The Social Fear That Keeps Us Lonely (and the easy fix) | Nicholas Epley

Jonathan Fields (0:00)

So, here is a wild fact. We tend to assume the people around us, on trains and the coffee shops at the office, they'd rather just be left alone. My guess research says we have been wrong about that for years, and the cost has been so much higher than we think. In this conversation, you'll discover why a commute spent talking to a total stranger, it left people happier than the one spent alone, even though almost none of them expected it to. We'll explore the two-dimension psychologists say we actually are being judged on the moment we open our mouths, why the personality label that you have worn for years, the sort of social orientation you thought you were, might actually describe less about who you are than the choices that you keep making by default, and the split-second thing that your face is doing right now that might be quietly telling strangers to stay away. Our guide is Nicholas Epley, the John Teppel DeKeller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll jump in right after this break.

Really excited to explore the work that you've been doing over a period of years. So much of your research, it ties back in a really interesting way to a random morning on a train south side of Chicago.

Take me there and tell me what happened, but also what penny dropped, what was revealed.

Nicholas Epley (1:33)

Yeah. So this would have been maybe 2010-ish, somewhere in there. I can't quite remember the exact time, but I was getting on the train in the morning and riding in to the University of Chicago where I work as a professor. Like I've done for five or so years, at least before then, and I sit down on the train and I'm in the midst of writing a chapter from my first book, which is titled MindWise, describing how we've got a mind, human brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others. It's made happier and healthier when we're connecting with other people.

Yet I had this eureka moment as I was running through all this in my head. I looked around on the train and I noticed surely not for the first time, but for the first time that something really clicked, that we were all sitting here, these highly social creatures, made happier and healthier by connecting with each other, and none of us were doing it. Not one. You could have heard a pin drop on the train that morning.

I'd been studying how we make inferences about each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes for years enough to write a book about it. I thought that maybe this might be one of the cases where we're misunderstanding each other's minds potentially. So I decided that I was going to try something different that morning. I was going to experiment on myself that morning. I had a woman sit down next to me that day. She was probably in her early 50s, African-American woman. I would have been in my mid 30s at the time, so she's 15 to 20 years older than I was. She was wearing this fabulous red hat. She was dressed professionally for work, ready to go.

She also had this great big mom purse that she was carrying with us, that magical bag that mothers carry around that has like everything you'd ever need in it. Quick, I got to put up this picture, so I need a hammer and my nose is runny. I need a tissue and she's got both right there, ready to go. But I decided I was going to have a conversation.

The second I decided to do that, getting ready to talk and my brain starts screaming at me all the reasons why I shouldn't be doing this, because it's just a bad idea to do that. Well, look, you don't want me to think in common with her. She probably doesn't want to be bothered. She might think you're a creep trying to hit on her or something. You don't have anything to say to her anyway.

But I decided to push ahead through that and I came up with a brilliant opening line. I turned to her and I said, Hi, my name is Nick. I love your hat. I have one just like it.

She chuckled politely at the not so funny joke and turned to me with a big smile, almost looked like, and I remember this very distinctly. She had this big smile when she turned to me, it almost made her look like a different person, that her face shifted from this kind of dead going off to work face that we sometimes carry with us when we go off to work in the morning. Had just a great big smile and she chuckled. Then the conversation just kind of got rolling and it was really quite easy to carry on. We talked about what she did for a living. She felt kind of stuck in her job, but she couldn't leave. She's raising a family and they needed her support and wasn't her dream job. I told her a little bit about the experiment that I had just enrolled her in with us having this conversation. I remember thinking that maybe we don't talk to each other as much as we used to because of the phones that we carry around to keep us distracted from each other and so on. I remember I was getting up to leave and as I'm walking around her to get to the aisle, she holds my wrist just gently and she says, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. As if with a sincerity in her voice that I distinctly remember, that suggested she was happy to have been seen and connected with on that morning. We didn't have any earth-shattering conversation, but I walked away thinking two things. One is that wasn't just nice, it was surprisingly nice. Here's where I think my training as a behavioral scientist, as a psychologist might cause me to look at this a little differently than other people might. What I noticed was the gap between my beliefs about how this might go, which drives and governs our decisions to reach out and engage with other people, and how it actually went. It was a meaningful gap. I thought it'd be kind of cringy, mediocre, not so great, and it was really nice. It's surprisingly nice. So that was one thing. The other thing that stuck with me was that I think I might be doing this quite a lot. That is, quite a few cases where I could connect with somebody, but a little weird, maybe now is not the right time, they wouldn't be interested in talking, might be misunderstood or something, and so I hold back and avoid it. And it seemed to me that maybe I'm not the only one doing this, but maybe the whole train might be doing that this morning. And if that was true, then this would really change the way I live my life, and it might really change the way a lot of people would live their life if we're making this mistake consistently. And so the eureka moment that I had, the penny that dropped for me that morning, was the possibility that misunderstanding each other, misunderstanding how it might go if we reached out to connect with somebody, might be keeping us from connecting with each other as much as would be good for our livelihood, good for our own lives and for those around us. And that started what has ultimately been 15 and counting at least years of research, tens of thousands of participants, 120 published experiments and counting on that phenomena.