudes to stress in general can have an influence on how you kind of physiologically respond to that stress. So if you see stress as being this kind of thing that makes you stronger and is important for growth, you have a better physiological response than if you see stress as being super dangerous and, like, bad for your health, bad and a sign of failure. So I do think when we experience these kind of transient periods of loneliness, I think our mindset is going to have a role there.

David Robson
Like you could see. I think no matter how strong your social network, sometimes you're going to still feel a bit rejected by people. Your friends aren't always going to act in the way that you want, and you can kind of catastrophize that and you can start to tell yourself that, blame it on yourself and see yourself as being totally unlikable and something inherent within you that's not going to be as healthy as if you just kind of take a more philosophical, stoical approach to that. And I accept that sometimes loneliness is a part of the human condition, and you can recognize the loneliness as this kind of core signal, a bit like physical pain that's telling you that maybe you have to nurture your relationships in other ways. So if you've been let down by one friend, like maybe it's time to reach out to another to kind of get that connection that you're missing.

Chris Williamson
What was the relationship between creativity and finances with loneliness? Yeah, I mean, so this is a whole other mechanism by which social connection might be related to our health. Because actually, when we're socially connected, we become more creative. Because if you're surrounded by loads of different people of different backgrounds who have different viewpoints, you have this kind of cross pollination process where, like, their ideas feed into your ideas and vice versa. And then that plays out in how innovative you are as an individual and as a group.

David Robson
So you can see that in data from the creators of Broadway musicals, for example, you sometimes had groups of choreographers, composers, lyricists, who only work together in very small, isolated groups. They tended to be less successful, as seen by the critical success, how long the plays ran, how much money they took in. They were less successful compared to some of these groups who would, like. They were a bit promiscuous in who they would work with. So they would work with one group for one production and then go on to another.

But they were just carrying so many different ideas from all of the people they'd worked with. They had this kind of broader professional network, and then that seemed to help them to break the kind of norms of the genre so that they became more creative in what they were producing. And something like west side Story seemed to come out of that kind of very collaborative process where you actually had people who had already worked with a whole bunch of other professionals before they joined that particular group. And then if you're more creative, you have more financial security often because you're doing better at your job. If you're well connected, you just see more opportunities for business.

So that gives you better financial security if you're made redundant. You know, like something like, in the UK, like, 50% of people found their job through, like, an acquaintance, so it's easier to then kind of get back into employment. So all of that is good in itself, but it's also just relieving you of, like, some of the biggest stresses that you're going to have to face in your life. So independent of the kind of loneliness response and what that's doing to your levels of inflammation and the clotting agents, you're also just better equipped to deal with all of the challenges that you are going to have to face. And that's a cycle, a feedback loop as well.

Chris Williamson
Presumably that poverty, for instance, is a reliable inducer of stress into a human's life. If you drop into poverty. There's this great study that I learned about to do with epigenetics for mothers, and they did this study, Robert Sapolsky talks about it, did this study where women who entered poverty during pregnancy, and you can see this epigenetic cascade into the child, into the fetus, and if that child is a female, that child has every egg that they are ever going to make a baby from while they're inside of what will be grandmother who has just gone into poverty. So you end up with three generations of this epigenetic. It's so interesting.

So, yeah, this sort of interest, it's like, um. It's kind of like stabilizers in a way. It's just sort of robust, increasing robustness. Yeah, that's exactly how I see it. It's just that you, you know, like, if you fall ill and you've got someone to take you to the hospital, like that is something that could potentially increase your lifespan as well.

David Robson
We know when people are socially connected, they're also just more likely to take care of their health because they get that kind of feedback from other people who might be saying, like, fucking hell. David, you've gained a bit of weight or whatever it might be. Exactly. Yeah, no, totally. It's like that.

Or if you've got a cough or whatever, that won't go away. You really do need to get that scene right. Yeah. The denial of your own medical issues is harder if there's someone watching you. Yeah, that's exactly it.

So it's just so fundamental. But like you said, it's like when you're connected, you have these kinds of stabilizers that mean even if you hit a kind of rocky road, you're just better able to write yourself more quickly. Is it the number of friends? Are some connections more important or higher value than others? How should we think about connection balance sheet or the profit and loss account?

Yeah, I mean, so it's going to vary from person to person and kind of what connections you really value. I know some people who just love having a huge social network of people that they aren't so close to. Others are happier with just having a very small but tight knit group. But even within those connections, you can kind of differentiate. So you have the people who are purely supportive, so, you know, they're always there for you when you need them and they're like an unalloyed good.

Like they're just gonna, you know, like, you want as many people as you can of those, then you have the purely aversive people who are kind of, you know, like, consistently nasty, like, you know, we would tend to avoid, I've. Been saying friends, but you're talking social connections, and social connections can be both good and bad, right? Yeah. Well, they can. That's it.

So, I mean, like, you know, those people, I guess we would try to, like, shift out of our social network, but then there's these people who are kind of in the middle, the kind of ambivalent relationships or frenemies. And what is weird about those is we might keep them in our relationship for our, in our kind of relationship network for our whole lives, but they're pretty bad for our health, actually, if you have too many frenemies. So these are kind of, you know, Jekyll and Hyde figures who, like, might seem like your best friend one day, then they're in a bad mood and they'll lash out at you the next. But the good kind of might outweigh the bad. So you don't want to just, like, fall out with them and, like, exclude them from your social network completely.

But what the research shows is that they can actually be more stressful for you than the purely aversive, like, consistently nasty people. Like, you know, if your boss is just always, like, difficult with you, you kind of can discount what they say. If sometimes they're praising you, and then another time they're just unreliably, really critical. That's like, that raises your blood pressure a lot more, basically. So even just knowing that you have, like, an ambivalent connection in the next room as you, and that you're going to have to interact with them, that is enough to raise your blood pressure.

Chris Williamson
So is it the uncertainty? Is that what's causing it to happen? Yeah, it's the answer. It's totally the uncertainty. And it's because they're nice enough to us that we actually really care what they say.

David Robson
We're not. Like, we are not going to ignore them in the same way that we might ignore your horrible uncle who's just going to be critical, whatever you do. How can people recognize or learn to recognize frenemies better? Hmm. I mean, so I think, like, there are, I think it, like, actually, the questionnaires are pretty easy, actually, to kind of.

So I put them in my book, and it's basically like, when you need help, is this person, on a scale of one to seven, helpful or, like, not helpful at all? Very helpful and not hurtful at all or very hurtful. But essentially, if someone scores more than two on both of those scales, they are a frenemy. And then the research shows that they're actually pretty bad for your health if you have too many of those frenemies within your group. Yeah.

So I think we all know people like that. And I'm not saying that we should just detoxify, but I think we can be mindful of the way that we interact with them. So if you're already feeling stressed, just avoid an ambivalent connection. Don't go to them for help if you have to see them, try to do something to chill out afterwards. Try to exercise some self compassion.

Maybe even just remind yourself of the fact that if they're nature, that they are this ambivalent connection and that you don't have to take what they say so personally because that's, you know, that's on them. That's not on you. I think all of these things can help to mitigate their effects. So it's kind of like a lowering of expectations in some ways that your unpredictability comes about. Because some days they convince you that they're potentially a good friend, but then many days they come and they're a dick or they're aloof, or they're not responsive, or they're mean or they're not helpful or whatever it might be.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. So just bringing down the expectation of the good. And this is the reason why your boss, that's just twenty four seven, a cantankerous person, is, well, you know, it's Jim. Do you know Jim? Jim, he's just, that's the way he goes.

But the guy that flip flops between, you know, Jim and John is the more difficult one. So by just, okay, everybody's Jim now. Everyone that's ambivalent is Jim. And I lower my expectations and therefore I don't, I don't get surprised when that happens. And, yeah, I mean, that's how I see it.

David Robson
That's kind of how I deal with my own kind of ambivalent connections is just to recognize that I don't have to, like, they can react however they're going to, but I don't have to actually engage with that in the same way that I did before. I can choose to kind of discount their kind of unpleasant side because it's, you know, that's their problem with the way that they're conducting their relationships. It's not a reflection on me. What do you mean? When you talk about the personality myth?

Yeah. So this is the idea that I think a lot of us have, that you kind of think either you're like a super social person or you're not. And there's not much that you can do about that. So you might just think it's like my shyness, my introversion that just stops me from talking to strangers or enjoying parties or making new friends when I move house to a different city. And the research shows that that's actually not true.

And so a common idea is that introverts just aren't going to enjoy being gregarious. But actually, when you give introverts challenges to kind of go out and chat to someone in the park every week, every day, who has a cool dog or cool hair, or just make conversation with the barista in your coffee shop. So things that they would normally find a little bit uncomfortable, like, to start with, they have this strong prediction that they're really going to hate those interactions. Like, everyone, including extroverts, tend to be a bit pessimistic about how much they're going to enjoy talking to a stranger. Like, we kind of assume it's going to be more awkward than it really is, but introverts kind of think that because of their personality, that's going to be especially true for them.

And then you look at how they feel afterwards and they enjoy it just as much as the extroverts. They actually really benefit from the social connection in exactly the same way. How much truth is there in the introversion extraversion, introvert extrovert dichotomy. I'm sure that you've dug into this and looked at the data and sort of debunked the bro signs. Yeah, I mean, so I do think, like, people do kind of fall along that spectrum.

I guess most people are ambiverts. We're a little bit extrovert, a little bit introvert. I think most people enjoy socializing and recognize that fact, but also enjoy a bit of solitude as well. Once those loneliness neurons have stopped firing and you've got your fill, you can go away. You just don't have the same appetite as someone who is a pure extrovert.

So I do think there are individual differences along that dimension. But what the research shows is that no matter where you lie on that dimension, you do benefit from just becoming a bit more social than you currently are, or most people do. So even extroverts can benefit from being a bit more social, but especially introverts can. And our personalities, like, they're not necessarily hardwired in our genes. We do have genes that influence whether we're introvert or extrovert, but it's not like they seal our fate.

Like, people can move along that spectrum just by kind of practicing being more gregarious, being more kind of dominant in certain situations. Like, you know, we're not. It's not like our genes kind of determine our personalities, like, 100%. What would you say to the person who feels that the prototypical avatar for the. I struggle to make new friends.

Chris Williamson
I find it hard to be gregarious. I'm not the loudest person in the room, or maybe I've just got a little bit of anxiety. I'm in my own head. I'm very thoughtful. What do you say to them to help them get out of their own skin a bit?

David Robson
Right. So I totally think it depends how they feel about that. Like, how they kind of evaluate the effect that's having on their life. I think, like I was saying earlier, some people probably do just have less appetite for social connection. And if you're actually pretty happy with the way you are and you don't feel frustrated, then there's no need to change your behaviour.

But I think lots of people do feel frustrated and would benefit from more acting more socially and they believe that they can't because of their personality. And so I would say to those people, actually, that is where the personality myth is really a barrier and that you need to overcome that by just kind of slowly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. And I think the best way to do this, it's kind of proven in psychology, is to set these implementation intentions. So it's all very well to be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be more sociable today. Like, that's a really vague goal.

It's not going to help you achieve that goal very much. So it's much better for you to kind of identify, like, when and how you're going to go about that. So it could just be that you're telling yourself, like, when I'm at the supermarket and I see someone struggling to carry their groceries, I'll just offer to give them a hand, or, you know, I'll just. Instead of just asking straight for my coffee, I will just try to ask the barista how they are, how their day is going, just make some kind of small talk. And what the research shows is that when you do that repeatedly, even over quite a short time span of, say, five days, even by the end of that five days, people are already changing the way they perceive those interactions.

So they no longer expect those interactions to feel awkward and they expect to enjoy them, and then they do enjoy them. So, you know, I think it's just something that we do have to practice kind of day after day and recognize that, you know, it's a learnable skill. It's like learning a musical instrument. Like, you have the potential to be sociable. You just have to put in a bit of work to practice those skills.

Chris Williamson
Wow. Five days to make, to start to reframe that. I suppose so much of what people are worried about is some odd, catastrophic outcome. I'm going to ask the barista at Starbucks how their day's going, and then the police are going to come in or they're going to laugh at me, or it's going to be weird or whatever it might be. So it's almost like, I guess, exposure training.

David Robson
Yeah, it totally is. It's like overcoming any kind of phobia. So, I mean, you can't ever guarantee that there's never going to be someone who is unfriendly. But what I love about these experiments where they've got like hundreds, sometimes thousands of people to enact these behaviors, is that it is so rare for people to have a really bad experience. Like in the first couple of studies, like, just no one reported having hostility kind of framed back at them when they tried to talk to strangers on the Chicago buses and trains or on the London Underground.

People, even the London underground has a really bad reputation for people being really unfriendly and isolated and not wanting to make conversation. But people responded much better than anyone had expected. And I think each person, maybe on the train, is kind of sitting there. Some are happy in their own faults, others are feeling a bit lonely, and they're just waiting for someone to strike up the conversation, but they're not brave enough to do it. So a lot of people are actually super grateful when you're the one who takes the first step and opens your mouth to speak.

Chris Williamson
Why is overcoming egocentric thinking so important? Yeah, I mean, so this is one of the kind of barriers where, like, we. I guess the work on, like, the personality myth kind of shows that, like, we're all better at making connections than we think we are, but that doesn't mean that there's not room for improvement. And so egocentric thinking is one of the ways that sometimes we do needlessly create a kind of misunderstanding between people. So essentially, uh, all neurotypical people have the, uh, they have the capacity to, uh, they have theory of mind, which means that you can kind of put yourself in another person's, uh, shoes and take their perspective and recognize, you know, like, um, that they might have different opinions or knowledge from what you yourself have.

David Robson
Um, now, the problem is that even though we have that capability, it's quite hard cognitively to do so far more often than I think scientists had expected people don't apply their theory of mind. They act super egocentrically and just assume that the other person that they're talking to can see what they can see, knows what they know, thinks what they think, has the same beliefs, can understand their intentions, even when they're super ambiguous in what they're saying. And I think we're quite robust in our interactions. So there's a lot of correction that goes on in any conversation when you're kind of, there's a bit of misunderstanding and then it soon comes out. By asking the right questions or just by kind of elaborating, that allows the two people to kind of fully get on board with what they're saying.

But just by being conscious of this fact that you might be thinking egocentrically and just kind of checking, like, does the other person actually understand what I'm saying? Like, are they familiar with the terms I'm using? Do they have a completely different political opinion that I just haven't given them a chance to express? You know, just doing those kind of little, like, safety checks in your conversation can just, like, smooth over the conversation so you're not making those kind of fundamental errors. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
What else did you learn about the art of conversation? Presumably a lot of what we're talking about with regards to human connection is going to be mediated through it. So it's a pretty key skill to develop, right? Yeah, it is. So, I mean, asking questions is fundamental.

David Robson
Something that is kind of well known is that you should ask more questions when you kind of meet someone for the first time. Like, don't talk about yourself. But I think what we often misunderstand is the importance of the follow up questions. So you could go into a conversation and you could just be, like, asking. It could be like an interview almost.

You're like, what do you do? Where'd you come from? Do you have a wife? Like, you know, like, what's your favorite sport? Like, um, fine.

Like, you're showing an interest in the other person, but it does feel a bit formulaic. Whereas if they tell you something, like, a bit quirky, and then you, like, drill down on that and you just follow up by asking, like, what they meant or, like, why that thing is so important to them. Like, you know, what joy or pleasure they get out of this activity that they've just described. Those are the ones that really matter. And so you look at people on speed, dates, and the amount of follow up questions that people asked really predicted whether they would actually be selected for a second date.

I mean, if you asked enough follow up questions, it doubled your chances of getting a date, basically. So it's well worth bearing that in mind. The other thing that we should really bear in mind is good to ask questions, but we also need to be quite generous with what we're telling the other person to. So self disclosure, like, revealing your own kind of deeper thoughts and feelings, is super important as well. And we have this kind of bias in our conversation where we think it's always safer to just talk about the superficial stuff, you know, like those kinds of questions I was talking about earlier, like, what profession do you do?

Where did you grow up? What did you do at Halloween? You know, that kind of stuff. But actually, when scientists have forced people into these conversations where they, like, two strangers, have to ask, like, super probing things, like, do you have an intuition about how you're going to die? Or, like, what is your.

What is the most embarrassing thing that you've done in your life, or what's your biggest mistake? And why would you wish that you could correct it? You know, not the usual kind of stuff that we would talk about, like, within 20 minutes of meeting someone, but that is called the fast friendships procedure. And, like, I mean, the name says it all, but, I mean, it really puts people on this fast track to intimacy. Like, within about 45 minutes, those people feel closer to each other than they do to some of their oldest friends, which is kind of amazing.

Chris Williamson
Just take us through high level what the fast friends procedure consists of. Yeah, so, I mean, it's kind of asking those probing questions, but, I mean, basically, it was developed by Arthur Aron at psychologist in New York. And essentially, he just got these participants to kind of total strangers to sit down with 36 of these questions that got progressively more kind of intimate. Like, there's nothing kind of dodgy or sexual there, but, I mean, it's just asking people to kind of to look inside themselves and reveal something that they might have felt too embarrassed or vulnerable to talk about. So, fears, dreams.

David Robson
You know, another one that I love is, like, if you had a crystal ball and it could tell you anything about your life or your future, what would you want it to tell you and why? So it's kind of getting people to really tell something that might have been secret beforehand or, you know, something that they're scared about potentially. You know, it just kind of. It's a kind of ambiguous prompt in that it's not forcing someone to go in any particular direction, but what you choose is super revealing about what's going on. In your kind of inner life.

And, yeah. So then he kind of tested, like, how people. How close these participants felt at the end of this 45 minutes conversation, and compared that to people who just went through kind of normal small talk on, you know, like, what's your favorite film? Or, you know, could be. I mean, talking about your favourite film could be super revealing, but most people just arent going to go into enough detail or depth to really make it sufficiently profound to build that connection.

So the people who went through the fast friendship procedure, at the end, he tried to get them to estimate how close they were to each other with this psychological test of their relationship strength. And then he compared that to how people normally feel about their old friends from their childhood or from university. And he found that already, the kind of average friendship between these two strangers was roughly at the same level. How funny, you know, when you see those Netflix documentaries, and it's some person that was part of a famous historic event, they caught a ball at a sports game, or their daughter went missing on holiday, or they did whatever, and they're always in some dusty warehouse somewhere. And I always thought when these people were being interviewed, I always just presumed that they'd told this story a million times, that so many people were interested in their story and had asked them these questions.

Chris Williamson
But then you see on these Netflix documentaries, people get very emotional and tear up and struggle to complete their sentences and stuff like that. And that made me think, well, actually, they probably haven't had that many people to tell this life story to. How many people in your normal day to day existence actually decide to go to that place and give you a canvas to talk about deeper things that maybe you don't usually think about or talk. Maybe you've never talked about it before. Not because it's shameful, but just.

It's a bit odd, or no one's ever seemed to be patient or given me the space to be able to do it. And, yeah, that kind of made me think, look, you know, this is evidently one of the biggest things that's happened in someone's life, and it's still so emotionally charged. I have to assume that that's because they haven't got that. This isn't the hundredth time they've said it. Yeah, exactly.

David Robson
I mean, so, like, when you kind of question people about stuff, like the fast friendship procedure, um, most people, when you ask them, like, why are you nervous about talking about these topics? Like, what you. You've, like, the psychologist would be like, you've told me that you think it's going to be awkward. But why do you think it's going to be awkward? And then, like, people just assume that it's, um, that no one cares.

Like, no one wants to hear about their inner life or this kind of event that was so profound for them. And I guess it's almost because that event was so important for their life that the rejection would hurt so much more if they told it. The other person was just like, oh, yeah. Anyway, you'll never guess what happened to me yesterday.

Maybe that will happen in some cases. With all of these things, there's no hard and fast guarantee that it's going to go in the way you want. But the numbers are really in your favorite. These conversations are, on average, going to be so much more rewarding for you than you expect. Like, that's what the research shows, that if we were just a bit braver, we would find, like, so much more reward from all of our social connections.

Chris Williamson
The other thing to consider is who says that a person's negative response to you opening up is a you problem? Like, you want to be around people to whom you can have deep conversations and talk about important things and play with new ideas and open up parts of yourself that you don't do, typically. And it's so strange, this ability to make ourselves the bad guy in scenarios especially social. Oh, that's because of me. I'm so awkward.

I'm so stupid. I'm so clumsy. Hang on a second. If someone had said to you this thing, would you have been interested? Actually, yeah, probably.

That'd be pretty cool. It'd be pretty cool to find out about, you know, that this thing that they've held with them from childhood, that's very powerful to them. I would have been interested and I would have asked questions. Okay. And why did that other person not.

Well, I don't know. They just don't. They socially ungainly. Okay, so it's not you that's done the social for part. It's actually them in their response to you.

This is a them problem, not a you problem. Yeah, that's exactly. I think, like, um, also it could be, and I think this comes back to the egocentric thinking that we were talking about. It could be that the other person really was interested in what you were saying, and they assumed that you knew how interested and how much they cared, how interested they were and how much they cared, and they just weren't communicating that correctly because of this egocentric assumption that it must have been written all over their face. And so that's what comes out of that research on egocentric thinking, is that we're really bad at judging how strongly our emotions are being communicated because we feel them quite strongly.

David Robson
We assume that other people will also be able to read them. And that's true in all kinds of situations. Like if you're lying, you assume that the other person can tell when you're lying, but you're not really giving away so many tells that they can. Like, if you find, if you're at a dinner party and you find the food pretty disgusting and you feel, like, super self conscious because you're worried the host is going to kind of see that disgust all over your face. Like, scientists have actually set people up to have that exact experience and it's completely undetectable.

Like, you can't, no one can guess better than chance whether someone's eating something disgusting or whether they're eating something really delicious. And so I think that's happening here in these conversations that sometimes people just aren't letting you know what you really need to hear, but they might still be feeling it. So there's no point in us beating ourselves up over not getting quite the response that we expected because we just don't really know what that person was feeling often. How can people express appreciation more effectively? Yeah, I mean, that's so, yeah, that is something that we can all do to strengthen our connections is to just avoid this ambiguity that people have.

We are generally not very good at saying compliments because we just don't do it enough. I think there was some, I can't remember the exact statistic, but we bite back the majority of the nice things that we think about other people because we assume that they know it already, or we think we're going to be so clumsy, we're going to sound like really ingratiating and fawning sycophant. Fawning is. Yeah. You think it's going to be awful.

So, so we just think, like, okay, I'm just not going to say anything at all that will be better. And again, it's like you're protecting yourself. Like, because by expressing a compliment or appreciation or gratitude, you're kind of making yourself a little bit vulnerable. But, like, those fears are totally unfounded. Like, people, they just really love to hear good things about themselves, as you would.

And again, like you said, if you just turn it around and think, well, would I want to hear I look great today or that I said something really smart, of course you would. So I just assume the other person wouldn't so, yeah, just, we can do it more often. Expressing gratitude and appreciation and what the research shows is, like, it benefits the other person a lot, but it also benefits the person expressing those good feelings. So, actually, once we've said something kind, we feel better ourselves. And it even, like, it's good for us physiologically.

Like, it actually reduces our stress response. So there was this study that was inspired by Shark Tank, the tv program, where students had to kind of come up with a product, give a presentation, like, in pairs. And the researchers told just one person in each pair, just express gratitude to the person who is helping you with this. And then they measured how they responded to giving the presentation itself, like, how their kind of blood pressure, their cardiovascular system responded, and what they found that both the person expressing and receiving the gratitude tended to show a more muted stress response. So they were still kind of charged and excited, but they weren't going into fight or flight, essentially.

Chris Williamson
Wow, how cool. Yeah, that's something that I've noticed since moving to America. You may say that Americans have too much enthusiasm, and that may be true, but I think that Brits have the equivalent scarcity as Americans have abundance. And there was this. When I first moved out here two and a half years ago, I got invited on a really big podcast.

It was Tim Pool's show on the day that the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict came down. So it was going to be, I think there was 300,000 concurrent live viewers at one point. It was fucking insane. And I'd got invited to go and be on the show, and it just happened to be the day that I was there. I'm like, all right, well, I guess I'm commenting on the Kyle Rittenhouse thing now.

And I'd only been in the city for two weeks, maybe three weeks, and I'd made some friends before, but largely, these were just friends that I got. And in between me leaving the apartment, the Airbnb I was staying in, and going down to get picked up by the car that was coming to get me, two different guys rang me that I'd met over the last sort of three weeks, and separately, both basically said the same thing. Hey, man, just wanted to let you know, I know you might be a bit nervous about tonight, but you're gonna smash it. Like, I've got pizza, and me and the missus are going to sit on the couch, and we're going to watch it. It's going to be so cool.

How are you feeling? I'm really happy for you. And I was like, this is such a lovely gesture from someone that didn't need to do it, from someone that you kind of barely know, and it felt really alien. And that was one of the big, oh, wow. You can say that.

You can behave in that way. The sort of zero sum, puritan, tall, poppy Brit in me sort of bristled a little bit and didn't really know how to take it. But, yeah, it's a really big deal. I suppose the other side of expressing appreciation is self compassion. And you looked at self compassion, too.

David Robson
Yeah. So I think self compassion is, like, super important in kind of all the things I'm talking about, because it's like you were saying that we often, like, if there's any awkwardness in a conversation, like, we just tend to put the blame on ourselves. Like, if you have met a stranger and there are, like, you know, you say a few clumsy words, or there's that kind of weird silence where neither of you knows what to say, or, like, you don't quite know when to finish the conversation, like, you think, like, that was wholly my fault. Like, I should have been more socially fluent and able to just, like, seamlessly kind of, you know, exit that conversation and go on to the next one. You know, the other person's feeling exactly the same way.

So that is a phenomenon called the liking gap, which means that when we both have a conversation with a stranger, each person tends to go away thinking that they liked the other person more than the other person. No way. So that shows up in the data. Yeah, yeah. It's really consistent, the liking gap.

Yeah. So that in itself, I think, uh, should leaders just, you know, once we know those statistics, like, we can just stop, like, beating ourselves up so much. Like, uh, because actually. So what's happening there is that it's, like we. Again, it's, like, egocentric.

We're so conscious of how we've behaved. Um, that's, like, kind of burning in our minds if we think we've said, like, a faux pa. So we assume that it was equally important for the other person, but they really aren't taking much notice of that. Like, they don't really care if you're, like, the perfect conversationalist who's always got something, like, super witty and appetite to say. Like, what they are more likely to do is just think about the overall kind of emotional tenor of the conversation.

Chris Williamson
Just vibes. It's just vibes, man. It's always been just vibes. Exactly. Like, was I laughing a lot?

David Robson
Like, did they kind of validate what I was feeling? Like, were they curious about me? You know, that's what really matters. Like, your warmth, not your confidence. So we can all be just a bit more forgiving of ourselves.

And, like, sometimes we will serve faux pas, but most often we won't. And it's just not worth the kind of mental energy to become too fixated on that. Because even if you did, the other person, like, so that's the other thing that even when you make a definite faux pas, like, you turn up to a dinner party and you're the only person who hasn't brought, like, wine or cake or anything, you ask people to judge how they would, to rate how they would judge another person for doing that. Like, how negative they would be. And then you get them to rate how they think the other person would judge them for the same thing.

And consistently, people assume that the other person is going to be twice as negative as they would be for the same thing. So even if you make a faux part, it really isn't such a big deal. Like, it's just, it's so forgettable. Isn't it interesting, you know, the fundamental attribution error bias? Yeah.

Chris Williamson
So somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's because they're a dangerous wanker. You cut someone else in traffic, it's because you need to really get to work because you're late and there's an important meeting that we have this sort of. We often attribute other people's actions to their personal motives, whereas ours are more to do with external events. And we're not. You know, we, we're able to not be as culpable.

And it's like a reverse fundamental attribution error in social situations whereby we will always be the awkward, clumsy social faux pas victim and everybody else is a competent, smooth, James Bond talking person that won't forgive us, but that we would forgive them is a very odd way that we sort of turn the bar stool upside down. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy, actually, because if you ask people, like, how smart are you compared to the average person, like, most people overestimate how intelligent they are or like, how good a driver are you? Or 70% of people say that they're better than average. Right, exactly.

David Robson
And yeah, if you ask people how smart do you think other people think you are? So you're kind of shifting that to, like, to a question of social judgment, then people are really underconfident. So it's like we're constantly kind of thinking the best about ourselves, but also assuming that other people are thinking the worst about us. Wow. Wow.

Chris Williamson
How interesting. Yeah, I am. I learned a lot about this comfort with vibes and imprecision, even though I'm quite obsessive about precision when it comes to speech. When I started the show, I thought that my goal was to be kind of like a ruthless indexer of information, kind of the ultimate blinkist app for whoever I was speaking to. And it was just to break down all of the different things in this new book or whatever, and then that would be it.

And it had to be said in the most precise and accurate way possible. And then as you go on, when I think about the sort of conversations that I enjoy listening to or the ones that I enjoy having more just about vibes, it's. Was it fun? Did it flow well? Was it charming?

Did we have a laugh? Did everybody feel comfortable and casual? And that's really what it is. And in an equivalent way, I did a live tour toward the back end of last year. So standing up on stage in front of between 501,000 people, and I'd seen a few friends do performances, much bigger ones, comedians and stuff, their mics would break or the lights would go out, or someone from the audience would yell something and you might think, oh, that's going to ruin the flow of the show, or that might get them off their game, or, oh, my God, how awkward that the mics died.

And it made me so much more warmly disposed to them to see how they dealt with something that went wrong and they did it in a charming way, or maybe they said something wrong, they forgot the line, or they tripped over, or they spilled water on themselves and all of those. There was no such thing as a social faux pas. There was simply dealing with an occurrence in a charming or an uncharming manner. And if you dealt with it in a charming manner, even if you did it to yourself, it made me like. It's the.

It's called. What's it called? The pratfall effect, which, when someone messes up, if the. You end up liking them more, as long as they can kind of style it out in a not totally socially ungainly way. So, yeah, oddly, social faux pas can be a breeding ground for perhaps social excellence, in a way.

David Robson
Yeah, totally. I mean, I totally think it's like you said, it's like how you respond to the era. The perceived error is more important than the era itself. And even stuff. People really overestimate how important showing a few nerves are going to be in an interview or on stage.

But when you question observers, what did you think of this performer, and some of them might have been touching their face a lot because they were nervous or biting their nails, whatever. Those people were actually considered to be much more likeable than the people who gave a super smooth performance. And I think it's just so relatable. You see someone who is feeling probably like how you would be feeling, and even if you don't show it on the outside, you're going to have those nerves. So your empathy is just kind of kicking in and you are kind of rooting for them to do well.

And we see that more generally. Like, there's this phenomenon called the beautiful mess effect, which is a bit like the pratfall effect, but this is like we try to hide our kind of failures and errors and vulnerabilities. Like, you know, you don't want to tell people if you're feeling like you look a bit shit today, or you've got some kind of complex about part. Of your body, the athletes foots come back or something. Right, exactly.

Or you're like, you made a real fuck up with your job and it's like. It's really embarrassing. It's like a schoolboy error that you have to own up to. And people assume that confessing those vulnerabilities is going to make them look weak. People are going to feel a bit repelled by that.

But actually, people often, far more often than you think, they're going to appreciate your courage and honesty and authenticity for just owning up to these things. We much prefer someone who's honest than someone who we think is hiding something. And so there was this study looking at giving people kind of profiles of potential dates. Weird profiles. I don't know how they set this up exactly to look like natural, but the potential dates had to say whether they'd ever done some pretty immoral acts.

Had they ever hidden an STD from previous lovers and, like, had sex with them anyway? People who said they had done that were considered to be a better potential date than people, than people who refused to answer the question. So obviously someone who had never done it was preferable. But at least admitting to your immoral behaviour was much better than just trying to avoid the question completely. What about the novelty penalty?

Chris Williamson
What's that? Yeah, so that is. I mean, it's so familiar for most people. I think when you've been on, you've had an amazing experience, you've been on a great holiday, and you get home and you want to tell all of your friends about it, and then you're ten minutes in and you can see their eyes glazing over, like you're just not getting the interaction that you want. That's the novelty penalty, because essentially, people often prefer to hear stuff that is already a bit familiar to them rather than something that is totally new.

David Robson
And the researchers found this in this quite complex setup where they gave people YouTube videos to watch, and then they got one person from the group to described the video. And they found that people much preferred hearing about a video they'd already seen, compared to hearing about a video that they hadn't seen. And it's totally bizarre because it's like you'd think it would be boring to you to hear repeated back to you what you just observed. But the problem is we're just like, maybe our storytelling skills just aren't up to scratch. So we're leaving a lot of gaps in the kind of narrative.

And so it just isn't that obvious. Like, why do I, like, why should I care about this? Like, you forget to say kind of what really attracted you to that experience and why it was so personally important to you. Like, you give the kind of, maybe some of the irrelevant details while skipping, like, the emotional content. And so that's what we need to do, I think, to be better conversationalists, to avoid the novelty penalties to, again, like, lean into that self disclosure and not be afraid to say kind of why something matters to you.

Chris Williamson
Hmm. To get a bit of personal investment. I had a guy called Mister Bolin on the show a couple of weeks ago. He's probably one of the best storytellers on the Internet. He does strange, dark, mysterious, sort of true crime adjacent stuff.

And it was really cool. He explained, he does this story, he does a number of stories, does one of them, and then he explains his approach to storytelling, using the story that he just told and breaking down why he said things in this way. And a really cool insight that I learned from him was the power of omission. So when you're telling a story, there's one about a lamp, this guy who is in a marriage for years and years and years, and then this lamp in his living room starts to behave very strangely. And it turns out, after he's protracted story of all of this stuff, that he was hit in the head during a high school football game and was knocked out for 5 seconds, but lived an entire different life and then came back around and was no longer married to this person for two decades, didn't have his kids, didn't have his dog, didn't have his house, didn't have anything and had imagined this entire other life that he felt he'd lived for decades and decades.

But he doesn't say that bit until the very end. So, you know, there's this sort of ever escalating anticipation of he's getting sort of stranger and stranger and stranger. But if he'd opened up the story by saying something like, I'm gonna tell you a story about a guy who was hit in the head in high school, like, you know, that completely punks the game and takes you to the end before it started. So just thinking about how consciously and dexterously he looks at the art of storytelling, not just conversation, but of storytelling. And, yeah, what are you including, and what are you excluding?

And maybe saying, you know, this is how it made me feel, and this is why it was really important to me, like, create some fucking stakes in whatever it is that you're talking about. Why should someone care? Yeah, exactly. And I think, so what we kind of maybe underestimate is that what people will care about is, like, the emotions that we're feeling and, like, you know, if they're connected to us, they kind of want the best for us. So if something was super important, they kind of really want to understand that bit.

David Robson
What they don't care about is, like, your kind of journey tour from the airport, or, like, you know, like, maybe they don't even care much about the details of the location itself that you've been to if you're on this amazing holiday. What they really care about is, like, like, you know, did that fundamentally change your perspective on your life? How did it make you feel? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
What is important about truth and lies and secrets? So this really surprised me, and it's the fact that honesty just is almost always valued. Even if you're delivering bad news to people, even if it's not necessarily reflecting well on yourself, even if it's the kind of situation where you would normally tell a white lie to save someone's feelings, like, kind of sugar coating some negative feedback. There are very few situations where telling a lie is ever gonna pay off, which seems kind of amazing in that I kind of had assumed that things like white lies are kind of a social lubricant. Like, you just need them to kind of get along each day.

David Robson
But these researchers in the US kind of, they set people out on a mission to kind of either be as honest as they could be in every single interaction for a few days, or to be as kind as they could be in every interaction for a few days, or to just carry on as normal. And what they found was that the people, the well being of the people who were kind or honest were pretty much the same, actually. But what was especially noticeable was that the people who were being like, sometimes brutally honest with people tended to report that their interactions were far more meaningful. They felt that they learnt a lot more about those people and that those people learned a lot more about them when they were saying some uncomfortable truths compared to people who are going around, like, with the specific intention of trying to be as kind as possible and to make people feel as good as possible. So that, yeah, I mean, that's changed the way I deal with a lot of my interactions now.

Like, it's not a path to, like, be kind of just like rude and nasty, because there's. I think in almost every case there's going to be a kind of telling the truth or like a pretty blunt and nasty way of telling the truth. So it's always better to kind of try to frame what you're saying in a way that can be constructive, that will help the other person to learn from what you're saying, rather than just being too overgeneralizing in a way that is not helpful for their growth. So, yeah, be specific. Try to be constructive.

Try to offer advice or your own time and resources to help them to deal with the kind of negative feedback you're giving. But overall, people will appreciate far more than negative feedback that can be useful over a white lie that isn't going to help them to learn and to grow. How can people overcome the discomfort of telling people the truth, even if it's going to be painful for the truth teller? So I think that is just practice, actually. I think, like, we're a bit like with the kind of overcoming the awkwardness of talking to strangers.

I think it's about recalibrating our expectations. And you can only do that by repeatedly performing this action and recognizing that the outcomes are, on average, far better than you expected. And over time, you just naturally start to recognize that the little bit of awkwardness that you're going to face is worth it. But the rewards at the end. Yeah, I suppose it's the same sort of exposure training thing that I can tell the truth and the whole world doesn't blow up.

Chris Williamson
Okay, well, maybe I can do it again. Yeah. Yeah, it's exactly that. And I guess I start out with like, small, kind of like the low hanging fruit, I guess, is one way that I would deal with all of these social dilemmas is that, you know, you. You build up maybe to something that's going to be much harder.

I wonder if there's a. I spoke about this a couple of months ago. There's a website still up called 100 days of rejection. And it's a kind of exposure therapy, social exposure therapy. And each day you do something, you ask the barista at the coffee shop if you can have this for free.

You see if a stranger will give you 100 pounds. You do sort of ever changing group of different things, and some of them are so toe curling, so awful and painful to do. And I think so much of what you're trying to do there is just teach yourself. This thing that you are adamant is going to be socially explosive is probably totally fine and with the truth as well. I suppose the other side is that if you're holding onto secrets for too long, ultimately you're the one that's going to pay the price.

Yeah, sure, the other person might be upset about it, but it's you that's got to vacillate about this complex house of cards that you've built up trying to keep said secrets away from someone. And you can relinquish that by just saying it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think you'd written about this in one of your newsletters, actually, that it is better to have an authentic, meaningful connection with someone who likes you for who you are than to kind of, no matter how good the relationship seems to be, if you know that you're hiding something really important and you're always scared that they're going to reject you for that thing that you're hiding, that in itself is something that is going to lead you to feel that kind of existential isolation. So you're surrounded by people, but you don't really feel emotionally connected to them.

David Robson
So, yeah, I totally agree with that. And actually, then there's lots of good research anyway, showing that when you keep secrets and your mind keeps on kind of going to these kind of awful things that you're hiding, you actually experience it almost like a physical burden. So when people are primed to think about a secret that they haven't told the people they love, they actually physically overestimate how steep a hill is going to be to climb. Or if they're throwing a ball into a target, they'll overthrow. Because they kind of assume that their strength isn't as great as it would as it really is.

Yeah. So it has, it's like embodied cognition that changes the way you navigate the world. Like, everything feels more tiring than it should be. Hang on. So someone that is holding on to a secret, when given a ball that they need to throw at a target, on average, they overthrow the ball, compensating for a perceived weakness.

Yeah. And that is a. What was the term? It's like embodied cognition. Embodied cognition, dude, you find the best studies.

Chris Williamson
It's so much fun. Yeah. How crazy to think about that. Yeah. This sort of inner fragility that they have manifested in themselves, this shame that they probably have about not being able to say this thing.

Oh, well, my real world strength must be, equivalently are feeble. Therefore, I must throw the ball harder and they end up overthrowing it. Yeah. And so what happens then is if you get them to reveal the secret to someone, even just to one of the researchers, then that embodied cognition kind of vanishes. So they suddenly start to be more accurate in their movements or in perceiving the kind of physical challenges ahead of them.

So you're saying baseball players and cricketers should be as honest as possible because it's a performance enhancer, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Who knew? I learned a new word from you, which was confelicity.

David Robson
Ah, yep. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.

Or mitfreude is the kind of german equivalent. So it's the, we have schadenfreude, which is our kind of joy at someone else's misfortune. But Mitt Freuder or con Felicity is our kind of joy at seeing someone else is happiness and success and achievements. And this is so relevant when we think about celebrating our own successes. Like, we tend to hide a lot of our achievements because we don't want to seem like we're bragging.

And we assume that the other person is going to judge us harshly for kind of talking about our promotion or like that kind of professional award we won, or even just like a, a personal best at the gym. We hide these kinds of things much more than we should because we assume the other person is going to feel envious of us. But what the research shows is that when people find out that youve kind of had these good events in your life and you decided not to share them, its actually super insulting because youre treating them a bit like a spoil kind of kid who has to kind of win up monopoly every time you play it or they'll have a tantrum. It feels incredibly paternalistic to find out that your best friend or your colleague or your brother didn't tell you about something good in their life just because they thought you might react badly. So it drives a wedge in our connection, in that way because it's just fundamentally offensive to be treated in that way.

But then, yeah, we're also missing the fact that most of these people would feel like rather than being envious, they're just going to be happy for you. And sharing in that happiness is just another way for you to be able to bond and to kind of share an emotional experience that kind of confirms that you share the same values in life. Well, the other thing as well is if you share something which is genuinely meaningful to you and that you're proud of in a charming way, obviously you can shove it down people's throats and in which case the negative response is probably you deserved it. But if you do it in a charming way and someone doesn't take a thing that's meaningful to you positively and it doesn't positively reinforce it, hey, guess what? That person shouldn't be in your life.

Chris Williamson
Like, they suck. As a friend, they suck. And the same as the. You open up to somebody, you try and tell them something that's really meaningful or something that's shameful or something that you're scared of, and they don't respond in the right way. That's not a you problem, that's a them problem.

David Robson
Yeah. I mean, to me, all of these things, it's like a classic case of someone being a frenemy, like an ambivalent connection. Like, if they're not responding to you when you're opening up to them, whether it's about a failure or a success or just like a really meaningful experience, then, yeah, there's something kind of. There's something going on in their life that is wrong, but you don't have to feel embarrassed about the fact that their response was inadequate.

Chris Williamson
I need to do a little bit more thinking about this sort of reverse fundamental attribution error, which is what you're kind of developing, is a kind of self confidence in social self confidence that I will make errors. But I know that I'm coming into this playing the rules of the game remotely, appropriately, and trying to put my best foot forward, and it takes basically all of the pressure off you socially. You go, look, I didn't mess up. Like, I just, you know, I did the thing. It's this person that's incapable of receiving or returning in an apt manner.

David Robson
Yeah, I mean, that's. I think that's ultimately it. We should be able to expect from the people in our social networks that they are going to respond positively to you sharing your life with them. And. Yeah, so it's like, it's having that confidence to realise that if they're not going to do that, then maybe your social network is better off without them.

Or at the very least, you just don't have to value their opinions so much. But I mean, the good news is that we overestimate how likely it is that people are going to react in all of these negative ways. Most people who really have your best interests at heart, they're going to be like, they're going to respond in the way that you would want them to. What is there to say about envy then? If con Felicity and feeling joy in other people's successes is something that's good, what did you learn about envy?

So, I mean, I think it's perfectly possible for someone to feel like a bit of envy and convulsity at the same time. And like, that's how I feel sometimes. Like, you know, my friends who are authors and if they have like a huge success, like, I am like genuinely, really delighted for them, I would never want to take that away from them. But I would also like it for me. Yeah, that's it.

And actually, though, there's nothing wrong with feeling envy, scientists kind of say there's like malign envy where like, you want to take that, tear that person down. Well, that is obviously an unhealthy reaction. But benign envy, when you're like, when someone else's success is just making you realize it's reaffirming what your goals are going to be for yourself and it's like a source of inspiration. Like that is totally something, that's a totally natural reaction and it's something that you should be listening to and then, you know, putting into action. I think it's, you know, envy can be a really strong form of motivation.

You don't have to put yourself in competition with that particular person, but it's good for you to just identify like, yeah, I still want to achieve that goal. And the fact that this other person has achieved that goal has just proven that to me that it's probably going to be as good as I expect it to be. Isn't it cool? I really like this idea of being able to balance, being happy for your friend's success with wishing that you could have it as well. I don't think that that's something that's negative.

Chris Williamson
I had Neil Strauss guy that wrote the game on the show a couple of weeks ago and he told me the title of his new book and I think a good rubric for whether or not a title is great is does the person that you tell it to think, fuck, why didn't I think of that? And that's the kind of envy energy, I think. And the title of this book is the power of low self esteem. And I thought, God, that's so cool. That's so.

It's like this oxymoron. It's intriguing, it's short. I love it. I was like, fucking, God damn it. Like, why didn't I think of that?

And, you know, that's. I don't think that I would judge myself for that kind of envy. And you can, even with this, you know, going back to the transparency, the openness, the honesty thing, I think I said it to him at the time and that almost calling out the emotion and going, bro, I mean, God dammit, I wish that I'd said that. That's so smart. That's really, really cool.

I'm really happy for you. That's going to smash you. That's all of the things that we've just spoken about in a single sentence. Right, exactly. And I think that's a totally healthy reaction that I think sometimes in the past we would feel a bit embarrassed about saying that we feel like envy for someone, but it's like, you know, that's also kind of a mark of that person.

David Robson
Such a low key compliment. Yeah, I think it is a compliment. Yeah. Like, and I would take that as a compliment myself if someone said they were, like, a little bit envious of me. Like, as long as I knew that they were also feeling happiness for me as well.

Like, I would totally take that as a compliment. Yeah. Envy with happiness. Good. Envy with negativity.

Chris Williamson
Dangerous. Need to be careful, right? Yeah, exactly. Why is asking for help important? So a lot of us kind of, and it's, again, because we're scared of seeming, like, vulnerable and weak.

David Robson
We're just scared of asking for help. We assume that we're going to be perceived badly for that, but also we think we're going to be a burden on the other person, that they're not really going to want to help us anyway. So we're kind of struggling alone. It makes our life a lot harder, but a little bit like when I was talking about when you don't share success because it's because you kind of assume the other person's going to react badly and they feel insulted by that. Well, actually, people feel a bit the same if you don't ask for help when it would be totally natural for you to do so.

Like, if you've got a really good friend who would be able to take you to the hospital when you're ill and you pay loads of money for a taxi. Like they actually feel a lot worse for the fact that you didnt ask them. Like its an insult to them. So by asking for help, it can actually be a really good way of cementing a relationship and making that person know how valued they are. And that can even be true not in those kind of emergency situations, but even just with the kind of, the uh, kind of little things in life that you could maybe do for yourself.

But like it just feels good when someone else is going to help you out. Um, so like asking someone to cook your favourite meal for you, um, just because you know it's going to feel like super comforting to have it from that person rather than doing it yourself. Um, there's a japanese concept called am I? That describes that kind of, um, a favor request where youre perfectly capable of doing it. Its a little bit inappropriate to ask for help, but you ask anyway.

The idea in the japanese concept is that actually that can enhance lots of relationships and make people feel kind of especially good about themselves and they enjoy caring for you. And thats what the research shows. And its not just in japanese culture, its also in american culture. By, by asking for favors, you're underlining the close nature of your relationship and people actually like you more for it. And amazingly, that even happens with strangers.

So if you kind of scientists set up this experiment where they gave people these difficult maths questions and at the end of the kind of test one person had finished before the other one, if one of the participants asked the other to just kind of help them with the remaining questions, that actually increased the bond between the two participants. And you didnt see that increase in the bond. If the teacher was the one who kind of told the participant to offer that assistance, you actually had to ask for it yourself to underline almost like how much you respected that other person for how smart they were and how much you appreciated the help and then. That, yeah, it's a low key comment on their competence. Would you mind helping me carry these bags out?

Chris Williamson
You look like the sort of person that is sufficiently physically robust that you can carry some bags with me. Hey man, would you mind taking me to the hospital? I consider you to be the sort of person who is sufficiently thoughtful and cares about me enough. You are a sufficiently good, helpful person that you will do this thing for me. And I suppose as well, I'd seen some, I'd heard about some studies around this topic, but not as precisely if you just explained them.

But I seem to remember something to do with doing a favor for someone is not seen as favorably as asking for someone to do a favor for you. And I think that part of that, if that's true, part of that is implicit in the I ask David to do me a favor is that, well, in future, you know, the debt cycle has begun between the two of us. So, yeah. Implicit in me asking you to do me a favor is that I will do you a favor, as opposed to just coming out and then doing something for you that you maybe didn't ask, which then places the debt in your hand. He's like, hang on a second.

I know you just, you know, unnecessarily brought round some food for my bird feeder, but what are you going to ask me to do next week? And I didn't kick this off in that way. Whereas by requesting the other person to do it, they have the option to not enter into this never ending, vicious re gifting loop of favours. Yeah, exactly. I think, yeah, I just think you're showing to the other person that you kind of fundamentally think there are decent, decent person.

David Robson
And like you said, like, um, there is an element, I think, of this kind of feeling we don't want to feel in debt, um, but we don't mind giving generously and not expecting anything in return to another person. So I guess there again, it's this kind of asymmetry. We might do a favor, totally altruistically, not expecting anything in return, but we're worried about, um, the fact that we might need to, um. To have that kind of. Yeah.

To cash in at something, the debt will be called. Yeah, exactly. What role does the gratitude gap play? Yeah, I mean, that's really important in that. Just we.

So, basically, like, when anyone does something kind of altruistic, like, they can benefit psychologically and even physiologically from having performed that act of kindness. Like, I call it in the book, it's bitch easy, but it's like the gift of giving. So, actually, people who are generally altruistic in their lives, they might be volunteers or just they are super helpful with, like, running errands for their family, all of that kind of thing. They live a lot longer than people who are a bit more selfish in their lives. Like, if you're always looking after yourself rather than other people, you might expect that those people would be prioritizing their own health and so would be healthier.

But no, actually prioritizing. The people around you actually has these kind of knock on benefits. For your own health and well being. So being a generous person is really good, but you have to be able to see some benefit from what you're doing. If someone does an altruistic act and they don't see that they've actually helped the other person, they experience none of those benefits of having done the deed.

In fact, it just makes them feel kind of used and stressed and kind of stressed out and frustrated. And the problem with the gratitude gap is that we maybe just don't, like, express our gratitude as much as we should do because we assume that the other person kind of knows. It's self evident, of course. I'm so grateful for the thing. Why wouldn't I be?

It's exactly that. And so we're not giving them the full benefits of what they've done to help us, even though we probably do secretly appreciate it. What is a tactic for overcoming the gratitude gap? So just expressing gratitude more explicitly, I think, is always important. But also we should be careful about how we express gratitude.

Any kind of sign of gratitude is probably going to be perceived pretty well, but you can make it a lot more powerful if you change the way you frame it. And what a lot of us do mistakenly when we talk about gratitude is we do tend to make it kind of emphasize too much the benefits for us, which, as I've just said, it's fine to say, to show that the act has had a good effect on us, it's been useful. But what makes it even more beneficial to the other person and makes them feel especially good about themselves is when you turn that reflection back onto them and talk about the specific qualities that you appreciate about what they've just done. So, like you were saying with that friend whos given you that kind of lift to the hospital or the airport, its really good for you to tell them that theyve saved you a lot of time and money and theyve made your journey a lot more comfortable. But its even better then to say, to make it explicit, the fact that you appreciate the fact that they are the person, they are the kind of person who would do that.

You recognize that they are generous and giving and that they have your best interests at heart. You really appreciate those qualities. So it's the combination, I think, that's powerful. Often we focus just on one or the other, but it's much better to say both. The effect on you, what you value in that other person.

Chris Williamson
What about healing bad feelings? Yeah, we are not very good at dealing with disagreements. I think we all know that fact that rifts can easily happen between people who are super close and often over the craziest things that become amplified in importance. And it's only when months or years have gone by that you look back and you're like, why did I let that small disagreement come to dominate what was actually a great relationship? There are a few different ways that we can overcome that kind of overly microscopic attitude and kind of a forensic attitude to kind of the rights and the wrongs of a situation.

David Robson
And one of those is just to kind of take a distance perspective that helps you to kind of zoom out from the situation and to recognize what is really important. And so often then youll realise that youre arguing over something that fundamentally might need to be discussed, resolved, but its not so important that its worth actually destroying what could be a very fruitful, authentic, genuine relationship for months or years to come. Psychological distancing can work in many ways, but it could just be imagining what an objective observer would think about the situation at hand. So maybe imagining that you were actually talking about this with a marriage counsellor or whatever, or just like some friend or relative who isn't directly biased towards one person in the disagreement or the other, it could just be imagining that you're looking back on this situation in ten years time. And what do you think would really stand out as being important when years have passed and this situation has long since been finished and over?

There's a study looking at married couples, so newlyweds. For the first year, the researchers did nothing. They just questioned them about how often they were disagreeing and how much they liked each other. And they had quite a few disagreements. These married couples and their kind of liking for each other over that first year, like, kind of went downhill.

Not dramatically, but at the end of the first year, they did not like each other as much as when they first got married, which I think is quite relatable. But then at the end of this first year, they got people to do this self distancing exercise. And what they found was that those participants, their relationship satisfaction was stable. They still had these kind of disagreements, but they resolved them a lot more easily, whereas people who hadn't been taught that intervention, they just continued on that downward trajectory. So actually, that one small psychological intervention, I think, could save a lot of.

Chris Williamson
Marriages, just take people through the. A self distancing thing again, just so that they've got it as easy takeaway. So essentially, it's like, even in the heat of the argument, but definitely afterwards, when you're both kind of thinking about what's just been said, it's to try to look at the situation from some new perspective. So rather than just thinking about how you feel, like in the present moment, it could be imagining that youre looking back on that situation in ten years time when enough time has passed that you can be a bit more objective about whats just occurred. So literally just thinking, how will I feel about this in 2034?

David Robson
Or just imagining that youre an objective observer. So just thinking, what would this kind of neutral party think about this disagreement? My arguments, like, his or her arguments, like, what would they, how would they appraise this? And, you know, what importance would they lend to all of this? And, you know, it really works like people really do, just like take that kind of step back or step, you know, into the future and recognize that actually, you know, it helps them to just recognize what's important and what isn't, essentially.

So it doesn't mean that like, you're just instantly going to forgive the other person, but it means you can be more constructive in what you say. You're not going to be so petty to kind of, you're not going to resort to kind of those knee jerk insults that you might do if you're still really immersed, purely immersed in the, the feelings of the fight itself. Yeah, your 13th lore in the book is something that I landed on after we probably did maybe between 305 hundred life hacks on this podcast over the space of six and a half years. And it was a huge series and it was how to make a good toasted sandwich or this new protein powder we'd found or a great meditation app or some new time blocking technique or whatever, everything that we wanted. And the number one hack that I had is basically the same as your 13th lore, which is text your friends when you're thinking about them.

Chris Williamson
So a lot of the time youll just be going about your day and some memory will pop up or youll wonder, I wonder what such and such a persons doing and this person that has no idea that youre in their thoughts arises, you think something nice about them and it goes away. And maybe in some karmic way they do end up benefiting from it. But ive just taken to using that as a trigger to immediately text that person. And honestly, one of the most like, simpy texts ever, if you can't think of something cool, but hey, man, just thinking of you, hope everything's well, like that's, or singing your praises, you know, talking about them over dinner, saying, I really love that he's got this new song out or did you see that thing that he did, or he just got married or he's got a kid. I'm really happy for him or whatever it might be.

And it's so good. It makes me feel so good to do that. Yeah. Text your friends when you think about them is just out of 500 life hacks, it's my favourite one. Yeah, me too.

David Robson
And I think it's like, again, it's like this kind of liking gap phenomenon, it's like all of these different psychological barriers that we've spoken about is that people tend to be quite resistant from doing that because they are kind of worried that it's going to be really awkward. And the other person especially, you haven't seen someone for a while, it's difficult to know exactly what to say, so you just avoid saying anything at all and you let the kind of friendship fizzle out even further. But the research shows when you send those messages, people genuinely really appreciate it. They're going to enjoy receiving that message a lot more than you assume they're going to. And you're going to feel a lot better, like you said, than you might have assumed that you do.

Friendships change all the time, but actually just keeping people in your thoughts and in your life, that's one of the best things we can do to craft that social connection that we crave. Is there a favourite study that you came across from the book that we havent spoken about yet? I think the connection just went away, so I didnt hear the question. Is there a favourite study from the book that we havent spoken about yet that you found? Yeah, weve covered such a lot.

Yeah. So I guess one thing that I do kind of love and it's just such a bizarre but amazing study. So basically, like, what the research shows is that for any, the foundation of social connection is this thing called shared reality. And so, like, we know that, like, there's this phenomenon called homophily or homophily, and we're kind of like people who are similar to ourselves, so similar music, tastes similar, you know, same religion, same like kind of worldview on politics. You know, people who speak the same language or dialect came from the same place, like that.

Those things are important. But what really connects people makes you, like actually want to be best friends with someone rather than just kind of vaguely know them as an acquaintance, is knowing that they have the same inner kind of experience of the world. So, you know, did they find the same things funny? Did they laugh at the same time? Do they get kind of the same chills at the same time in the same song, all of these, like, intense, visceral reactions to the world.

And so there are psychological studies that kind of just try to prime that and they're really dumb, kind of. Imagine if questions like, if Jennifer Aniston was like a household object, would she be like a screwdriver, a cocktail shaker, or like a pencil case? And the answers are pretty much meaningless. But if you tell someone that they both chose, like, toothpick for Jennifer Aniston, like, they sense that they have this kind of shared inner world, and that makes them like that of a person a lot more. And I just love that, that actually, there are these tiny little clues that we're experiencing all the time that are just helping us to bond.

It's bizarre, but it really works. And obviously that is such an artificial kind of experiment. I'm not saying that we should all play these kind of imagine if questions to connect to strangers, but I think it shows how actually how much of our kind of connection and clicking with someone can really depend not just on those kind of big similarities in your background, education, all of that, but it's just those immediate, impulsive responses to the world around us. And there's actually then a bunch of neuroscientific research that shows that there's a literal truth in the kind of feeling that someone is on the same wavelength as you. And these researchers in the US got a bunch of class of students to watch a series of YouTube videos, some of which for music, video, comedy, documentary, whatever, and scanned their brains as they were doing so.

And they found that just from the similarities in the brain activity as people responded to those videos, they could predict who was friends with who. And it was really because they had this very similar streams of consciousness. Like, yeah, their interpretation framework is similar to someone else. This isn't necessarily happening between the people, it's that they are similar kinds of people. So when they get a shared stimulus, person, a, c and f all move in the same way.

Chris Williamson
Well, why? Well, it's because they've conditioned themselves. And quite likely, if you're going to observe the YouTube video in that way from all of the kids in the schoolyard, you're probably going to get on with the ones that think like you and talk like you and have the same sort of views as you. Yeah, yeah, you click. Exactly.

David Robson
And so, you know, it's like, I think, like, you know, sometimes, again, because we're so reserved, we can avoid allowing people to kind of see inside our stream of consciousness. So if you're, like, too cautious about revealing what you think or feel, there's just no way of constructing that shared reality. The other person just doesn't know if you're thinking in the same way as them or not. So I think that's why things like self disclosure are so powerful, because you're offering many more opportunities for you to recognize. In what way do your views of reality coincide?

Chris Williamson
Hell, yeah. David Robson, ladies and gentlemen. David, I love your work. I love the fact that you're digging into all of these fascinating psychological studies. James Smith shamelessly repurposed a bunch in his book and then I've been using them on my live tour.

So I very much appreciate that. I've been subscribed to psych.org comma psyche.org for ever since we last spoke. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. Get the new book, etcetera.

David Robson
Yeah. So there's my website, www dot Davidrobson. Dot me. You can kind of pre order my book or order it anywhere where you'd get your normal books, like Amazon, you know, bookshop.org, comma, whatever, wherever you go. But I do have, like, links on my webpage as well.

I'm on Twitter or x a Robson. My Instagram, which I'm just kind of trying to build up, is David Arobson. So, yeah, you know, I love hearing feedback, I love having questions. So get in touch. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next, mate.

Thanks.

Chris Williamson
Get away. Get.

#799 - David Robson - The Science Of Building Genuine Friendships

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2. The Science of Connection

3. Practical Advice

4. Technology and Connection

5. Conclusion

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