Everyone has heard about the incredible benefits that come to mind, body, and spirit from having strong relationships. The quality of our social ties has a huge impact on our physical and mental health and our overall feeling of flourishing.
Yet many people still struggle to create these strong relationships in their lives, and often figure that things like weakening communities and digital technology are to blame.
But my guest says that the barriers to establishing bonds with others may actually be more psychological than physical, and he shares research-backed tips for breaking through them in his new book, The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network. Today on the show, David discusses how we can feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by people if we don’t have what he calls a “shared reality.” We then discuss ways to build that shared reality with others. We talk about why frenemies are so bad for you, how to overcome the “liking gap,” why you might want to interrupt someone to connect with them, the need to be aware of the novelty penalty in conversations, why you should stop telling white lies, and much more.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- David’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #803 — How Your Expectations Can Change Your Life
- AoM Article: Why Ambivalent Relationships Are Terrible for You (And How to Deal With Them)
- AoM Podcast #949: Envy — Unpacking The Emotion No One Likes to Talk About
Connect With David Robson
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Hey, this is Brett. I want to let you know that we’re having an enrollment for summer cohort of The Strenuous Life starting this Tuesday, June 11th. The Strenuous Life is an online-offline program that we created, it’ll be putting into action all the things we’ve been talking about and writing about on AoM for the past 16 years. And we’ve done that in a few ways.
First, we created 50 different badges based around 50 different skills. There’s hard skills like wilderness survival, outdoorsmanship, knot-tying, building fires, but also soft skills like how to be a better host, how to improve your social skills, how to be a better husband and better father. We also provide weekly challenges that are going to push you outside of your comfort zone mentally, physically and socially. We also provide day-to-day accountability for physical activity and doing a good deed.
And every new member of The Strenuous Life goes through what we call The Strenuous Life challenge. It’s a 12-week boot camp that’s going to help you develop a bias towards action that’s going to carry over to other areas of your life, and at the end of the 12-week boot camp, if you’ve completed all the requirements, we’ll send you a challenge coin that’ll commemorate your achievement.
If you want to learn more about The Strenuous Life, head over to thestrenuouslife.co. You can also sign up if you want to sign up. Deadline to sign up is Thursday, June 13th at 9 PM Central Time. And then the challenge, the bootcamp challenge starts on Saturday, June 15th. Thestrenuouslife.co, go check it out. I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life.
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Everyone has heard about the incredible benefits that come to mind, body and spirit from having strong relationships. The quality of our social ties has a huge impact on our physical and mental health and our overall feeling of flourishing, yet many people still struggle to create these strong relationships in their lives, and often figure that things like weakening communities and digital technology are to blame. But my guest David Robson says that the barriers to establishing bonds with others may actually be more psychological than physical, and he shares research-backed tips for breaking through them in his new book, The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network.
Today on the show, David discusses how we can feel lonely, even when we’re surrounded by people. We don’t have what he calls a shared reality. We then discuss ways to build that shared reality with others. We talk about why frenemies are so bad for you, how to overcome the liking gap, why you might want to interrupt someone to connect with them, the need to be aware of the novelty penalty in conversations, why you should stop telling white lies, and much more. After show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/connection.
Alright, David Robson, welcome back to the show.
David Robson: Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay: So we had you on two years ago to talk about your book, The Expectation Effect, which is about the placebo effect. You got a new book out, it’s about the science of social connection. You took a deep dive into what makes us feel connected to others, and then you offer these research-backed tips on how we can improve our connection with others. You start out the book talking about the loneliness crisis that people have been talking about that’s been happening in the United States and other Western countries. You have a fresh take on the source of this loneliness crisis, and you talk about it’s the lack of shared reality. So how is a lack of shared reality behind our feeling of loneliness?
David Robson: Right, I mean, there’s a lot of talk on how modern society and then new technologies are kind of driving people apart. And I’m sure there’s certainly an element of truth in that, but the fact is, if you look at historic data from what we know, it seems that loneliness has been a problem for humans for a very long time. And even if we think about the people who surround us, celebrities, like cultural references, you can really see that people can be surrounded by a lot of friends or a lot of people, but still feel pretty lonely.
So there’s more to feeling social connection than just having face-to-face contact with a lot of people. And what I propose and what the scientific research suggests is that even when we’re kind of in conversation with someone, we can often feel a sense of existential isolation because we lack a shared reality with that person. And put simply, a shared reality is the sense that the other person is on the same wavelength as you, so you feel that their thoughts, their emotions, their reactions to events are very similar to your own. That’s really the basis of our sense of social connection, and too often we have these psychological barriers that prevent us from forming that shared reality.
To give just a few examples, when we’re in conversation, our conversations can be so shallow and superficial because we’re too scared of disclosing the things that are most important to us that we just don’t give the opportunity for shared reality to develop. So it could perfectly well be that the other person is really thinking the same stuff that you’re thinking, but you just neither of you say it, so you feel that distance, even though there’s that potential for communication and for connection.
And that’s what The Laws of Connection is all about, it’s overcoming those psychological barriers so that we don’t miss all of these opportunities. And actually, what I really discovered from all of the research that I read was that there are so many opportunities for us to feel some meaningful connection with the people around us, and with just a few changes to our mindset, to our behavior, to the content of our conversations, we can make the most of those opportunities and achieve our social potential.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love this idea because, as you said, a lot of times when people talk about how do we solve the loneliness crisis, it’s these really drastic engineering our environment, well, we need to get people more into face-to-face situation, we need to redesign our communities, or you tell people just get out there, sign up for a rec league, go to church, or something like that. And all those things are potentially good, but it might not be the solution, it’s not sufficient, ’cause you can be around people and you can still feel completely lonely, and you see this in relationships, people, they just… They’re in their family and they absolutely feel alienated from their family, and as you say, it’s because they just don’t feel like they’re on the same wavelength as their family.
David Robson: Right, exactly. And in today’s social environment, you could blame this on, say, things like political polarization, and certainly like sharing a similar world view is important for shared reality, but it can also be something very intimate, it could be that the two of you are sitting watching a film together, and one of you is laughing and finding it absolutely hilarious, and the other person is just totally turned off by that film, they just don’t get what’s funny. And that’s a very alienating experience, that creates this sense of existential isolation, because in that moment you have no shared reality. And conversely, actually, you can have a shared reality with someone who is thousands of miles away, like I have a friend who lives in DC, I’m based in England, but we grew up together and he can just send me like a gif on WhatsApp, and I know that he’s found it funny, he knows that I’ll find it funny, that creates a sense of shared reality in that moment, even though we’re not in the same room.
Brett McKay: And you highlight research when people have this shared reality, their brains actually start matching each other in different ways.
David Robson: Yeah, that’s what I love about this whole topic is that you can do these psychological questionnaires where you measure how much shared reality people experience with another person, and that can be like measured on do you have the sense that you’re kind of thinking the same thing, do you feel that you’ve got a shared stream of consciousness, do you finish each other’s sentences. And we know from those studies that the sense of shared reality really is important for our feelings of closeness, and it overrides often broader superficial similarities between people, for example, like if they both come from the same home town.
So we know that this intimate sense of sharing our inner world with someone is important, but then there’s a whole bunch of studies from neuroscience that show that there’s literal truth to the idea that we’re on the same wavelength with someone when we share a reality with them. Basically, one of my favorite studies looked at a bunch of students from this kind of graduate class at a university to watch a series of YouTube clips, so it could be a music video, a documentary, a comedy routine, and they measured their brain activity as each person watched the clips. And what they found was that the similarities in the brain activity to the same events could predict how close the friendships were between the classmates, whether they were kind of a direct connection or whether they were more of like a kind of an acquaintance who you might bump into at another friend’s party, but you’d never choose to spend time together.
This kind of interbrain synchrony is called, or interbrain coupling, and that’s really the neurological foundation of social connection.
Brett McKay: Okay, so in the course of your research, you developed 13 laws that can help you develop more shared reality with people around you. I want to talk about some of these laws today. The first one is be consistent in your treatment of others, avoid being a stressful frenemy. I want to talk about that frenemy part. What is a frenemy?
David Robson: So a frenemy is… Or the scientific term for a frenemy is an ambivalent relationship, and essentially, they’re the kind of people who blow hot and cold, they’re kind of Jekyll and Hyde figures. So you might go to them one day and they act like your best friend, like they have your best interests at heart, and then the next day, they’ll ignore you or lash out because they’re feeling jealous. They’re not reliable, they’re not consistent in their behavior.
Now, there’s been a bunch of longitudinal studies that have looked at the importance of social networks for our health, and one way of looking at this is just calculating how many connections you have, and it does seem that people with bigger social networks tend to be healthier. It can be as important the size of your social network as things like whether you smoke or drink, or whether you exercise regularly, how high your BMI is.
But then it’s not just the number, it’s the quality of the interactions with people that you have, and what was really surprising to me was that the ambivalent friendships, the frenemies who are kind of good and bad in equal measure, they’re not just worse than the people who are wholly supportive to you, they can actually be more stressful than the people who are purely aversive, those relatives, for example, or that colleague at work who’s just so consistently nasty that you just know to avoid them.
And I think the problem with the frenemies is that they have… You feel invested in the relationship and you kind of want their approval, and so when there’s this uncertainty on how they’re going to respond to you, it actually hurts a lot more. And so there are studies showing that just knowing that a frenemy, that an ambivalent relationship, is sitting in the room next to you and that you’re going to have to interact with them in a few minutes, that can make your stress levels soar, it can actually raise your blood pressure just knowing that they’re going to be there and you don’t know how they’re going to react.
Now, the conclusion of this research is obviously that we should be more mindful of the people in our social networks, so maybe keep a distance from these people who are not good for our well-being. We probably don’t want to eliminate all of them altogether, because sometimes the good outweighs the bad, but an awareness of those people and their effects on our well-being can at least help us to manage our expectations and to make sure that if they stress us out that we do something to calm ourselves afterwards and put their behavior into perspective.
But equally important, we need to avoid being frenemies ourselves, and we could be doing this without realizing, like maybe it’s just that you’re the kind of person who is always late and that leaves your friend feeling devalued, or you never respond to their messages, you forget their birthday, all of these things. We want to be consistent. If people really matter to us, we really want to show that regularly and consistently.
Brett McKay: That takes some self-reflection. You might even have to ask your friend, Hey, am I doing anything that just really bothers you, and what can I do to improve?
David Robson: Right, exactly. It’s like asking, am I the arsehole in this relationship? You might not want to hear what they have to say, but ultimately it’s going to help you to be a better person if you do.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the second law is create a mutual understanding with the people you meet. What are some tips you’ve found in your research for how to create a shared reality with someone by fostering mutual understanding?
David Robson: Just actually making the effort to verbalize your feelings to the other person is hugely important. So if they’re telling you something that really mattered to them in their life, it could be like a tragic event, it could be something that they’re super proud of, but just verbalizing how you feel for them, that is something that we sometimes forget to do. We might just assume that they can read it from our facial expression, our body language, but just saying it out loud can be really important.
And if you’re having joint activity together, just to actually say how much you’re enjoying it, so that they know that they’re not the only person who’s experiencing that kind of exhilaration, that’s one way that we can do this. Another way that was super surprising to me was that you can often achieve that neural synchronization that is kind of behind this shared reality by changing your physiological experience. So rhythmic activities, when you’re moving or singing in time with other people, so going to karaoke, dancing, these are very effective bonding activities, because they’re synchronizing your brain waves, and so fundamentally, you know that that other person is living in the kind of physical world in the present moment, experiencing exactly the same sensations that you are, that’s been proven to be really good for establishing a bond between strangers and between people who know each other.
All of these experiments showed that when people kind of dance together, they become more altruistic to one another, they feel closer, they’re more likely to share their secrets with each other. It’s very, very powerful, and it doesn’t have… If dancing’s not your thing, if singing’s not your thing, something like going to a chili eating contest together, if that’s what you and your friend enjoy, experiencing that kind of pleasurable pain together, that is also a good way of establishing this kind of momentary shared reality that can then just ease your interaction and maybe you can develop that into some more meaningful relationship, a more lasting relationship.
Brett McKay: Yeah, the sociologist Émile Durkheim called that collective effervescence, when you’ve felt you’re connected with everyone and you’re dancing. Okay, so do things together that require synchronized movement, so dance, play music together, you can even do comedy or improv with each other. And I like that other idea, it’s very simple, just validate the thoughts of other people. If they say something and you agree with it, say so, and don’t just assume that they know that you agree.
And we talked about what it feels like when you’ve created that mutual understanding. It can actually feel… It feels like you’re on the same wavelength, but then you also highlight research, and I think people might experience this as well, there’s a sense of self-expansion, like you feel like you’re getting bigger whenever you have created this shared reality with someone. Talk to us about that idea of self-expansion.
David Robson: Yeah, self-expansion is super important, so even after you’ve clicked with someone, even if you’ve spent a lot of time with them, you shared the same interests, the most successful relationships are the ones that also allow each party to grow. And you know, that’s as true with platonic relationships as it is with romantic relationships, it’s not restricted to the particular kind of connection you have with someone. We just want to surround ourselves with people who are encouraging us to kind of exit our comfort zone in some way.
Now, they could do that purely by being themselves, perhaps they’re just bringing a whole new range of knowledge and perspectives that you never had yourself, so maybe your backgrounds are just so different that actually they always help you to see the world in a slightly different way, that they always have a new insight to bring. That’s one form of self-expansion. It could be that they encourage you to do activities that you wouldn’t have tried before, maybe it’s they practice a difference sport and they help you to do the same, or they’re a real foodie and they’re kind of taking you, encouraging you to go to new restaurants, to try different gastronomic experiences. It could be that you both do star-gazing together, like there are so many ways that you can create self-expansion within a friendship or a romantic relationship, but it’s really fundamental to making sure that your shared reality doesn’t grow stale.
Brett McKay: Another law that you have, you talk about in the book, is trust that others on average will like you as much as you like them, and this law seeks to resolve a problem of socializing called the liking gap. What is the liking gap?
David Robson: So the liking gap is a very common phenomenon that I think we’ve all experienced, some of us experience it more than others, and it’s the fact that when you meet a new acquaintance for the first time, you can have a great conversation, you can really hit it off, like you’re laughing at the same stuff, you have the same interests, you really find that other person fascinating. But when you go away from that conversation, you start to experience these doubts, you start to think that maybe I said a faux pas, maybe I was a bit boring at this point of the conversation. You come away despite your good experience assuming that the other person didn’t like you as much as you liked the other person. You just underestimate how appealing you are.
The research shows that the liking gap is probably happening to both parties, so each person within that conversation is going away thinking the same thing that the other person just didn’t like them as much as they liked the other person. And you can see how this can drive people apart, because if you have that kind of anxiety, you’re less likely to capitalize on that interaction afterwards, you’re less likely to arrange to meet up a second time to go out for a drink, to get a coffee, to maybe engage in some kind of creative collaboration if it’s at work. And the sad thing about the liking gap is that it lingers for quite a while.
So one study looked at university suite mates who were living together, should have got to know each other pretty well, but they found that even after seven or eight months, these suite mates still had this liking gap, they still weren’t confident that the other person liked them as much as they liked the other person. And if we want to build better relationships more quickly, we want to overcome that liking gap after the first few meetings.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like the liking gap is maybe you established a shared reality with someone, but then after the fact you start questioning it.
David Robson: Yeah, you start… You kind of allowed that shared reality to crumble because you start to think that what you perceived was not what the other person perceived, you don’t trust that actually those feelings of closeness were real and true for each party.
Brett McKay: And this liking gap is more common for introverts than extroverts. Another thing about introverts is that they think or they predict that they will enjoy a social interaction less than they actually do.
David Robson: So I’m not doubting that there are like meaningful fundamental differences between introverts and extroverts and the kind of situations that they might find most recharging or restorative, but in general introverts tend to have more pessimistic assumptions about social events. They’re more likely than extroverts to assume that they’re just not going to enjoy an interaction with a stranger, that it’s going to be exhausting and awkward and embarrassing, and that they’ll come away feeling a lot worse than they did before the interaction. But what the research shows is that when you compare introverts and extroverts after an interaction, they both actually find these social engagements really meaningful and enjoyable, so those expectations just aren’t as well-calibrated as they are for the extroverts.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve experienced that. I’m an introvert. I write for a living, I do my podcast, my podcast, I use my closet, so I’m just at my house all the time. And so when there’s an opportunity to socialize, I always have like, Oh, I’m not… I’m going to be really exhausted, I’m not going to be very good, and then I do it and I feel great. That was awesome. Have you had that same experience as a writer?
David Robson: Yeah, all the time, but especially, I think after the covid pandemic lockdowns that we had in England. It was like I’d forgotten how to… Only temporarily, only for like the first few meetings, but I really felt like I was worried that I’d forgotten my social skills and how to interact with people. And then once I had those conversations, it was great, but it took maybe a few weeks for me to fully feel engaged again to the same degree that I had before the pandemic.
This actually comes out in the research quite nicely, that to overcome phenomena like the liking gap and those kind of official nerves about meeting strangers, anyone can do it no matter what our personality, but you do need to put in practice. So you have to make it a kind of intention every day to try to speak to someone that you don’t know, and then after just one week, you’ll find that your expectations are much better calibrated, that you feel more confident about enjoying those interactions, and more confident in your ability to conduct those interactions with fluency.
You just need the experience, but if you let it go by for a few weeks or months without pushing yourself in that way, the nerves and the fear, they’re going to kind of creep back and you’re just going to have to kind of warm up again before you feel that same confidence.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and you say that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice can teach us this principle of needing to take an intentional approach to developing our social skills.
David Robson: Right. There’s a great scene between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, who is kind of his love interest, even though they don’t realize it at the time, and she is basically pointing out the fact that he just doesn’t speak to people at parties, and he’s like very standoffish, and it seems to her very rude, the fact that he’ll just going to keep to his group and he just makes no effort. And he says something like, Well, I just don’t have the ability that you have to make small talk and to connect with people. And she’s playing the piano at the time, and she says, Well, I’m not a great pianist, but I don’t pretend that… That’s just like inherent within me, I’m not a great pianist because I just don’t put in as much practice as all of the other girls who can play much better than me. And maybe your social awkwardness is just part of the fact that you just have never tried to practice.
And that’s really what the science demonstrates for us, is that you put in the practice and you reap rewards in just the same way that you would with learning a musical instrument, that these skills don’t necessarily come naturally to anyone, but we’re all much better than we think if only we try hard to put ourselves in the kinds of situations where we need to use those skills.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that scene. That was a very incisive insight from Jane Austen. I really like that a lot. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. So in the book, you also talk about how conversation can help us create and nurture shared realities with others. How can we better use conversations to create that shared reality?
David Robson: Right. I mean, again, there are like these psychological barriers where we might be trying our hardest to connect, and often we are successful, but we’re maybe not doing it as well as we could be. One of the problems that a lot of people have is that they just don’t ask enough of the right questions in a conversation. So I think it’s quite well known that you should ask questions to achieve a shared reality. But the problem is that when people take that advice, they can often do it quite kind of algorithmically, robotically, and they’re just kind of… It’s almost like an interview. They’ve got a list of things, like what profession you do, like where did you go to school, where do you live, what family do you have, all of these things.
But each question isn’t really building on the other ones, it’s just like a stream of new questions. Now, that’s fine. It’s certainly better than just those kind of ice breakers of like, Hey, how are you doing? And it’s better than this habit that some people have, which is like, Hey, how’s work going? Anyway, I got a great promotion and I was given this huge bonus, but you just used the question as an excuse to turn the conversation back to yourself.
So those are bad questions, but the best questions are the ones that ask the other person to open up and then build on what they’ve just said, so kind of follow-up questions that really make an effort to dig deep into this experience that they’ve shared with you.
Brett McKay: Any examples of questions that are really good for digging deep and establishing that shared reality with somebody?
David Robson: Yeah, I mean, say you are just getting to know someone, it’s reasonable to say, like, what’s your profession? What do you do with your day job? Then if they tell you they’re like a lawyer or a scientist, or whatever, just asking them like, well, why did you choose that profession, or what does it involve? Like, what’s your favorite part of that profession? What’s the worst part of it? Just showing that you have a genuine curiosity in what they’re saying is hugely flattering, and it’s just building that shared reality by constructing all these details that allow you to understand their life better. And from your reactions, you’re allowing them to understand where you’re coming from and how you feel about these different topics.
Brett McKay: You also talk about, there’s some research saying that in order to establish a shared reality with someone during a conversation, you may need to interrupt them, which goes against the advice you hear about don’t interrupt people, just listen, maybe you do some nodding and uh-huh while you’re listening, but you don’t interrupt. Tell us about this research, ’cause I thought it was really counter-intuitive.
David Robson: So the way we show attention to someone else is really important for establishing a shared reality. Now, a lot of us rely too much on what’s known as paralinguistic cues, so that’s things like murmuring assent, like mmh-hmm, uh-huh, yeah, or nodding along, that kind of body language. We think because we know that we’re listening, that the other person is going to read those cues as they were intended, but the fact is, it’s really easy to fake those cues. If you’re not concentrating, you can just like murmur assent every few minutes, and it’s really difficult to tell whether you are listening or not.
So what’s much better is to demonstrate actively that you’re engaged with what they’re saying, so it could be paraphrasing what they’ve just told you, asking one of those follow-up questions. But then the super surprising thing is that interruptions are actually a really useful way of demonstrating your interest and curiosity. If you’re finishing their sentences, or when they pause ’cause they don’t quite know what to say, and you interrupt to ask them to continue or to kind of guess what they were going to say, that shows that you’re really engaged, and that’s actually very flattering.
Now, obviously, not all interruptions are equal, so if you’re interrupting someone to completely change the topic, that’s super insulting. That’s never going to work. But yeah, if you’re interrupting because it’s a sign of your genuine curiosity and passion for what they’re saying, you know, we don’t have to listen to the etiquette guides, that is going to be a way of forging this connection.
Brett McKay: You also talk about the novelty penalty in conversation. What’s that?
David Robson: Yeah, that’s super counter-intuitive to me, and it’s the fact that when we’re listening to other people or they are listening to us, we all have a preference for hearing about something that we already know, a topic that’s already familiar. And so if you talk about something that isn’t in the other person’s life, so it’s totally novel, that’s when you have the novelty penalty, they just don’t feel the same level of connection to you through that. I think it’s very common when we’re talking about our kind of holidays, if the other person hasn’t been to the location that we’re talking about, they can feel very alienated and bored by the conversation very quickly because it’s just difficult for them to grab hold of.
Now, one of the reasons this happens is partly that our story-telling abilities just maybe aren’t as well-developed as they could be, so you’re leaving too many gaps in the conversation, in your descriptions that make it very hard for them to really get a handle on what was so exciting or fun or interesting about your experience and why it mattered to you. And so actually to overcome the novelty penalty it’s often better to embellish our stories a little bit more than we would naturally do, and I don’t mean embellish with like false details, but I just mean like fill in those gaps, be a bit more emotional in what you’re saying. Like if something like completely changed your life by having an experience, make that clear, actually explicitly say what it was that was so transformative about the experience. That just allows the other person to see inside your mind, and that’s really what is a shared reality is when people can see inside each other’s minds and really get to know what’s actually making you tick and what’s actually motivating you.
Brett McKay: And I guess if you’re listening to someone tell a story and the novelty penalty is kicking in for you, you’re just like bored. I think the solution to that would be to ask questions to flesh out those emotional details.
David Robson: Right, that’s it. I think we should be really humble about this, and rather than just assuming that the other person is really boring, not all getting irritated, we should think that maybe this is a reflection on us and that actually maybe we’re not asking the right questions or leading the conversation in the way that will allow them to tell us why that experience was so important to them and why they think it’s worth sharing with us.
Brett McKay: So oftentimes in a relationship to maintain it, we might tell white lies, we basically tell something untruthful to not hurt the other person’s feelings. So a typical one, hey, what did you think of this food I made? And you’re like, oh, it was so good. And you’re thinking, well, actually, I thought it was gross. What does the research say about how that affects relationships?
David Robson: I mean, there are very few situations where dishonesty pays off in relationships, it’s pretty much limited, actually, like a white lie can be beneficial, and it’s kind of acceptable if the other person has no opportunity to respond to that feedback constructively. So the obvious example is, if you have a bride or groom on their wedding day, and they’re just about to walk down the aisle and they look pretty awful for some reason, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they can’t manage to get a new suit, a new dress, they can’t manage to redo their hair, hearing that news is only going to make them feel a lot worse and be less confident, then it’s fine to tell a white lie, but in almost every other situation, people really respond well to the negative feedback much, much more than we would expect.
And that’s because people value honesty so much, because honesty is so essential for that shared reality. If you start to question whether the other person is really telling you the truth, all of the shared reality that you’ve constructed together starts to feel like this kind of illusion, this mirage that might disappear. So even if you have negative feedback, don’t be afraid to share it, just make sure that you are, firstly, you’re being honest, secondly, that you’re being nuanced, so don’t make sweeping statements, but try to be very specific in what you liked, what you didn’t like on their project, for example, and try to offer your own support and resources to help them to make the changes that they need.
So if you’re talking about a work project, offering to go out for coffee with the person to talk it through and to impart your expertise, that’s going to mean that the negative feedback is much better received and it’s going to help them to feel less stressed about the whole thing. But there have been studies where researchers got students to either go out into the world for a few days and to be as kind as possible to all the people that they met, kindness was their number one objective, or they asked them to be honest. So totally honest, even when it was uncomfortable, even when they might have naturally told those white lies.
And what they found was that actually both groups performed equally well, they found similar benefits to their well-being compared to a control group who just carried on as normal. And actually, those who had the honest conversations, they often reported feeling greater meaning in their interactions, even when there was the discomfort, they felt that they got to know the other person better and the other person got to know them better because they had been brave enough to tell them the truth.
Brett McKay: It reminded me of a scene. So we just got done in our family, we just got done watching Little Women. Have you seen the most recent one from 2019 with… It’s Greta Gerwig’s…
David Robson: Yeah, yeah, Greta Gerwig’s…
Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, she directed it. So it’s that scene where Jo, the heroine of the story, writes this novel and she presents it to this guy, Friedrich, who she kinda likes, and he likes her. And he reads it, and he’s like, this is awful. And she’s like, what are you talking about? It’s like, no, it’s just not good. I don’t think it’s good. And then she got really defensive, like you think I’m a bad writer? He’s like, no, I don’t think you’re a bad writer, I think what you wrote was not good. And in the short term, it kinda hurt the relationship, she got all in a huff and she left, but in the end, it seemed like it was the right thing to do, ’cause they ended up creating that shared reality.
David Robson: Yeah, exactly. And so that’s it, sometimes like you might get a negative reaction initially, ’cause the other person needs to calm down and to process what you’ve said, but according to these studies, ultimately it does bring you closer together, to be honest. I don’t think this means that we… It gives us like an excuse to just be rude or tactless, I think there’s always going to be a much kinder way of telling the brutal truth, than just saying it in the kind of nastiest way possible, like there’s always a way that you can make your words… Like really emphasize how much you care about the other person and your honest intentions for doing so, the purity of your intentions to help the other person.
But yeah, mostly, like just having that bravery, it’s going to pay off for you and the other person, it’s going to help them to achieve their goals better. And it’s going to help you, as a kind of dyad, like as friends or in a relationship, it’s going to help you to grow as well.
Brett McKay: So another thing that can get in the way of relationships is the emotion of envy. I think this is a really fascinating topic. We did a podcast last year about the philosophy of envy with Sarah Protasi, and she described envy as this aversive feeling when somebody, could be even a friend, has something that you don’t have but you want and you feel bad. How do people typically manage envy in a relationship?
David Robson: So I don’t think we manage it very well. So often our fear of provoking envy in the other person just leads us to not share the things that we’re really proud of, like the stuff that’s given us joy. That’s been shown in multiple surveys that people will just keep it quiet if they’ve got promotion or if they’ve received a bonus, if they’re super proud even of like a personal best at the gym or by the number of Twitter followers that they’ve just received, it’s part of their personal reality, they want to be able to share that with the people that are closest to them, but they avoid doing it because they don’t want to seem like some kind of blow-hard, like some kind of braggart.
And those motives are so misdirected, because actually, what the research shows is that the very act of hiding your success can be incredibly insulting to the other people, because your motives seem pretty paternalistic. So when you finally found out that your best friend has got a promotion or that he’s won this amazing like prize for his novel, when you find that out and you realize that he was hiding that from you, that makes you feel like he kind of… He expects you act like this spoilt child who has to win at every competition, and that you’re going to act like this kind of brat who has a tantrum.
It kind of shows disrespect as if you’re not strong enough to deal with that good news and to actually feel joy for the other person. So there have just been so many studies showing this, so many multiple experiments showing that false modesty really doesn’t pay off, and that includes humble brags where you try to veil your boast in this kind of complaint or self-deprecating joke. All that tells the other person is that you’re trying to manipulate them, and that you’re trying to make them respect you without risking envy.
And that doesn’t go down well either, because when there’s the perception of insincerity in someone, that shakes the foundations of shared reality, so pretty much we should be more willing to celebrate our achievements, we don’t need to be ashamed of them. We just have to make sure that what we’re saying is honest and what we’re saying doesn’t involve any social comparison, so that’s really crucial. So it’s fine to talk about your promotion, talk about your prize, talk about your achievements at the gym, just don’t say something like, oh, yeah, I was running like faster than everyone I could see at the gym, or oh, yeah, like I’m now earning more money than like 90% of the people I know, because this social comparison, it triggers all of these kind of hard wire devolved responses where we’re really suspicious of people who are trying to climb the ranks of our society’s hierarchy.
We just don’t want to think of people overtly comparing themselves to others, because we might also be included in their negative judgment. That really puts people’s defenses up, but provided that you’re honest and you avoid social comparison, people respond really well to hearing about your successes, and often they experience this emotion called confelicity or mitfreude, a German word like schadenfreude, which means joying with someone, like experiencing that vicarious happiness in seeing another person’s joy and contentment.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the antidote to envy is confelicity. And the way you can do that, just share the good news, don’t do the social comparison, and then when someone shares good news with you, what can we do to have better mitfreude?
David Robson: Basically like when someone shares their good news with us, like even if we are feeling a little bit of envy, we just have to let the kind of mitfreude shine. We have to try to kind of put our envy to one side. I mean, the chances are you’re… We have complex emotions, so you might feel a little bit of jealousy, but you probably are genuinely happy for the other person, and just expressing that, showing the other person how glad you are for them, that is a really good bonding experience.
Scientists called that process where you experience mitfreude with another person, they call that capitalization, because it actually ends up increasing the well-being of both parties, the person who’s had the good news and the person who is vicariously experiencing the good news.
Brett McKay: So you got a law about helping others who are going through a hard time, and it’s offer emotional support to those in need, but do not force it upon them. And I think there’s another thing that keeps people from connecting with others, when they see someone going through a hard time they don’t reach out because they don’t know what to say, right, so if they have a friend who lost a loved one to death or someone lost a job, they don’t say or reach out, ’cause they’re like, I’m going to say the wrong thing, and it’s just better that I don’t say anything. But the research actually says that that fear is unfounded. What does the research say, and then what can we do to overcome that fear of reaching out?
David Robson: Yeah, so I mean, what I found so surprising about this research was the fact that actually the nature of the relationship didn’t seem to really change how grateful someone was to receive that emotional support. So whether they were close friends or whether they were vague acquaintances, like walking up to someone and saying, I’m really sorry to hear that your dad died or that you’ve been ill, or you’re going to be kicked off your course, I’m really sorry, and I want to be here to support. No matter what the nature of that relationship, people really appreciate your effort to reach out. So we don’t need to be as scared of offering our support as we would be, because most people do assume that it’s going to be kind of awkward, that they’ll say something clumsy, that they’ll end up making the over-person feel worse rather than better. But the research suggests that those fears are unfounded, we’re actually much better at providing the support that they need than we think we are, and what we really need is just a bit more bravery to do so.
Brett McKay: When we do reach out to someone and say something, anything that the research says is or isn’t helpful?
David Robson: Yeah, definitely. So one thing is that it’s one thing to express your support to another person, but you shouldn’t be overbearing in the way that you go about that. So sometimes a few short words, a few short sentences is enough. Trying to force someone to speak about something when they’re still in the middle of a painful experience, that’s not really going to help them to feel closer to you. So just making it clear that you’re there for them whenever they want you, but you’re going to kind of be willing to step back and allow them to approach you, that can be really important.
Secondly, there’s a lot of research looking at the downsides of venting, and essentially when we have supportive conversations with people, sometimes we can just egg them on to relive the painful experience in as much detail as possible. And in some ways that can be very validating, because people want to be heard, they want their feelings to be known, you’re engaging in their shared reality by kind of telling them how painful that must have been and how much you sympathize with them, but after a certain point, it can become quite toxic, because when you’re re-living a painful event again and again and again, it’s not really helping them to move on, it’s not really helping their mental health. And so that’s why we need to combine validation with some kind of attempts at helping them to see a new perspective on the situation.
Now, we have to be sensitive and delicate in the way that we do that, so kind of blundering into the conversation and being like, oh, well, what you need to do is this, and giving really misguided advice because you don’t actually really know precisely what they’re feeling, that’s not going to help too much. But it could be you tentatively suggest another way of looking at the problem, but do it humbly, and kind of ask for their opinion, like do you think that would be helpful, that’s a sensitive way of helping them to re-appraise what they’re going through.
Sometimes it’s just kind of asking the right questions and allowing them to come to a different perspective by themselves, so just asking them, what do you think you might learn from this experience, or how do you think you might move on from this? What’s your plan now? Just making sure that that is part of the conversation, so that it’s not solely focused on the pain that they’re feeling, that has been proven to be really fundamental to not just reaffirming your relationship but actually helping that other person to recover from whatever they’re going through.
Brett McKay: A related law to that is a law on forgiving and asking for forgiveness. And you talk about the research about what happens to us when we hold on to a grudge. What does that research say?
David Robson: There’s been a lot of philosophical and religious teaching around this. I think it is probably pretty well established in so many traditions that holding a grudge is bad for us, and the scientific research just kind of proves that point. Like if you lash out and retaliate, that can help you in the moment, but it doesn’t necessarily help you to recover emotionally afterwards. In fact, when we act spitefully to someone, even if we feel that we’re justified, it causes us to lose our sense of humanity.
There’s lots of scientific questionnaires that psychologists can use to measure that aspect of how human do you feel, and what you find is that people’s answers subtly change, so that it looks like they are now considering themselves to be a bit more kind of animal-like than they would have been if they had expressed forgiveness instead. So choosing forgiveness, taking that moral high ground, that can be really beneficial to how we feel.
And then there’s a bunch of research showing that people who forgive over those who hold lasting grudges, they tend to be much healthier with their psychological well-being, but also their physical well-being. When you hold a grudge, you really feel disconnected from other people, so it kind of poisons you inside and you face the consequences of that for things like your risk of chronic pain, even your risk of things like heart disease can be liked to whether you hold grudges or not.
Brett McKay: What about asking for forgiveness? Is there research that tells that the best way to approach offering an apology and how we typically mess it up?
David Robson: Yeah. I think the biggest problem that most of us face is that we just don’t apologize even when we know that we’ve acted rudely. That’s not just stubbornness. I think there’s research showing, actually, that people often really want to express their apology, but they just assume that the other person isn’t going to forgive them, so they don’t say those words. They think, again, that they’re going to be rejected, and they might even make the situation worse by apologizing, so they almost just… They’re too fatalistic about losing the relationship rather than recognizing that they might be able to heal this rift, and that often relationships are much more robust than we expect, even when they have suffered some serious damage through some wrong behavior.
So the first thing to learn, I think, is just to, if you genuinely feel sorry, it’s to actually to say those words. When you’re apologizing, you need to tick multiple boxes, so you’ve got to accept your full responsibility for what you’ve done, you have to listen to the other person to hear about what the consequences were of what you did, and take responsibility for that too. You really should then try to show how you’re going to act differently in the future, like you have to make it clear what you’ve learned from your mistake and why you’re going to avoid hurting the other person again.
A lot of the time, we just try to rush our apologies. If we are brave enough to apologize, we might be like, oh, yeah, I’m sorry, anyway, now you have to get over it, because we need to go back to normal. That is not going to help the other person, like they need to feel that they’ve been heard and that you are going to change as a result of what’s happened.
Brett McKay: Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
David Robson: My website is davidrobson.me, you can find links to buy my book there. It should be available in all of the usual retailers, your local bookshops, big stores like Barnes & Noble, Amazon, obviously, wherever you get your books. You can also follow me on Twitter, that’s d_a_robson, and on Instagram where I’m just starting to kind of build a following, it’s davidarobson.
Brett McKay: Fantastic, well, David Robson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
David Robson: And a pleasure for me too. Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest there was David Robson, and he’s the author of the book The Laws of Connection. It’s available on amazon.com, and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, davidrobson.me. Also check out our shownotes at aom.is/connection, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
