The Evolving Leader

The Laws of Connection with David Robson

• David Robson • Season 7 • Episode 2

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In this episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender welcome back former guest science writer David Robson. David is an award-winning science writer specialising in the extremes of the human brain, body and behaviour. He has worked as editor of New Scientist and BBC Future, and his writing has been published in The Guardian, the Observer, the Washington Post and Atlantic and in 2022 was a finalist for the Best British Science Journalist of the year award. He has written three books including The Intelligence Trap (2019), The Expectation Effect (2022) for which he won a British Psychological Society Book Award and his latest book The Laws of Connection (2024).

During this conversation David shares the importance of social connection for physical health and well-being. He explores the concept of the liking gap, where people underestimate how much others like them, and the physiological effects of loneliness. This highlights the need for prioritizing social connection and provides practical strategies for building and deepening relationships. 


Referenced during this episode:
The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life
David Robson’s website


Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Jean Gomes:

Our profound need for social connection is more important than we ever thought in the West, in particular, our societies have become more about the individual and our identity shaped by beliefs that have made us more isolated and lonely, science is now decoding the impact on our well being, showing that social connection is as essential for our health and happiness as a balanced diet and regular exercise. It reduces our risk of stroke, heart disease and Alzheimer's, it enhances our creativity and adds years to our lifespan, yet many of us struggle to form strong and meaningful bonds, and the problem lies not with our personalities, but with a series of cognitive biases that stop us from fulfilling our social potential. In this show, we talk to the award winning science writer David Robson, who describes the psychological barriers that lead us to keep others at a distance, and offers evidence based strategies to overcome them. From his wonderful new book, The laws of connection, drawing on philosophy neuroscience and cutting edge psychology, David introduces us to new concepts such as the liking gap, which provide fast, proven ways of meeting our social needs. Tune in for an important conversation on the evolving leader you

Scott Allender:

you. Hi friends. Welcome to the evolving leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender and I'm Jean Gomes. So good to see you again. Mr. Gomes, how are you feeling today?

Jean Gomes:

Oh, I'm feeling very envious of your vacation around the Greek islands and in what sounds like a mega yacht or something like that, but

Scott Allender:

that's why I did it.

Jean Gomes:

Other than that, I'm feeling great. I had a lovely weekend, lots of renewal. Our team did some forest bathing on Friday to improve our well being and connection, which is amazing, and still feeling the benefit that actually what is forest bathing? Forest bathing is borrowed from Japan, who in the 1980s had a recognition from the government that stress levels, particularly around technology, were just rapidly increasing. And so two psychologists, academics, came up with this idea that because Japan, I think three quarters of Japan, is covered in forests, actually reconnecting would have lots of health benefits, reducing people's stress levels and so on. And so they encourage people to do this, and it had a massive impact, positive impact on it. So yeah, I mean, we could get into the whole, you know, science justification about what it does to your brain and so on, but we immediately felt the benefits as team doing that. That sounds amazing. How are you feeling? Scott,

Scott Allender:

well, like you said, I just returned from a wonderful holiday yesterday, in fact, and I feel amazing. I had never been to Greece before, and I've never seen water that blue or that clear, and we got to have great family time and great time with friends, and I feel lighter as a result. My bank account feels lighter as well. It was definitely well worth it. And I'm delighted to be back with you, and particularly delighted to have a former guest back to talk with us about his new book. David Robson is back today to speak with us, and he is one of the world's best science writers driven by a desire to better understand the human brain, body and behavior. He's a Cambridge University mathematic graduate who's worked as a features editor at the New Scientist and the BBC future. And his award winning writing appears in a wide range of publications, and he's written two of our favorite books, Jean in recent years, the intelligence trap and the expectation effect, and his new book, The laws of connection, features 13 social strategies that will transform your life. David, welcome back to the evolving leader. It's

David Robson:

a real pleasure to be here again. Thanks for having me,

Jean Gomes:

David, thank you so much for finding time. I have to say, and I said this to you just a moment ago, before we started, I loved your book. You're a brilliant writer, but this one just was just such a pleasure. I read it outside as well, in the garden over the course of a weekend, and I enjoyed every moment of it. You managed to bring together, weave together the stories and the science and the practicalities of it in such a effortless way. So I'm really looking forward to. To sharing a little bit of what you've gained from that experience with our listeners today. So welcome to the evolving leader. How are you feeling today?

David Robson:

Really good. Thank you. Yeah. I am. I got back from a festival yesterday where I was talking about the book, and it's just so nice after writing, which is quite a solitary activity, to finally be sharing its message and to be hearing people's feedback. So yeah, I'm feeling quite positive.

Scott Allender:

Well, congratulations on it, and we're not going to go through all 13 laws of connection, but I'm sure we'll cover enough ground to convince our listeners to get a copy today. So can we maybe start with the motivation for writing this book? Maybe, what's your what's your elevator pitch, and you know, who's it aimed at, and what will they get from from reading it?

David Robson:

So, I mean, I guess with the book, I wanted to do two things. The first thing is to help to convince people that social connection is something that they should really prioritize within their lives, much more than they already do, and to recognize that it's as essential for their physical health and well being as all kinds of lifestyle factors, including things like exercise, diet, sleep. You know, all of these things are important, but social connection is equally important for our physical health. And then I wanted to show people how to go about making the most of this. And that's what I think has been really missing from the literature so far, is advice that goes beyond kind of platitudes and anecdote. But what I discovered, you know, in the researching of this book, was just that there's a huge torrent, really, of psychological research that's showing the kind of barriers that we have within our minds that cause us, often, to self sabotage our relationships, to not make the best connections that we can. So I want people to be able to go away from reading this book feeling empowered to build a bigger social network, if that's what they want, but also to develop more profound connections with the people that matter to them the most. So those existing connections too. You

Jean Gomes:

start with a fascinating recent insight from psychology research called the liking gap. Can you talk to us about what it is and how we can how it can help us? Yeah.

David Robson:

I mean, so if we're talking about personal inspiration, then the liking gap was really what first caught my attention and made me want to delve into this topic more deeply. And so it's something that I'd experienced, and then I discovered that it's very common, and it's simply the fact that we often underestimate how people like us. It's a kind of universal tendency that we have. So within the experiments and in real life, you can have just two people, two strangers, who meet and they hit it off. They have great rapport. You know, they find they have things in common, that they find each other funny, that they respect each other, and then afterwards you can question them, how much did you like this other person? How much did you want to spend more time with them? How much would you like to be their friends? And what you find is that, you know, on average, most people are very, very positive about these encounters. People are open to the idea of friendship, but they they tend to go away feeling unsure about how the other person felt. So they consistently, uh, considered that they liked the other person and wanted to have a friendship with the other person. More than the other person liked them and more than the other person wanted to have a friendship with them. That's why it's called the liking gap, because there's a gap between what we perceive the other person to feel and what they actually feel. So each person there is being overly pessimistic, overly self critical, and it goes, you know, because it's a kind of symmetrical effect. It means that the chances are the other person is feeling exactly the same way as you when you have these doubts, and I think it's it's really important when we think about social connection, just to recognize that actually this is just preventing us all from feeling as connected as we could do, because we just don't have faith that the other person feels about us in a way that would provide that support that we want. But also, I think it changes our behavior. It discourages us from them building on that rapport. We're more likely to let that seed of a friendship, you know, wither and die, fall to the wayside, whereas, actually, with a bit more effort in the future, in trying to kind of build on that, to meet them more often, we could find that a true, really deep friendship evolves, but we just don't give it the chance to do so, because we have those doubts that discourage us. That's

Scott Allender:

interesting. What accounts for that? Did you find is that a general like negativity bias, we have insecurity? What's behind that?

David Robson:

Well, I mean, it's quite surprising when you look at the um. Science of cognitive bias in that lots of our biases are self serving. So we tend to think we're smarter than the average person, a better driver than the average person. You know that we're better at math, that we have a larger vocabulary, all of these things, so overconfidence seemed in the past to have been a major kind of driver of human error, and yet, here was a bias that is the opposite. People are underconfident about their social skills, and it seems that we we just tend to we might think that we're quite good deep down, but we do have this negativity bias in and what are called meta perceptions and in thinking about the ways that other people think of us. So it's not just the liking gap that this is the case. We also think that other people underestimate how funny we are, or how funny we could be, how intelligent we are, how extroverted we are, all of these things we we think that other people maybe just don't quite get you know who we are and how great we are. So it seems to come from that, I think that we have this kind of where we're wary of other people, because we don't really know what's going on in their minds. We we don't know if they're just being polite to us, but actually are thinking something quite negative, and we often assume the worst. That's

Scott Allender:

so interesting. You touched on this in your opening answer about the sort of physiological component, because in recent years, we've become more aware of the costs of loneliness. I think certainly since covid When people accelerated the experience of loneliness for many people, and you describe relationships as one of life's most fundamental requirements. So can you give our listeners a sense of this research and the implications, particularly around the physiological component? I

David Robson:

mean, it should be much more widely known, because the research dates back to the 1960s when there was this big study. It's called the Alameda study because it was conducted around the bay area of San Francisco in Alameda County, and the researchers recruited 1000s of participants, questioned them about all elements of their lives, you know, telephone interviews and detailed written questionnaires, and then followed their health and well being over the next decade and initially, you know, they discovered all of these things that we now recognize as being important for our health and well being. So, you know, eating a varied diet, exercising, sleeping, well, not smoking, not drinking. You know, all of that was incorporated into the public health discourse. But then in the 1970s it became clear that they'd missed off one of these major lifestyle factors, and that was social connections. That they found in that study, that people who had a strong sense of support from the people around them and who had many ties, tended to be about half as likely to die from all causes over that study period compared to the people who felt lonely and isolated and didn't have that social support. Now we can't base health advice on just one study, but I mean, looking into this, I was just blown away by just how many times this result has been replicated, you know, hundreds of times. And even more convincingly, you know, it stands up even when you change the specific measures of loneliness. So it's not like there's some confounding factor there. It's replicated in lots of different populations. You know, it wasn't something unique about these people who are living in Alameda. And then, you know, the researchers have really been able to pin down the mechanisms of this too. So they they've looked at what happens when people start to feel lonely, when they feel isolated, and they've identified real physiological changes that do occur, and they make most sense when we look back to our evolutionary history, and if you look at what kind of happened as we scientists say we were self domesticated. And by that, they just mean that we, as we grow up in into bigger and bigger societies, we came to depend on others for our kind of security and safety and resources like food. So we we became kind of less wild, in some ways, more dependent on others. And what that meant was that when we were excluded from the group, when we were isolated, then that put us in real dangers that maybe other primates wouldn't have had. You know, dangers of being attacked by a predator, where we would be helpless alone, or dangers from other hostile groups. And the primary physical danger here is, you know, an injury that would result in a bacterial infection that could. Us so the body, when we start to sense that we might be facing that risk in the future, the body starts to produce higher levels of inflammation throughout the body, because inflammation is the immune system's first, first line of defense against bacteria in wounds. It prevents the bacteria from really being able to take hold and to to cause an infection. It's a great short term response. But the the problem is that inflammation is also a major risk factor for long term chronic illnesses, things like diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, because it's it causes wear and tear on our tissues. It's bad for pathogens, but it's also kind of damaging our own cells in the process. And if you have that over weeks, months and years, the risks kind of build and build and build. So what we see in all of these studies is loneliness over years or decades comes with a much heightened risk of all of those chronic illnesses, and eventually one of them is going to kill you, which is why the overall mortality rate of being lonely is much higher compared to someone who's who feels socially connected and supported by the people around them.

Jean Gomes:

That's truly fascinating. I think there's a nice connection with the expectation effect work that you did in terms of belief effects and so on, how that that operates, from, you know, how your mindset operates, to the physiological reactions in your body. Can we? Can we turn to how we connect with each other and how we can use the idea of shared reality and inter brain coupling? I love that to help us think about relationships. As an aside, Scott and I use the generalized shared reality scale that you featured in the in the book, and it opened up a very interesting conversation about things that we've come to take for granted in terms of how we communicate. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

David Robson:

Yeah, sure. So I think when we we kind of look for who we're or when we kind of consider who we likely to be friends with, we tend to assume that it would be people who share the same background as ours, or who might have the same profession or similar kind of education. And, you know, you see this on dating apps, right? Like people have, like, very strict criteria for who they're going to consider as a possible date. And it's often all about these kind of surface level differences in background. But what shared reality is trying to look deeper than just you know where you live. It's trying to look more at the visceral responses that we have to different events in our lives. And when you have a shared reality of someone, those visceral responses tend to be mirrored. They tend to occur in synchrony, so you might laugh at the same joke or feel the same. Feel your eyes filling with tears at the same part of a particular song, and the more of those experiences that you have that showed this emotional and physiological synchrony, the closer you feel to that other person. Now that's been shown in these brain scans, like you mentioned, there's this process called into brain coupling. And so you can take, like a big cohort of students, show them a series of YouTube videos of like, a comedy skit, a music video, a documentary, and track their how their brains respond to those different clips, and what you find is that you can predict who's going to be a closer friend to who, based on the similarity in their neural responses while watching those clips. So for people where the same parts of the brain light up at the same time within the clip, they tend to go on to have deeper friendships, and that's just it's kind of showing the neural basis for this shared reality. Now, in real life, we can't have like brain scans to kind of test like who, whose brains are coupled with our own, but we we get a really strong sense of this just from like small triggers and cues. So if you find that someone is finishing your sentences for you, or that you're both saying the same things at the same time, that is a sign that our brains are on the same wavelength. And very quickly, we tend to feel much closer to those people, even within. I mean, it can even happen within, say, a 10 minute chat on a direct messenger app on a phone. It doesn't even have to be face to face. You can already get this sense just from how you're interacting, how that conversation goes.

Jean Gomes:

It's fascinating. You know, leaders listening to this. What do you think the implications are in terms of trying to. Create more cohesion within organizations or within teams.

David Robson:

I mean, I think, like one of the things that really jumped out at me with this was just that we leaders have to make sure that their colleagues have opportunities for that to occur. And you know, it means sometimes that I think we shouldn't be watching people's kind of time schedules so closely, because those little chats at the water cooler, you know, aware that kind of shared reality might become apparent, and then that's going to that's going to make people work more efficiently together, like there's, you know, good signs that when people have this shared reality, they're more more efficient at cooperation, because they don't have to kind of translate everything, or speak like laboriously explaining their thinking behind you know what they're doing, if the other person's on the same wavelength, if you can skip a lot of that and kind of get on with the job at hand without, without talking at cross purposes. But that's not going to occur if you never let your colleagues, actually, you know, have a little bit of time in each day to to kind of connect with each other in that way. And, you know, like one time, one of my friends was applying for a job at a creative agency, and they basically told him at the interview like, this is not the kind of place where you're going to have water cooler chats. And it just seems the most bizarre corporate culture, especially for a creative industry, because we also know that social connection is hugely important for creativity. Like we can spark ideas off of each other, we have this kind of creative pollination, and then to be preventing your colleagues from doing that. It seems like the the the opposite of what any manager should be encouraging.

Jean Gomes:

That's a bit bizarre.

Scott Allender:

Seems that the the substitution could be that managers think, Oh, well, if I get my team together once a year, and we'll do relationship team building once, you know, in an off site, but the rest of the year, you know, we sort of shut down any of these water cooler chats because it feels like a time waste. And what I hear you say is the opposite is probably true. The sort of once a year, things might not have as much impact as the day to day opportunity for that inter brain coupling.

David Robson:

Yeah, that's exactly how I see it. And you know, when you ask these questionnaires about shared reality, you know it's like, just how often do you experience this sense of clicking with the other person? Do you have that sense that you're thinking the same thing, feeling the same thing, having the same visceral reaction to the same event. Well, if you only have, like, one day a year when you're allowing that to happen, it's quickly forgotten. It does have to, we have to maintain that day after day after day. And I think, you know, with remote teams like you can do that to a certain extent through video calls, phone calls, even emails, you know, like I said, like you can do it in DMS as well, but if you're trying to cut down on all of that kind of frivolous conversation, you know, it's a bad idea for connection.

Scott Allender:

So interesting. I loved your chapter on egocentric thinking as well, something that every leader needs to be alerted to, Can you unpack for our listeners what that is, and maybe share a couple of studies you came across in developing that thought?

David Robson:

Yeah, so, I mean, it's one of my favorite chapters, because I think even from a scientific perspective, this recent research has really changed what people thought they knew about our capabilities of like mind reading and so essentially, with historic research, there had been this assumption that neurotypical people, so those who don't have disorders like autism, are pretty good at having a theory of mind, and what we mean by that is just the capacity to put yourself in someone else's shoes and consider their perspectives, and, you know, recognize that they might have different knowledge to your own, or different beliefs, different feelings from your own, and then trying to account for that in communication. What this new research shows is that just because people have the ability doesn't mean that we actually use it very often. So even totally neurotypical people make Theory of Mind errors really frequently. So there's lots of studies showing that sometimes it can be quite consistent mistakes that we make. It can be as simple as you know, pointing in a room to to an object and assuming that the other person can see it, or pointing out the window, and assuming the other person can see what's out there, even if they're at a totally different perspective within the scene. And so that view is completely obscured to them, but, um, but I think you know much more. This is evident in our. Conversation, we have this bias called the illusion of transparency, where we assume that our emotions are much more visible than they really are, and that's because our emotions are very salient to us, but we forget that the other person you know, they're not feeling that knot in their stomach or they're not sensing that tensor tension in your muscles that is so, so apparent to you, all they're getting is like these very, very small signals in your body language or your facial expressions. And then there's something called the illusion of communication, which is how this affects the language that we use. So you can have really ambiguous sentences, and we assume the other person will understand the exact meaning that we're saying, but they don't. They, you know, it can be interpreted multiple ways, and there's no reason that they're going to interpret it necessarily in the same way as us, unless you have that very well established shared reality. And even then, it's imperfect. And you know, the one of to test the limits of this, the researchers actually took participants from China who didn't speak English and participants from the US who didn't speak Chinese, and essentially just asked them to record some statements and then the and then to listen to the other parties statements so In the different language and to fill out multiple choice questions about what they thought they were saying. Now, both sides overestimated how well they were conveying their message, that they thought the other person would understand what they were saying better than chance, and they thought that they themselves were understanding the other people better than chance, even though there was this enormous language barrier that meant they had none of the vocabulary, none of the grammar to be able to understand that, but they just assumed that there must be something within their tone of voice that they were conveying. But of course, that's not enough to make up for a total lack of any kind of communicative terms that are going to precisely convey the meaning. So I found that fascinating. Then I look at, you know, I still receive emails from people, you know, who I'm working with, and I'm like, I just think I have no idea what you want me to do here. And it's because of the illusion of communication and the illusion of transparency that the meaning is so clear to them, but so so hard for me to decipher. And I've been come aware, obviously, that I'm perfectly vulnerable to this bias as well. So in general, my role is just add more information than I first, first of all believed that I needed to add. So just make sure that if there's a chance for misinterpretation, that I account for that before sending the message,

Jean Gomes:

yeah, just picking up on that last point, because it feels in that the book has kind of changed you a bit in writing and researching and writing it. I mean, you mentioned that when you were younger, you were very shy. I wonder, you know, how you now think about your current relationships differently, and how you may be thinking about improving the art of conversation in those relationships.

David Robson:

Yeah. I mean, I kind of of all of my books, I try to apply what I've learned. I kind of do that before I write it, actually, because I I don't want to give people advice, but I can't stick to myself. And, you know, say it has actually worked for me. So yeah, like, everything that we've spoken about is kind of relevant to me, like just having the term shared reality, I found was, like, very useful for me and my partner, because it helped to understand sometimes why, you know, those small kind of disagreements could actually feel like they mean a lot more, and it's because it's fragmented, that shared reality sometime, and what you want to do when you notice that is to try to create, make A special effort to create the mutual understanding that is missing so you can see where each other's coming from, and to try to reassert the shared reality in other ways, but, um, but yeah, with my own friendships, I think, you know, learning about the liking gap was very useful for me, because, like you say, I was very shy as A teenager, and that kind of lingered into my 20s and 30s, and a lot of my shyness came from this kind of post hoc anxiety where I'd meet people, you know, love the conversations, and then I'd go away and only focus on the faux pas that I made, or the time when there was a bit of awkwardness, or I felt like The other person looked distracted, and I would be quite self critical and blame it on myself. And then reading about this research on the liking gap, but also on kind of meta perceptions more generally, it just made me realize this is for one thing. This is a universal experience. So I felt better just knowing that it's not just me. Everyone's feeling. US, and just it gave me the confidence to realize that what I think was really important, though probably the other person isn't thinking about, or they've forgotten, or even if they did notice it, they just don't care as much as I think they care about it. So that that did make me braver, to to just to try to build those relationships, and then to to Yeah, to kind of, to have faith that people probably, you know, all other things being equal, they probably do like me as much as I like them. And then, you know, when you mentioned the art of conversation, and I guess one of the big things there is just engaging in self disclosure, so being a bit more open about ourselves, not hiding our vulnerabilities, or talking, or not shying away from the things that really matter to us because we think they might be a bit embarrassing or the other person's not interested. And what the research shows is that people are much more interested in these things than we think, and what we think might be embarrassing and make us look vulnerable and weak. Other people often see those things as a sign of bravery, and they appreciate the honesty there. That's a phenomenon called the beautiful Mass Effect, and so that's really just helped me to again, to be more, a bit braver in these exchanges, and a bit readier to acknowledge the things that they give me anxiety. Like, I think five years ago, I'd have never written about shyness because I'd have worried that, like, you know that it would be bad for my career, but like, people would not invite me to give public talks because they'd become too shy to be able to deliver my ideas well. But the research shows it really isn't like that, and actually, especially for people in leadership positions, sometimes talking about their vulnerabilities, can actually make people warm to them a lot more. It can actually increase employee loyalty, for example. So it can it can be really powerful. We can use this in our favor. And that's why this is known as the beautiful mess effect, because what we think is a mess other people do see is this wing of beauty and courage. You

Scott Allender:

do people who are lonely always know that they're lonely? I'm sort of thinking about some people, I think, who are particularly susceptible to the liking gap and as a result, maybe added shyness, have sort of seemed pretty content on the outside with this sort of kind of a more reclusive, reclusive life, or, you know, less social interactions, and may not articulate or even know that they're potentially lonely. Did you find anything there?

David Robson:

Yeah. I mean, I do think so. I mean, when you ask people, you know, give them questionnaires, how lonely Are you? A lot of people do report feeling lonely, at least some some parts of their lives, but you know, frequently enough that it's a problem. So about 50% of people in the UK and the USA, and I've seen similar data in in Italy, for example, you know, do admit to feeling lonely, but I think it's something that we feel there's a lot of shame around so, you know, like Olivia Lang's book The Lonely city, where she spoke about experiencing this terrible loneliness when she moved to New York, and how, you know, even very basic interactions became much harder for her, the loneliest she felt, The harder it was to connect. So just going to, like a coffee shop, and asking for an americano suddenly became this thing she felt very anxious about. And so I do think that's quite common, that you know, loneliness can actually lead us to retreat, rather than to act on that loneliness to to tend our our relationships, which in evolution, you know, that was the point of this kind of social pain. It was a warning signal. Like, when we've been injured physically, we have to tend a wound. It was really telling us we had to tend our wounded relationships. But I think, like, if we experience it too much, it can, it can almost be something like a chronic pain where the signal becomes inhibitory, it stops us from doing the things that would actually enhance our lives.

Jean Gomes:

In recent times, we seem to have actively discouraged constructive disagreement, particularly amongst the young. I'm thinking about the ideas and the coddling of the American mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg looking off where they explore those three myths that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings and life is a battle between good and evil people. They kind of unpack that in a very interesting way. Can we talk about your thoughts on constructive disagreement and its role in key. Us healthy?

David Robson:

Yeah. I mean, you know, for one thing, there's been some very recent research showing that we we tend to be very pessimistic about what disagreement is going to look like, especially on, say, political issues, social issues, we tend to think that it's going to be much more negative than it really is. This, you know, it's really part of a broader bias that we have where we are quite concerned about telling the truth to people. And, you know, we we're worried, for example, about giving negative feedback, far too worried, because the research shows that people appreciate hearing the truth, even if it's not the truth they would have liked to have heard. They'd much prefer that than for you to tell a white lie. And again, I think it comes back to self disclosure, which I mentioned, like people. It's only by telling people what you really feel that they can start to get a handle on who you are and what's going on underneath, which helps you to build that shared reality. And you know, this is especially true, I think then what when we're talking about, you know, differences of opinion in politics or in our worldview in general. Now, the thing that I found really positive about this research was that it does suggest, you know, there are ways to to overcome those biases and to have those conversations. And one of the things we can do is just to emphasize when we do find that disagreement is approaching, is to emphasize how much we are genuinely curious in understanding the other person's point of view. And so one part and parcel of this negativity bias is the fact that we tend to assume that other people don't really want to understand what we think. They just want an argument. You know, they or they want to persuade us. They want to. They won't be happy unless we change our point of view. They just want to kind of bang us over the heads with the facts until we agree. But the research shows, you know, again, it's like the liking gap, like each party is assuming this, whereas each party is actually much more interested and curious than the other person believes. And so what you have to do in these discussions is just to verbalize that, to make it explicit, so there's no room for doubt. So even just asking one question within an interaction, just saying, Why do you think the way that you do that's been shown to to improve the quality of the discussion, and importantly, it's it's powerful to to actually persuade people to at least consider your point of view as well. I think that's what's often missed in a lot of the discourse that we see online, is that when you show curiosity and you genuinely try to understand the other person, it can be very disarming. So it can actually change the way that they view their own opinions, so that they're more willing to accept some of their own uncertainty and some of their doubts and to question the sources of information that they'd been looking at because they're no longer preparing for an argument. And then that actually just allows them to be much more humble in their own opinions. So if we're each doing that in these conversations, if we're each, you know, showing curiosity in the other person and then accepting more of our own humility in what we do and don't know that produces just a much more healthy and constructive discussion. But you know, if we don't allow that to occur, if we go into these conversations butting heads with the idea that the other person only wants to argue and doesn't really care about you, then there's no way to go about that. So we do have to, we have to just change the tone of the conversation right at the start. And

Jean Gomes:

you know, as you're you're talking up there and just thinking about people and situations where there is this kind of polarization, the physiological response of meeting somebody who you anticipate is going to be really wanting a fight will will create immune response in you that's very unhealthy. And if that's if that's what you know, you're constantly met with in those interactions. You're never really going to break out of that cycle of fight or flight and then starting to interpret your feelings, therefore, in a very different way. So I can see how that complete disarming of that cycle would be so helpful. How in the research that you've looked at, How has that worked, kind of from an operational point of view, how do you seeing people being able to do that in different situations and ways? Because asking that question, why do you why do you think the way you do? You know, what's the evidence? It's based on, where have you seen it, and so on. Can. At in itself start to become a little bit confronting if you're not careful. Have you seen sort of subtle ways of being able to answer that question?

David Robson:

Yeah, no. I mean, I think it can and again, like, you know, if it's used, if it's not used with kind of true and benign intentions, I think it can, yeah, it can just be used as another line of attack. I think is it called Sea lining, this behavior online that sometimes people do where they it will be a troll who will just keep on asking questions, like questioning every single element of what you say, like, you know, practically down to like you say, this guy's blue, and they'll say, Well, how do you know that it's blue? Well, I'm not, never gonna suggest that that kind of behavior is gonna enhance social connection. And actually it can feel, you know that can be especially disconcerting, because it's like they are, they are picking apart the reality that you have constructed for yourself and that you might have with your other acquaintances. And it's like they are, and they're trying, it's so alienating because they're trying to portray the fact that they they cannot trust any element of what you're saying. So yeah, like, we have to avoid that. But I think, you know, thankfully, I think there's research showing that, you know, far fewer people display trollish behaviors than we believe. People even online, tend to be kinder than we give them credit for. We remember the negative encounters, but actually the average encounters do tend to be a bit more, bit more positive. So I don't think it is likely that many people will be doing that. But if you do find someone is behaving like that and you feel alienated, then I think it's fine to end the conversation, because you know, our time is precious, and we don't always have the energy to be explaining everything to someone who doesn't really genuinely seem to want to understand they might only be paying lip service to their principal.

Sara Deschamps:

If the conversations we've been having on the evolving leader have helped you in any way, please head over to Apple podcasts and leave us a rating and review. Thank you for listening. Now let's get back to the conversation,

Scott Allender:

at the risk of staying with this idea of curiosity a bit too long. I love, I love everything you're saying, and I'd like to know more about the curiosity piece, because I feel like maybe, maybe not, more than anything. But certainly it feels like a really lost art or a lost value in so many ways, where I think people, I guess my question is, do people think they're more naturally curious than they are? And how do we, in a very practical way get honest about how sort of curious we are versus how certain we tend to be. And when we tend to feel certain, we tend to other people. We tend to put them in categories and sort of box them into a line of thinking. And yet may not be very honest with ourselves about about that. We might think, Oh, I'm open, I'm curious, but we're not really open, and we're not really curious unless we're interrogating or proving so. Again, I hope I'm not belaboring the point, but I guess, how do we sort of self diagnose how good we are or not good we are at being genuinely curious without interrogating? And how do we build that muscle where, if we find, gosh, maybe I'm not as open as I should be, how do we do that?

David Robson:

So you're totally right. And I think, like the idea of certainty and uncertainty is kind of fundamental to this, because I think in I think people's curiosity does depend on context in many cases, and when we feel threatened, when there's a lot of uncertainty around us. A lot of people have what's known as high intolerance of uncertainty, like they, you know, they don't want to feel that their worldview might be wobbling in some sense. So they actually, they, they will pick, you know, it's not picking their battles. They will pick their opinion and stick to that just because they don't want to feel that uncertainty occurring. And you know, there are, I guess they're quite artificial, laboratory study showing how much people hate uncertainty. So you know, when people are given a choice, they're set, set up in an experiment where they can receive painful electric shocks, and you can tell them like you'll receive fewer of these shocks if you don't know when they're going to occur, or you'll receive more of them, and they'll be more painful if you're told exactly when they're going to occur, and people often choose the more painful option just because they were. If they don't want to have the fear that something might occur, that they and they don't know when. And I think that's a kind of metaphor often for these kinds of conversations that we we will try to hide away from anything that that makes us feel uncertain and that seems ambiguous. So you know it is a problem. And if you know, if that's them preventing you from kind of really, you know, talking to other people and trying to work out where they're coming from, is that, in itself, is a big barrier to to communication, to understanding, and ultimately, to friendship. I think, like self diagnosis is always difficult, but I do think we can start questioning, like, just questioning, like, how many like, when we think something about one of these topics, and especially when we start making assumptions about what someone else thinks of the topic, we can just ask ourselves, What basis do I have for that? Like, what actual evidence is there, and often you might find that there's no real evidence. You're just guessing. But you've attached such certainty to that guess that you you forget that it's it's not the verified truth. You know, we see this a lot. There's something called the closeness communication mismatch, which is the fact that actually we are even worse at this with people that we know compared to people that we don't. So you might have had a few difficult conversations with your parents about politics, for example, and then you assume you know everything that they think about politics and how they're going to respond to every event, so you don't even bother asking them. You just, you know, you almost go into that conversation over Thanksgiving. You know, determined to have that argument, because you, you know, you feel like you you feel like you've already got past that first stage where you might try to gage their views, and you're just going to go into the combative mindset. So that is a real problem, and that's what we have to avoid, really, yeah, it's just and recognize also, you know, with our own views, that we may not know as much as we think we know about a subject, and to be open to the fact that you can always learn more. You can always it's fine to have your mind changed. I think that's something that we fear is changing our mind, because we think that will look weak, but actually, other people will see that often as a sign of strength. Again, that if you've changed your mind, you've shown that you're willing to listen and learn. And that can be very appealing. So

Jean Gomes:

I'm going to merge two of your strategies into one, because, as Scott said, We don't have time to go through them all in the depth of love to but healing bad feelings and finding forgiveness. Can we talk about those in the context why they're so important? I mean, they're always been important, but they're particularly important at the moment given the current polarizing trends we're seeing. Yeah.

David Robson:

I mean, so healing bad feelings. You know, in that chapter, what I really wanted to show to people is that we again, we're overly reserved and shy about providing support to other people. We we don't think we have the social competence that people will need to to be comforted by us. So we might hear, for example, that one of our colleagues is going for a really difficult time, and we want to help and care for them, but we don't know how to we think we don't know how to do it effectively. So we pretend it didn't happen, like we just talked to them, as if, as if, we don't know that something terrible has happened in their life. But the research shows that people are just much more, much more grateful for any sign of compassion than we expect them to be. And we don't have to have amazing skills at, you know, in counseling, we don't have to be trained counselors to be able to say something that will really make a difference to someone and and help them provide that little bit of support that they needed in that particular moment. When it comes to forgiveness, we have this bias that we just don't recognize. How much people want to hear our words of apology. For example, we we kind of quite fatalistic. We're quite fatalistic when we've made an error. We just and the other person's annoyed at buzz, we just tend to assume, well, that's it. The friendships over. There's no going back when the other person would be much more open to hearing what you have to say, as long as you do it in the right way. And, you know, giving a good apology isn't nearly as bad as it might seem. So, you know, the process itself can be quite cathartic for the person who's made the transgression and and it's not hard, like, essentially, you know, if you cover a few bases, which is, I can. Acknowledging responsibility for what you've done, allowing the other person to express how this has made them feel, telling them how you're going to change your behavior in the future, and validating them, allowing them to know that you you understand why they're annoyed and that you're not judging them for that, but you're actually your intentions are to try to take that pain away. You know, just doing these few things in an apology can be incredibly powerful, but because of those psychological barriers, those biases, we just don't do it enough so we actually lose friendships unnecessarily just because we we don't take a few simple steps that would make both parties feel a lot better

Jean Gomes:

and wonder. You know that, as you describe it there, we don't teach children how to apologize properly. We sort of try and get them almost like a rubber stamp process. You're sorry, aren't you, and that's it. You know, we don't actually walk them through the process of the interior journey that they need to make to really embrace what what they've done?

David Robson:

Yeah, exactly. You know, I think that's the case with a lot of these social skills that I'm talking about. We kind of just assume that people pick them up as they go through life. But, you know, I don't think I mean, the science literally shows us that people aren't learning them like the majority of people aren't learning how to do these things as effectively as they could be. And so I guess that's what I just wanted this book to be, the kind of book that I would have loved to have read when I was that shy teenager. And I think it would have really helped me to know for one thing, that you know, building social connection isn't going to be this hard process, that actually other people are much more likely to warm to you than you believe they will, and that you can improve your social confidence with practice. And you know, it doesn't even take a huge amount of practice to see a big difference. So, you know, talking to strangers is something that pretty much all people, even even adults, you know, approaching middle age like me, tend to really dread talking to strangers because they think it's going to be awkward. They won't have anything to say. The other person will reject them. It's going to be horrible. And then the research shows actually, you question people after those encounters, and they, you know, they found it fun. They learned something interesting. They were pleased by how warm the other person was. You know, both people enjoyed it, but, but we don't do it enough to kind of reinforce that idea. So, you know, if we only do that maybe once every couple of weeks or every month or every year, we just don't, we don't get the reinforcement to change our biases, but one study just encouraged people to make these conversations just every day for a week's period, and what they found was that after just five days, people were feeling a lot more confident about those encounters. They already started to look forward to them rather than fearing rejection. And you know, I think that's just such a valuable lesson that just within less than a week, you can change some of these pessimistic biases and anxieties that you've been carrying around with you for the whole of your life. It's quite powerful.

Jean Gomes:

And as a leader, if you had to kind of pick one thing that you would advocate for to help you build more connection in the world. What would what would it be? Where would you start?

David Robson:

So I think being a bit braver about talking to strangers and doing it regularly, I think can be a really fundamental it's like a proof to yourself that you you do have this within you that can be very empowering. But you know one thing that listeners could do, like at the end of this episode, and it's so simple, it's just to think of one older acquaintance that you have that you might not have been in touch with for a while, and you might, you might have started to worry that the friendship is kind of fading, but you you've been too, too kind of anxious about that fact, to actually make the effort to rebuild the friendship. Just send a message to that person saying that you're thinking of them. It doesn't have to the message doesn't have to be full of, you know, flowery like florid language. It doesn't have to have any there doesn't have to be an excuse for sending the message, apart from the fact that you just wanted to check in and show them that you cared about them, what the research shows is that we again, we underestimate how much the other person will appreciate hearing from us, but in the vast majority of cases, people, they were probably feeling the same again, they probably wanted to connect with You, but didn't want to be the first person to make the move. And it's just such an easy way, I think, to assert to ourselves. Actually, we have more capacity for connection that we realize, and often these this sense of connection that you crave is literally at your fingertips, like it's literally in your hand when you're holding your phone, if you just. Make that, that first step.

Scott Allender:

Love that. Well, that's probably a great place to land it, although, David, I could talk to you for hours more. In fact, I think we need to have you back on, like monthly or something, because I get so much from this and all of your writing. Thank you for writing this book, and all the books that you've written and all the articles I get so much in my own life. So much impact. And thank you for that. And folks, you know, do yourself a favor and absolutely order the laws of connection today. David, thank you again for joining us. And until next time, remember the world is evolving. Are you? You?

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Jean Gomes

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Scott Allender

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