Speaker 1: Aristotle said friends are another self, and that actually proves
Speaker 1: to be true. Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: Today we welcome Eric Barker on the show. Eric is
Speaker 1: the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up
Speaker 1: the Wrong Tree. His book has sold over half a
Speaker 1: million copies and has been translated into nineteen languages. Was
Speaker 1: even the subject of a question on Jeopardy. Eric is
Speaker 1: also a sought after speaker, having given talks at MIT,
Speaker 1: the Aspen Ideas Festival, Google, the United States Military Central Command,
Speaker 1: and the Olympic Training Center. His news book is called
Speaker 1: Please Well with Others. In this episode, I talked to
Speaker 1: Eric about relationships. We tackle the misconceptions on loneliness, marriage
Speaker 1: and body language. Eric shares practical tips that we can
Speaker 1: apply in our own relationships, such as how to keep
Speaker 1: passionate love alive and how to catch liars. We also
Speaker 1: touch on the topics of communication, vulnerability, community, and health.
Speaker 1: It's always a great time chatting with Eric. He's a
Speaker 1: very thoughtful guy who knows a lot about psycho So
Speaker 1: it's my great pleasure to bring you Eric Barker. Eric,
Speaker 1: how you doing, man, I'm okay, I'm okay. You and
Speaker 1: I haven't had the next ended the conversation maybe since
Speaker 1: the last podcast. How many years ago was that five years?
Speaker 1: My first book was twenty seventeen. Well, how much have
Speaker 1: you changed since five years ago? Like, how is your
Speaker 1: thinking about human nature changed? It's an interesting five years
Speaker 1: to pick because of the pandemic. But the funny thing
Speaker 1: is that, like, well funny but sad is like I
Speaker 1: decided my second book was going to be on relationships,
Speaker 1: and you know, put everything together, and then literally two
Speaker 1: weeks after we closed the deal, California locked down for
Speaker 1: the pandemic, and all of a sudden, the issue of relationships, connection,
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, it went from this project I
Speaker 1: was working on to something I was very serious that
Speaker 1: was going to be a big deal in people's lives.
Speaker 1: So if any of my thoughts have changed on human
Speaker 1: nature and stuff, it's it's you know, only reinforced the
Speaker 1: issue of connection and relationships because you know, it's and
Speaker 1: it's availability bias. I don't know, but just just like
Speaker 1: seeing all of this and also seeing the reaction of
Speaker 1: the world and life in terms of the pandemic, I've
Speaker 1: just realized just even more so how important people are
Speaker 1: when did you decide that you wanted to write this book?
Speaker 1: Was it a pre pandemic or was it during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: I was putting the proposal together long before, and I
Speaker 1: started roughing it out probably twenty eighteen, but I didn't
Speaker 1: take it. I didn't really get taken seriously until twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: so long long before COVID reared its ugly ahead. How's
Speaker 1: the pandemic affected you personally? Very double edged sword, you know,
Speaker 1: in the sense of writing the book, you know as well.
Speaker 1: I was very productive. I didn't have I didn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of distractions going on. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: I don't recommend reading studies on the negative effects of
Speaker 1: distance and loneliness while you're cooped up in a pandemic.
Speaker 1: That's not conducive to feeling great. Yeah. Well, I like
Speaker 1: the title of the book play well with others. Why
Speaker 1: do you choose that title? And how's that German to
Speaker 1: some overarching threads that run through the book. I mean,
Speaker 1: I haven't been great personally. Relationships have never been my
Speaker 1: strong suit, and I thought it was kind of a
Speaker 1: relatable maxim We've all heard that we understand, and then
Speaker 1: personally I kind of you know, connected to because you know,
Speaker 1: on the Big five out of a possible one hundred unagreeableness,
Speaker 1: I scored a four. So I don't know what a
Speaker 1: what a report guard for a middle aged man would
Speaker 1: look like. But I don't know if I would have
Speaker 1: scored so high on plays well with others. That's so
Speaker 1: interesting because that's not like my perception of you when
Speaker 1: I talk to you, so but maybe if I got
Speaker 1: to know you better. But when you say relationships, you're
Speaker 1: referring to not just romantic relationships. You're saying your own life,
Speaker 1: even with like friends, like has this, have there been
Speaker 1: issues for you throughout your life? You said you don't
Speaker 1: do that well with relationships, Like what does that mean?
Speaker 1: I'm not really a joiner. That's not never been the
Speaker 1: focus for me, you know, And in some ways that's
Speaker 1: been a positive in the sense of redirecting time and
Speaker 1: energy towards other things. But it never came easy to me.
Speaker 1: It was never kind of number one for me, and
Speaker 1: I struggled because I didn't I didn't understand it. You
Speaker 1: never have access to other people's minds. You you never
Speaker 1: kind of know what the baseline is. You just have
Speaker 1: this distance where you realize other people seem to be
Speaker 1: handling this very differently and I'm not, And what's something's
Speaker 1: going on here? So the book was too I mean
Speaker 1: I took the same I took the same structure basically
Speaker 1: that I used for the first book, which was the
Speaker 1: maximum of success trying to apply to social science and say,
Speaker 1: does this whole book playing MythBuster? And second book same thing,
Speaker 1: but it was all about relationships and just trying to
Speaker 1: get to it, get to the fundamentals like does love conquerall?
Speaker 1: Is a friend in need? A friend? Indeed? You know,
Speaker 1: is no man an island? You know, and trying to
Speaker 1: understand that. And I think I found some things that
Speaker 1: are helpful in other people, but definitely found some things
Speaker 1: that helped elucidate things for me. I love it. I
Speaker 1: love it. You do debunk a lot of myths in
Speaker 1: this book, So maybe like that's a great superpower of yours.
Speaker 1: What is one myth about relationships that we could start
Speaker 1: off with that you debunk in this book. One thing
Speaker 1: that really blew me away was the issue around loneliness,
Speaker 1: And you know, looking at Catchiopo's work and seeing that, yeah,
Speaker 1: he just found that lonely people on average, don't spend
Speaker 1: any less time with others than non lonely people do.
Speaker 1: And I think that's shocking. I think most people would
Speaker 1: kneed jerk disagree with that. And yet if you think
Speaker 1: about it, you know, we've all felt lonely in a crowd.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like, just because you're in the middle
Speaker 1: of Times Square on New Year's Eve, doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: you feel connected to those people, are close to those people,
Speaker 1: And when you get to the core of it, you know, proximity,
Speaker 1: you know, is not really the issue. As Ketchyoko basically said,
Speaker 1: to paraphrase, you know, loneliness is how you feel about
Speaker 1: your relationships and that perception of it, because you know
Speaker 1: you have the flip side. It's like you look at
Speaker 1: you know, VIVEC. Murphy says that you know, solitude is
Speaker 1: protective against loneliness, and ostensibly those two are the same thing.
Speaker 1: You're not proximate to other people, yet one is protective
Speaker 1: and the other is correlated with pretty much every negative
Speaker 1: health metric you can imagine. And it's an issue of perception.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't mean to diminish it by saying that.
Speaker 1: I just mean it's that issue of do you feel
Speaker 1: you have strong connections to others? If you do, you
Speaker 1: can go on a business trip, be away from friends
Speaker 1: and family and feel you'll miss them, but you don't
Speaker 1: feel like horrible loneliness. Meanwhile, you can be in Times
Speaker 1: Square on New Year's Eve, be surrounded by people and
Speaker 1: feel like no one understands you. So it's that issue
Speaker 1: of do you feel those connections are strong? And I
Speaker 1: think we I think most people, including myself, feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, oh, I just need to spend more time
Speaker 1: with other people. It's like, no, you probably need to
Speaker 1: deepen your connections with other people. Paul Rodgers talked about
Speaker 1: different forms of loneliness, and one of his forms was
Speaker 1: he called it, I think called existential loneliness, which is
Speaker 1: how disconnected are you from yourself? So I wondered, to
Speaker 1: what extent do people crave relationships to fulfill a hole
Speaker 1: in their soul because they really feel they don't feel
Speaker 1: comfortable with themselves. They like need someone else to be
Speaker 1: with someone else to distract them from themselves. Am I
Speaker 1: getting to existential here? I think that cuts to the
Speaker 1: quick of bit. I remember when I first when I
Speaker 1: first interviewed Arthur Aaron, he said something about fixing love
Speaker 1: relationships that you know, reading all this Gotlan stuff and
Speaker 1: which is awesome. Arthur Aaron was like, oh, well, the
Speaker 1: first thing you need to deal with is yourself. And
Speaker 1: it's so obvious in a way, but it doesn't really
Speaker 1: get discussed quite enough or at least as deeply, because
Speaker 1: it's like, if you don't feel comfortable with yourself, then
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, you're having relationship problems. It's like your
Speaker 1: patient zero, you know, I mean, you know you're you're
Speaker 1: the one going around and you know, potentially possibly causing
Speaker 1: the problems. So if you're not first, you know, addressing
Speaker 1: those issues, then the only possible solution would be to
Speaker 1: find someone who compensates for all of all of those issues,
Speaker 1: and that's not going to be fair or healthy. So no,
Speaker 1: I totally agree with you. I think like, first and foremost,
Speaker 1: if you're dealing with serious issues around yourself, yeah, you
Speaker 1: have to resolve that before you're before you're going to have,
Speaker 1: you know, really good relationships with other people. And so
Speaker 1: many of the findings you talk about in your book
Speaker 1: so interesting. You talk about if you're about to walk
Speaker 1: down the aisle, you better be feeling crazy in love.
Speaker 1: And this is a study I hadn't I wasn't familiar with,
Speaker 1: but said, women who have second thoughts before they say
Speaker 1: I do or two and a half times more likely
Speaker 1: to be divorced in four years for minutes, more than
Speaker 1: a fifty percent increase. Holy how I mean, if that's
Speaker 1: the case, how many people really are that crazy in
Speaker 1: love when they're about to get married. What's the statistics
Speaker 1: on that? What percentage of people are actually crazy in love?
Speaker 1: I don't know what percentage of people are crazy in love,
Speaker 1: but I mean, no, I think you're right, And I
Speaker 1: think that speaks to some of the other stuff I
Speaker 1: discussed in the book, was the issue of, you know,
Speaker 1: marriages in a difficult situation. Right now, we don't have
Speaker 1: the social and cultural pressures that we used to do,
Speaker 1: which is fantastic in a lot of ways. You took
Speaker 1: the governor off the engine. You know, It's like, that's great.
Speaker 1: So if you're willing to do the work, and this
Speaker 1: is most this is from ELI think all. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, if you're willing to do the work and
Speaker 1: really craft and customize a great relationship, it's phenomenal. It's
Speaker 1: the best thing in the world. It's the do it yourself,
Speaker 1: it's a custom tailor. But if we don't do the work,
Speaker 1: we don't have those societal and cultural pressures, norms and
Speaker 1: strictures to keep everything within bounds. We have tremendous freedom,
Speaker 1: which is great if you're willing to do the work,
Speaker 1: but we the defaults are and the averages are not
Speaker 1: as safe as as they used to be because we
Speaker 1: kind of removed those pressures. It's a tricky balance, and
Speaker 1: that's what Finkel found was that the happiest marriages right
Speaker 1: now are the happiest marriages that have ever existed. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the bottom end is not good at all. The average
Speaker 1: is not as good. But the real critical factor here
Speaker 1: that doesn't show up as immediate, immediately and quick analysis
Speaker 1: of the data. One of the big things is people
Speaker 1: just aren't getting married. So a lot of things are skewed.
Speaker 1: Is a lot of people are opting out of the system,
Speaker 1: which again might might be the best thing for them,
Speaker 1: but it still shows that we have a lot of
Speaker 1: myths and skewed perspectives on marriage, the place of marriage,
Speaker 1: and how it's going to how it's end how it's
Speaker 1: going to end up. Yeah, we sure are you married, Eric, No?
Speaker 1: You know, John Gottman's seminal research is mind blowing. You know,
Speaker 1: the extent to which he can predict whether or not
Speaker 1: people are going to stay together after watching videos encoding
Speaker 1: their responses after three minutes of an interaction with each other.
Speaker 1: You know, the most important factors he's discovered that will
Speaker 1: predict a healthy marriage. First and foremost, he talks about
Speaker 1: his four horsemen. First and foremost. A lot of people
Speaker 1: are afraid of having, you know, marild disputes because they
Speaker 1: think it's it's going to go badly. We're going to
Speaker 1: argue and we're going to get divorced. And yet, you know,
Speaker 1: what gotten found was that yelling and screaming only lead
Speaker 1: a divorce. That's only forty percent of the time. More importantly,
Speaker 1: it's usually an issue of not communicating, you know, it's
Speaker 1: not talking about those things. Then we're only having a
Speaker 1: conversation with ourselves. That most marriages don't end with yelling
Speaker 1: and screaming. You yell and scream when you care. You know,
Speaker 1: is that most couples split because they started living parallel lives,
Speaker 1: so you have to talk. And then in terms of talking,
Speaker 1: he sees four critical things for critical mistakes that are
Speaker 1: highly correlated I think like eighty five percent with divorce,
Speaker 1: and that's criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness, and contempt. And criticism is
Speaker 1: the issue of complaining is good complaining raises issues, you
Speaker 1: raise them, you can solve them. Is when you make
Speaker 1: it you make it about the other person's character, not
Speaker 1: their actions, and that doesn't go nearly as well when
Speaker 1: you start attacking the other person's character. Stonewalling is when
Speaker 1: you shut down in response to issues that your your
Speaker 1: partner raises, and it's basically a passive form of being dismissive,
Speaker 1: you know. And defensiveness is they raise an issue and
Speaker 1: then you fire back and it just keeps escalating, which
Speaker 1: obviously isn't good. And then contempt is when you see
Speaker 1: your partner on a lower plane than yourself. Gottman describes
Speaker 1: it as sulphuric acid for love and it is the
Speaker 1: single biggest, you know, predictor of divorce. But the flip
Speaker 1: side that I would say is that's the negative. Avoiding
Speaker 1: those negatives is good, But avoiding negatives we generally focus
Speaker 1: too much on that. You know, it's like that you
Speaker 1: know potentially could just get you a neutral and neutral
Speaker 1: is in love. What Gottman talks about, like you said,
Speaker 1: about the being able to predict the successive relationship and
Speaker 1: predict divorce, that comes down to the story, and it's
Speaker 1: really about kind of that that aspect of embracing the negatives,
Speaker 1: you know, seeing it towards this like, hey, we had problems,
Speaker 1: but we got over them. That sort of embracing the negative,
Speaker 1: overcoming it, you know, that's that critical aspect that he
Speaker 1: looks for in a story that allows him to predict,
Speaker 1: you know, whether a couple will be divorced in five years.
Speaker 1: So many marital problems don't get resolved. Another big part
Speaker 1: of that research is showing that kind of the manner
Speaker 1: in which people try to resolve things really matters a lot,
Speaker 1: not necessarily the contents of the conflict. Can you kind
Speaker 1: of laborate a little bit more on what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: Gotman found that sixty nine percent of ongoing marital issues
Speaker 1: never get resolved, and I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: immediately feel like that's depressing and that's negative, But I
Speaker 1: don't think that's the best way to look at it.
Speaker 1: The best way to look at it is to realize
Speaker 1: that that sixty nine percent is true of unhappy couples
Speaker 1: and true of happy couples that you're always going to
Speaker 1: have issues and some of them aren't going to get resolved,
Speaker 1: and that does not predict necessarily the success of the union.
Speaker 1: We have to solve this, we have to settle this.
Speaker 1: That's a dangerous perspective, you know. To paraphrase Gotman, he
Speaker 1: put it really well. Is it's not about the resolution
Speaker 1: of conflict. It's about the regulation of conflict. To discuss it,
Speaker 1: to talk with your partner, to understand because it might
Speaker 1: be just a different perspective. Something that is very important
Speaker 1: to them might not be as important to you, and
Speaker 1: vice versa. And if you don't talk, those things can
Speaker 1: be very idiosyncratic and non intuitive. You don't talk, you
Speaker 1: can't find those and there might be a way to
Speaker 1: honor both of your perspectives, you know, or to deal
Speaker 1: with it. But it's it's less about like trying to
Speaker 1: just kill problems dead so they never pop up again,
Speaker 1: and it's more about trying to find a way where
Speaker 1: both of your values can get respected, can get understood,
Speaker 1: you know, playing fair. You know. In terms of that,
Speaker 1: the regulation of conflict, not the resolution of conflict. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a game changer to think, like, it's
Speaker 1: kind of analogous to life in general. The point is
Speaker 1: that point of life to resolve all your conflicts or
Speaker 1: is at the journey? You know? Is it like the
Speaker 1: meaning you find through trying to reconcile the conflict seems
Speaker 1: to be, well, that's more meaningful than just resolving them all. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What about the you know the fact that passion feeds
Speaker 1: very quickly in a marriage, some marriages more quickly than others.
Speaker 1: But what about people who want to keep love alive?
Speaker 1: What does the research show on that? I mean, what's
Speaker 1: really critical there is just that understanding that the crazy
Speaker 1: love typically dies down about you know, eighteen months. It's
Speaker 1: tricky because we associate that with marriage and love and
Speaker 1: this you know overwhelming and usually that dies down, usually
Speaker 1: moves towards a more companionate love. And as Gobman finds,
Speaker 1: you know, it is actually the what predicts a successful
Speaker 1: marriage over the long haul is usually much more about
Speaker 1: the friendship aspects of marriage than the insane, passionate love.
Speaker 1: But we can keep some of that alive. It's just
Speaker 1: that we there's a bit of a bait and switch
Speaker 1: in there in that love is very passive, you know,
Speaker 1: in the sense that those feelings just hit you, those
Speaker 1: feelings rise up. That passionate love, you know, is not
Speaker 1: a choice. It just occurs. But it does die down. However,
Speaker 1: you know, if you think about the principle which I
Speaker 1: know you're familiar with, of emotional contagion, that whichever situation
Speaker 1: we're in, we tend to associate those feelings with the
Speaker 1: person that we're with. We can leverage that to try
Speaker 1: and keep the ball in the air volleyball wise, with
Speaker 1: those positive emotions, where rather than just having another night
Speaker 1: of Netflix and pizza, to go out do fun things,
Speaker 1: put yourself an exciting, fun environment. There was one study
Speaker 1: where they compared it, you know, two cohorts. One went
Speaker 1: on quote unquote pleasant dates and the other went on
Speaker 1: exciting dates and exciting one hands down. You know, adrenaline
Speaker 1: makes the heart grow fonder, you know, it's like to
Speaker 1: keep that stimulation alive, we will come to associate those
Speaker 1: exciting feelings with our partner and we can keep those
Speaker 1: kind of like positive very early love emotions going. But
Speaker 1: again it shifts to it's on us. We have to
Speaker 1: be a little bit more deliberate about it before we
Speaker 1: shift to the friendship segment of our chat. What else
Speaker 1: within the romantic relationships I kind of left out that
Speaker 1: would be really big ones for our listeners to help them.
Speaker 1: I mean. One of the biggest that I found that
Speaker 1: I think can have a huge impact was Gobman's incredible work.
Speaker 1: He found that just by listening to the first three
Speaker 1: minutes of a conversation, he could predict the end of
Speaker 1: the conversation with over ninety percent accuracy. And the practical
Speaker 1: takeaway is, if it starts harsh, it's going to end harsh.
Speaker 1: If you start relationship discussions with both barrels on the attack.
Speaker 1: He just found that the vast majority of the time,
Speaker 1: that's how it's going to end, versus if we pause,
Speaker 1: if we take a deep breath, complaining is good, criticisms bad.
Speaker 1: We don't make it about the other person, we don't
Speaker 1: attack their character, We focus on the issue itself, keep
Speaker 1: it calm. That has an enormous effect on the end result,
Speaker 1: the end resolution, and the emotions that people take away.
Speaker 1: And that's you know, another surprising finding I found is
Speaker 1: that you know, if people think back, usually couples can't
Speaker 1: remember the substance the content of the argument, but they
Speaker 1: remember how they felt, and so raising issues in a
Speaker 1: diplomatic what you know way produces better emotional endings, and
Speaker 1: those better emotional endings are what is remembered over the
Speaker 1: long haul. I mean, it makes sense when you're in it.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit harder because, well, ego gets in
Speaker 1: the way. I mean, isn't ego a big block to
Speaker 1: some of these things? I mean? And I think that's
Speaker 1: why keeping those lanes of communication open is really critical,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's like, if you're bottling it up
Speaker 1: and you have this issue and you hold up yeah,
Speaker 1: then ego and you start to make assumptions you know,
Speaker 1: are out to get me, they're trying to make me miserable,
Speaker 1: versus an ongoing communication. You bring it up relatively quickly,
Speaker 1: then it doesn't fester. To really think about that because
Speaker 1: another thing I found that was really powerful when Gotman
Speaker 1: talks about love maps, you know, that issue getting to
Speaker 1: know your partner better. That gets a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: quick talk, oh, get to know your partner better. But
Speaker 1: I thought he framed it really well in the issue
Speaker 1: of yeah, knowing how your partner likes their coffee or
Speaker 1: knowing what your partner's favorite vacation destination is. That's nice,
Speaker 1: But asking bigger, harder questions like what is your definition
Speaker 1: of love? What is a good husband to you, what
Speaker 1: is a good wife to you? What does marriage mean
Speaker 1: to you? Those are questions that are The answers are
Speaker 1: idiosyncratic and personal. There are no like kind of set
Speaker 1: There's some things we can agree on, but there are
Speaker 1: no set answers. Those are very personal and it kind
Speaker 1: of gets to the answers to the test. I think
Speaker 1: it reveals a lot of Oh, that's why my partner
Speaker 1: or is getting so bin out of shape about this
Speaker 1: little thing, because to them it's not little. And there's
Speaker 1: no book that's going to tell you your partner's idiosyncratic,
Speaker 1: you know, feelings on what love means, what marriage means.
Speaker 1: You have to ask them, and by doing that then
Speaker 1: you can start to say, Okay, maybe handle this in
Speaker 1: this way, or maybe raise this issue in this way.
Speaker 1: And it becomes a lot easier when you realize, oh,
Speaker 1: they have a phobia about this. I don't need to
Speaker 1: screaming yell, I know they have a phobia about this.
Speaker 1: I can just kind of politely remind them, Oh, this
Speaker 1: is really great advice. Like, in the research you looked
Speaker 1: into in this book, how much should you look at
Speaker 1: the role of physical attraction and how that can blind
Speaker 1: us from really good at getting into good relationships? Have
Speaker 1: you looked into physical attraction at all? And it's I
Speaker 1: don't really know what I'm asking. Yeah, no, no, oh no, no, no, man,
Speaker 1: I know. That was the trickiest thing. What was really
Speaker 1: funny for me was in writing the book. Writing the
Speaker 1: love section was daunting because there's so much research. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can get a great amount from Gotman, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of research and so you kind of have
Speaker 1: to put boundaries on it because you can't cover or
Speaker 1: that would just become the book. It would be a
Speaker 1: love book. And then what was funny was I was like, oh, good,
Speaker 1: I got through all this. And then the friendship issue
Speaker 1: is there's not a lot of research on friendship. So
Speaker 1: I ended up with total opposite problem, which is that
Speaker 1: you know, we pay for marriage counselors, marriages an institution,
Speaker 1: you know, friendship. There's no business around friendship. There's no
Speaker 1: institution back in friendships interests. So it was really interesting
Speaker 1: for me. But for love I kind of had to
Speaker 1: put boundaries on it because otherwise it would have become
Speaker 1: the book. And with physical attraction, now you're also getting
Speaker 1: into issues of it's a lot less one size fits all,
Speaker 1: what a women find attractive in men, what a men
Speaker 1: find attractive in women, what a men find attractive and men,
Speaker 1: what a women find attractive in women. It's like, now
Speaker 1: the permutations start to increase exponentially, and trying to handle
Speaker 1: all that, the scope would have increased, you know, beyond
Speaker 1: the bounds of a reasonable book. No, that's totally fair.
Speaker 1: That's totally fair. I just I just feel like so
Speaker 1: many of us jump into relationships because we're physical attracted
Speaker 1: to someone, and then it dissipates after a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: like stuck with the person. No, I mean, that's that's why.
Speaker 1: Basically I framed that section of the book around like
Speaker 1: how do you make love? How do you make a
Speaker 1: marriage last? How do you make love last? So I
Speaker 1: didn't talk as much about the issues of attraction as
Speaker 1: what sustains this in a healthy way. That's great, that's
Speaker 1: really great. Have you read Carlin Flora's book Friend of Fluence?
Speaker 1: Oh and cited it and leaned on it heavily. She
Speaker 1: did a great job of a fantastic job of rounding up,
Speaker 1: you know, the existing research on friendship. It's one of
Speaker 1: the few really good research based books on friendship. I
Speaker 1: interviewed Hero's number that book's probably likes ten years old.
Speaker 1: I interviewed her the way back, I mean, because she
Speaker 1: did a phenomenal gum. I agree, I agree. Let's dive
Speaker 1: into the friendship research a little bit. One of the
Speaker 1: interesting findings is that not being open and vulnerable doesn't
Speaker 1: just kill friendships, but it can also kill you. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit more about the value of
Speaker 1: openness and vulnerability. It's really critical. That's worked by Robert
Speaker 1: Garfield at University of Pennsylvania where I attended, where you
Speaker 1: taught the Yeah, no, I mean, it's very critical in
Speaker 1: terms of actually many aspects. Because the first thing I did,
Speaker 1: playing my usual MythBusters angle was to look at Dale Carnegie,
Speaker 1: you know, and Dale Carnegie's stuff on friends. He wrote
Speaker 1: it before the advent of most social science research. Truth is,
Speaker 1: most of it holds up. Carnegie was very focused more
Speaker 1: on business contacts and more on the initiation of relationships.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to dive deeper and kind of see
Speaker 1: what sustains relationships or what deepens them, or what produces
Speaker 1: close friends best friends. And what the research pointed to
Speaker 1: was two things was time and vulnerability, and the key
Speaker 1: thing being the issue of costly signals. It's easy to
Speaker 1: bob your head, pay compliments, find similarity, and that's Those
Speaker 1: are useful things for people. Those are useful things for
Speaker 1: conn artists. That produces you know, much more shallow connections
Speaker 1: deep in it. Time is always limited, it's always scarce.
Speaker 1: Spending a lot of time with somebody over a long
Speaker 1: period of time shows they matter. It's a really critical thing.
Speaker 1: It's also the thing that friends fight over the most.
Speaker 1: The other thing is vulnerability. Very simply, if I tell
Speaker 1: you things that could be used against me, if I
Speaker 1: tell you things that make me look bad, that is
Speaker 1: a very powerful demonstration of trust. It's not a casual
Speaker 1: oh I trust you, here's a metaphorical weapon that you
Speaker 1: could use against me. I trust you not to That
Speaker 1: sends a powerful signal of trust. And often if the
Speaker 1: other person feels the same way about you, they reciprocate.
Speaker 1: And this is worked by Daniel Hushka where it's like
Speaker 1: that basically putting yourself out there, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: being vulnerable. They reciprocate and you escalate that vulnerability. That's
Speaker 1: what deepens friendships. I mean, you look at je Jeff
Speaker 1: Hall's work. You see on average and typical relationships takes
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of time to create, you know, a
Speaker 1: deep friendship, you know, like for dozens of hours for
Speaker 1: a close friend and over one hundred hours for the
Speaker 1: highest level of friends. But you know, Arthur Aaron managed
Speaker 1: to make people feel like lifelong friends in forty five
Speaker 1: minutes by having people ask deeper questions, having people go
Speaker 1: back and forth. That vulnerability is a good litmus test
Speaker 1: for who who you care about, who cares about you.
Speaker 1: It is powerful in terms of deepening it. But to
Speaker 1: your initial point, if we don't have it, that's where
Speaker 1: you get into the area of loneliness again, where our
Speaker 1: friends can't know us, can't help us, can't feel close
Speaker 1: to us if we don't share those things. And in
Speaker 1: the book, I positive the scary rule, that's scary, say it.
Speaker 1: You can be incremental about it, but we need to
Speaker 1: share those difficult things. It's good for us, it's good
Speaker 1: for our friends, and it's good for the friendship overall,
Speaker 1: trust is so important for a friendship, any relationship really,
Speaker 1: and by being vulnerable with someone, you're signaling that you
Speaker 1: trust them not to tell your secrets. In terms of
Speaker 1: all the factors that are health related that can kill you,
Speaker 1: what are the biggest predictors and which are the ones
Speaker 1: that maybe we think our big predictors are not as
Speaker 1: big predictors. You could talk a little about Robin Dunbar's
Speaker 1: work a little bit. Oh yeah, Like, I mean that
Speaker 1: was botily insightful and impactful, but he was also pretty
Speaker 1: funny about it. Robin Dunbar teaches it Oxford to you know,
Speaker 1: famous for the Dunbar number. Can you explain what the
Speaker 1: Dunbar number is? Actually? Yeah, Basically, he found that there
Speaker 1: are consistencies in terms of our social circles and how
Speaker 1: many people we can feel close to. Most people are
Speaker 1: familiar with Dunbar number. In terms of this like hard
Speaker 1: stop on how big you know groups can be like
Speaker 1: in the workplace, military units, et cetera. And you see
Speaker 1: a shocking consistency over how well those match over time.
Speaker 1: If you go deeper into his research, you know he
Speaker 1: talks about kind of the hierarchy where it's like how
Speaker 1: many close friends can we have, how many semi close friends,
Speaker 1: how many acquaintances can we have? That where it almost
Speaker 1: seems like we are programmed at a certain level to
Speaker 1: have certain only be this many close to this many
Speaker 1: people less close to this many people that they're sort
Speaker 1: of slots. And that also aligns with the work that
Speaker 1: shows after seven years fifty percent of close friends aren't
Speaker 1: close friends anymore. That basically, as as new people you know,
Speaker 1: move in, you only have so many slots. As new
Speaker 1: people move in, other people have to move out, and
Speaker 1: so Dunbar. It's it's really critical to see that, to
Speaker 1: see that we do seem almost wired for a certain
Speaker 1: number of people to be close to us at a
Speaker 1: certain level. But what he found health wise was mind
Speaker 1: blowing because he looked at all of the factors in
Speaker 1: terms of health and said, specifically, one year after a
Speaker 1: heart attack, what determines whether you'll be alive or not?
Speaker 1: And he found that really it came down to two things,
Speaker 1: and that was whether you smoke and how many friends
Speaker 1: you have. Now. Granted, nutrition, exercise, all those things do matter,
Speaker 1: but the gap between smoking, you know, close friends and
Speaker 1: everything else, he jokingly said, Oh, you could slav about
Speaker 1: you don't have to get off the couch, but like,
Speaker 1: don't smoke and have a number of close friends. Which
Speaker 1: is also interesting because the bulk of the research shows
Speaker 1: that quality of friendships matters more than quantity. But Dunbar
Speaker 1: also found that, you know, to a degree, quantity matters
Speaker 1: as well. Cool really really important work twenty ten study
Speaker 1: of over fourteen thousand college students found that a decline
Speaker 1: empathy over the past few decades, while a separate study
Speaker 1: found scores in the narsis and personality in DEX increased
Speaker 1: by almost fifty percent between nineteen ninety and two thousand
Speaker 1: and six among a similar cohort. What what what is
Speaker 1: the takeaway? What do you what do you get from that?
Speaker 1: The issue becoming part of that is due to our
Speaker 1: increase in parasocial relationships. I mean, you start with you know,
Speaker 1: you start with the work of Robert Putnam. You know,
Speaker 1: end of the twentieth century, we saw the decline of
Speaker 1: community in the in almost every sphere, we saw a
Speaker 1: decline of community interactions. If we think about like the
Speaker 1: Elk lodge or bowling leagues. That almost seems archaic to us,
Speaker 1: but the community kind of decline, and he attributed the
Speaker 1: bulk of those shifts to television, you know, television providing
Speaker 1: these pseudo parasocial relationships. And now in the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: you know, we have social media, we have online you
Speaker 1: know support, which is this weird thing where on one hand,
Speaker 1: it delivers some of the positive and if it's some
Speaker 1: of the connections, but it doesn't deliver some of the others.
Speaker 1: And we have this human inate ability to be efficient
Speaker 1: would be the would be the polite spin on it.
Speaker 1: But we can also be lazy. And it's easier to
Speaker 1: turn You can turn on the TV, turn off the TV.
Speaker 1: You can turn on Instagram, turn off Instagram whenever you want.
Speaker 1: Instagram doesn't ask you to our money, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a lot easier. You can have, you know,
Speaker 1: relationships at your convenience, and that has kind of encroached
Speaker 1: on those deeper connections, face to face connections, and we
Speaker 1: all kind of get a pass during the pandemic, but
Speaker 1: these trends are pretty clear that hey, if I can
Speaker 1: get some of the friendship benefits but not the costs
Speaker 1: and difficulties, are the lazy end of our of our
Speaker 1: brains is kind of saying, oh, hey, maybe that sounds
Speaker 1: like a better deal. And we're seeing this and it's
Speaker 1: it's bad. We're getting a level of self absorption. You
Speaker 1: you you see that there's an increasing focus on popularity,
Speaker 1: on staf so for likability, which aren't well correlated. Most
Speaker 1: people who are very popular are not very likable, and
Speaker 1: it's really challenging for us. And you see this level
Speaker 1: of self absorption. But you know, as a cherry turkle
Speaker 1: found when these kids, some of the same kids you
Speaker 1: show up when they go to camp and their phones
Speaker 1: are taken away, empathy levels return to normal. So you
Speaker 1: know it is that issue of social media is not
Speaker 1: an unadulterated evil. It's just that it can encroach on
Speaker 1: the limited amount of social time we have every day.
Speaker 1: Do you really think like prior generations really weren't narcissistic
Speaker 1: when you compare different generations to each other, Like I
Speaker 1: feel like every older generation is like, oh, the kids
Speaker 1: these days are so narcissistic, Like in the sixties, I
Speaker 1: bet parents were saying that about the children. I feel
Speaker 1: like we always in every generation, we have something in
Speaker 1: our culture that is that makes the young kids there's
Speaker 1: something programmed about young kids being narcissistic in general. I
Speaker 1: think that's totally true. I think it's I think it's both.
Speaker 1: I mean, every older generation is critical of the younger
Speaker 1: generation because they're not exactly like them, and because different
Speaker 1: phases of life. Babies are very selfish, but they don't
Speaker 1: have a choice not to be, you know, it's an
Speaker 1: issue of survival. They need us, and young people are
Speaker 1: trying to find their way in the world. They still
Speaker 1: have to define their personality itself, to define their role
Speaker 1: in place in the world, so that means they're going
Speaker 1: to be a little bit more self focused. However, we've
Speaker 1: never had this little community because before community mean survival,
Speaker 1: you couldn't exist on your own for the vast majority
Speaker 1: of human existence, and you didn't have the ability to
Speaker 1: opt out and live, you know. Now we have an
Speaker 1: extraordinary ability to opt out or at least to live
Speaker 1: at arm's length, you know. And I think you get
Speaker 1: a vicious circle there where we are able to keep
Speaker 1: that distance, and that affects us emotionally, and we don't
Speaker 1: think as much about others' needs because we're not in
Speaker 1: that loop of being dependent upon them and then being
Speaker 1: dependent upon us. You can live a pretty independent life,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't necessarily have positive effects on our connections
Speaker 1: to others or how we feel in ourselves. I mean
Speaker 1: when you look at them. I talk about some of
Speaker 1: the MRI data that when people feel lonely, when they
Speaker 1: feel disconnected, their brains scan for threats twice as fast.
Speaker 1: You know, that's not a choice. That's just at a
Speaker 1: fundamental level, when you feel disconnected from others, your brain realizes, hey,
Speaker 1: I'd better be on the lookout for threats because help
Speaker 1: isn't coming if there's a problem. And again that's not
Speaker 1: a choice, that's something that just happened. Again, that's It
Speaker 1: might be smart from a survival perspective in our ancestral environment,
Speaker 1: but it certainly isn't conducive to happiness, especially in the
Speaker 1: modern era. No here here, okay, So why is reading
Speaker 1: people's body language overrated? There is no Rosetta stone for
Speaker 1: body language. We can never know why someone is doing
Speaker 1: is doing something if they're shivering, maybe they're nervous, maybe
Speaker 1: they're cold. You know, we don't necessarily know. And the
Speaker 1: other issue is that a lot of it's idiosyncratic. You
Speaker 1: know somebody, you know, some people, scratching their face might
Speaker 1: mean they're nervous and lying, and other people it might
Speaker 1: be either just itchy. So we don't know what particular
Speaker 1: signals for any individual mean a specific thing. By getting
Speaker 1: to know them better, you might get better. But the
Speaker 1: truth is, like Nicholas Epley's or at the University of Chicago,
Speaker 1: we're not good at reading the thoughts and feelings of others.
Speaker 1: You know, with strangers we're about twenty percent accurate. With
Speaker 1: friends or thirty percent accurate, and spouses can you get
Speaker 1: thirty five percent. So whatever you think your spouse is thinking,
Speaker 1: two thirds of the time, you're wrong. So we with
Speaker 1: body language, we're trying to make these associations and you know, again,
Speaker 1: unconsciously we can read people, size people up pretty well,
Speaker 1: but trying to look at individual specific actions and attribute
Speaker 1: overall global motives and perspectives, that's really not our speciality.
Speaker 1: So it's it's better to hear someone than see them,
Speaker 1: is their research on that. Yeah, this was this was dramatic,
Speaker 1: you know, was the issue. They did studies where people
Speaker 1: if you could see someone but couldn't hear them, and
Speaker 1: pathic accuracy dropped off enormously. But when you could listen
Speaker 1: to someone but not see them. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: we still it only dropped off mildly. So I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is good news for podcasts, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's like we're hearing somebody actually delivers a lot more
Speaker 1: information than seeing someone again because we're really not that
Speaker 1: good at reading those intricacies of body language in the moment.
Speaker 1: That just blows my mind that that discrepancy. So the
Speaker 1: drop off is fifty four percent when you can see
Speaker 1: something to not hear them. It was something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what the implications for like interviews, for orchestra auditions, there
Speaker 1: are other deep implications here for lots of things in
Speaker 1: life potentially. I mean, well, job interviews as we usually
Speaker 1: perform them are terribly fraught anyway. I mean, the primary issue.
Speaker 1: One of the best ways the research is to improve
Speaker 1: job interviews is to make them structured and formalized, because
Speaker 1: people very dramatically and what questions they ask to one
Speaker 1: candidate versus another candidate, So then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: it moves completely out of the bounds of like getting
Speaker 1: legit information and more of that issue of do you
Speaker 1: feel rapport with this person? And rapport is not necessarily
Speaker 1: predictive of job performance. So it's really critical in job
Speaker 1: interviews that we think about, you know, that issue of structure,
Speaker 1: but it's also critical to think about the job at hand.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're evaluating someone who's going to be
Speaker 1: coding and writing software, their ability to you know, present
Speaker 1: themselves in an interview may have very low correlation with
Speaker 1: like how well they perform their job. Meanwhile, sales professional,
Speaker 1: their ability to interact with others might be critical to
Speaker 1: the profession. So there's this varying scale, but we kind
Speaker 1: of use a very similar system for everybody. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if this one size fits all approach is
Speaker 1: necessarily the best way to determine who's going to be
Speaker 1: awesome at a job. I agree. So what can you
Speaker 1: do if you want to catch a liar? I mean,
Speaker 1: this was something that I found fascinating because, again, MythBusters
Speaker 1: so much of what we believe is wrong. We usually
Speaker 1: look for signs of anxiety, and that's not the case.
Speaker 1: We usually look for body language, body language out of reach.
Speaker 1: It's never been correlated, it's never been seen to show
Speaker 1: an association. What's really critical when it comes to lies
Speaker 1: is that whyes, actually take a surprising amount of thought.
Speaker 1: You have to think about the truth. You have to
Speaker 1: think about the lie you're telling. You have to monitor
Speaker 1: the other person to see if they're catching on. They
Speaker 1: ask questions, you have to update your fictional story in
Speaker 1: real time. That requires a fair amount of brain power.
Speaker 1: So the best way to fundamentally, the best way to
Speaker 1: detect lives is to increase that cognitive load. Is to
Speaker 1: make it even harder. They make them have to think
Speaker 1: more until to use a computer metaphor, the processor starts
Speaker 1: to slow down because it can't handle all of this.
Speaker 1: And specifically, what's very valuable is to ask unanticipated questions.
Speaker 1: Is the issue of no liar can prepare for every
Speaker 1: question you might ask them, So to ask them something
Speaker 1: which they're not expecting. Again, that's something that creates this
Speaker 1: big gap. It's very easy for a truth teller to answer,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult for a liar to answer. So the
Speaker 1: example I use is if you're a bartender and someone
Speaker 1: comes into the bar who's obviously underage. If you ask
Speaker 1: them how old are you, they're going to say twenty one.
Speaker 1: They know the right answer. If you ask them what
Speaker 1: year were you born? They probably didn't prepare for that.
Speaker 1: Now they're going to have to do math, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, it's going to slow down. A truth
Speaker 1: teller knows what year they were born, you know, a
Speaker 1: liar might have to wait. I don't. And then now
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, again it's not perfect, but it's
Speaker 1: a bigger improvement or when you start to oh, it's
Speaker 1: very powerful. And now it was really funny. I was.
Speaker 1: I was in Prague three weeks ago and one of
Speaker 1: the research studies that I found going unanticipated questions was
Speaker 1: a study of airport screeners. And while I was in
Speaker 1: the airport in Prague, an airline attendant came up to
Speaker 1: me and said, Hey, give a second, can I ask
Speaker 1: you a couple of questions. The questions were not direct
Speaker 1: where are you going to? It was kind of like,
Speaker 1: so what did you do in your stay? So where
Speaker 1: did you? What did you? What did you do? Like yesterday?
Speaker 1: They were asking me these very kind of off and
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh my god, like my research, the recent
Speaker 1: the research I was looking at for the book, like
Speaker 1: is actually being used on me. And it was so
Speaker 1: funny to see, like I'm being subjected to this, and
Speaker 1: luckily I was telling the truth, so I had quick answers,
Speaker 1: but I could imagine that the number of the questions
Speaker 1: she asked me were not things that if I was lying,
Speaker 1: that I would have been able to produce in advance,
Speaker 1: if I was there doing a drug deal or something else,
Speaker 1: Versus I was ea able to say, I'm here for
Speaker 1: a wedding, it's my friend Nick with the event was
Speaker 1: at this location, it was at this time. It was
Speaker 1: very easy, but I can imagine for somebody's line it
Speaker 1: would have been much more difficult. Yeah, for sure. Well,
Speaker 1: Eric Parker, I really appreciate you coming on my podcast today,
Speaker 1: and we covered quite a wide range of ways in
Speaker 1: which you can play well with others, within the romantic
Speaker 1: demean within the friendship to mean, and within even just
Speaker 1: being able to spot the bullshit of others. So I
Speaker 1: just I think it's a very comprehensive book, actually quite
Speaker 1: more comprehensive than a lot of books on the topic
Speaker 1: of connection. I want to leave with one last question, then,
Speaker 1: in all these different demeans you cover in your book,
Speaker 1: I mean, is there a thread that you see that
Speaker 1: kind of runs through all of them. Is there some
Speaker 1: sort of overarching, transcendent takeaway about human connection that you
Speaker 1: can leave us with today. I did find a through line,
Speaker 1: and that is the issue of stories. You know, when
Speaker 1: we are reading people, or trying to read people, our
Speaker 1: brains are immediately within middleseconds starting to construct a story
Speaker 1: about this person, and then confirmation bias kicks in and
Speaker 1: we have to be very careful to challenge those stories
Speaker 1: because we tell these stories about other people with very
Speaker 1: little information, and that can lead to biasing and stereotypes
Speaker 1: and on a higher level, but also on an individual level.
Speaker 1: And if we don't deal with people again, we get
Speaker 1: no chance to challenge that confirmation bias. And then, you know,
Speaker 1: in friendship, what I was amazed to find is that
Speaker 1: our style said friends are another self, and that actually
Speaker 1: proves to be true. You know, you have this ven
Speaker 1: diagram overlap this issue where when you interview people about
Speaker 1: their friends and you ask them, hey, is this quality
Speaker 1: true of you or true of your best friend? It
Speaker 1: will take them longer to answer because as we grow
Speaker 1: closer to people, as we go closer to friends, our
Speaker 1: ident in our minds are our identity and their identity overlaps.
Speaker 1: We tell ourselves the story that they are part of
Speaker 1: us and in love. You know, like I said, Gottman's
Speaker 1: ability with ninety plus percent accuracy to predict whether a
Speaker 1: couple of be divorced in five years. He gets there
Speaker 1: by simply asking them, tell me your story is the
Speaker 1: critical thing. And for communities, you know, at large, is
Speaker 1: no man an island those issues. Communities are built around
Speaker 1: a story, a story of connection. Many of the stories
Speaker 1: that human beings have told themselves throughout history about how
Speaker 1: we're connected have not been factually true. But what they
Speaker 1: did do was they bound us together. They told us
Speaker 1: the story of connection and unity, and we need those
Speaker 1: stories so throughout every aspect. The theme I found running
Speaker 1: through every aspect of the different types of relationships is
Speaker 1: it all comes down to the stories we tell ourselves.
Speaker 1: That's brilliant. Maybe that's where mindfulness can come in as well,
Speaker 1: and helping us to be more mindful and the presence
Speaker 1: of others where we don't allow these automatic thoughts to
Speaker 1: and trude and what the beauty of the beauty of
Speaker 1: whatever relationship could be. Our Eric's expectations get in the
Speaker 1: way sometimes. Absolutely, Eric, thank you so much. It was great,
Speaker 1: so great talking to you. And let's not let's not
Speaker 1: go another five years. How's that sound that sounds that
Speaker 1: sounds fantastic, But thank you very much, Scott. It was.
Speaker 1: It was really great to be here man. Thank you
Speaker 1: thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
Speaker 1: at thus psychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page,
Speaker 1: The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of
Speaker 1: some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll
Speaker 1: want to check that out. Thanks for being such a
Speaker 1: great supporter of the show, and tune in next time
Speaker 1: for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.