Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

by Eric Barker

“Sounds like you’re frustrated.” Yeah, that’s an epic understatement, but it’s also a fundamental active listening technique: labeling.

Neuroscience research by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA has validated that labeling dampens powerful emotions. It also builds rapport by showing someone you’re on their wavelength.

“Nephew?” Mirroring. Another pillar of active listening. In the form of a question, repeat the last thing they said.

Active listening sounds great. And it works well in scenarios like hostage negotiation or therapy where the practitioner is a third party and has some distance from the problem.

Gottman found that people just couldn’t do it in the heat of the moment.

Note to self: something designed for terrorists and emotionally disturbed people isn’t perfect for your family.

That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.

Whom can I trust? Does anyone really know me? Does anyone really care? If you think of your happiest moments, they will be about people. The most painful moments will too.

So this is not a I’m a guru, do what I do book. This is a I had no idea what I was doing so I talked to a lot of people way smarter than both you and me to get some solid information book.

We’ll see that the fundamental core of relationships is the stories our brains weave to create identity, agency, and community—and how those stories not only bind us together but can tear us apart if we’re not careful.

Not bad for someone who, as a woman, still couldn’t even vote.

“The Barnum effect refers to the tendency for people to accept as uncannily descriptive of themselves the same generally worded assessment as long as they believe it was written specifically for them on the basis of some ‘diagnostic’ instrument such as a horoscope or personality inventory.”

Simply put, base rates tell you how common something is on average.

If you’re wrong on those guesses, they’ll be glossed over—but

we want it to be true. In fact, we look for evidence to make it true.

People turn to crystal balls and tarot cards not for hard answers but for a story that gives them a feeling of control over their lives.

profiling is: unintentional cold reading.

We’re not objectively evaluating what we hear; we’re active participants in trying to make the puzzle piece fit.

humans are prone to seeing meaning where there is none.

Emotionally, we want a feeling of control over the world around us.

We think the secret to reading people is learning some special magic indicator in body language or lie detection. But the primary thing we have to contend with is our own cognitive biases.

Research shows that horses are able to detect head movements in humans as small as one-fifth of a millimeter.

After Pfungst released his results, von Osten did the rational, objective, scientific thing: he got totally pissed off, refused further testing, took his horse, and went home.

Textbooks today still refer to “the Clever Hans effect,” which is also known as “the observer effect.”

If you’ve ever heard the term double-blind study, you can thank Hans.

we think we’re awesome at reading others. Again, that pesky brain is telling us flattering stories.

How can we be so off base? And yet so confident in our inaccuracy? The technical term is egocentric anchoring.

ask others questions, our accuracy goes up, but we don’t do that enough. Usually, we just play in our own heads with our own stories and replace bad assumptions with different bad assumptions.

Yes, women are better. Female superiority in detecting nonverbal communication is well documented. It’s only about a 2 percent edge, but it’s very consistent across ages, testing methods, and cultures.

The advantages are more pronounced in detecting facial expressions and in emotion recognition.

It’s actually due to one of the things that can make all of us better mind readers: motivation.

When studies dig deep to look for the underlying cause, what many find is that women, on average, are more motivated to read people accurately than men are.

What happens when researchers inform guys that being empathic will make women more interested in them? Bingo. Male motivation increased as did men’s ability to accurately perceive thoughts and feelings.

motivation drops, so does accuracy. Husbands in unhappy marriages can read random women’s nonverbals better than those of their wives. Oof.

when people are motivated, either intrinsically, i.e., they love it; or extrinsically, i.e., they will get a prize, they are better able to maintain consistent brain activity, and maintain readiness for the unexpected.”

when a study had anxiously attached women eavesdrop on their boyfriends talking to beautiful female researchers, guess what happened? Yup, their ability to correctly predict his answers to questions increased.

The Lazy Brain Axiom™. So the first step to being better at reading people is to be curious. Even better is to provide yourself with some sort of external gain or loss that motivates you.

This leads to our second big insight: readability is more important than reading skills. People-reading skills aren’t that variable, but how readable people are ranges widely. Most of the reason we’re able to read people isn’t that we’re skilled; it’s that they’re expressive. So

To graduate first in my class, I can either improve my grades or make everyone else do worse.

So we’ll call this The Eric in High School Theorem™. Since we can’t improve our people-reading skills that much, we have to focus our efforts on making others more readable.

Instead of passively analyzing them like Sherlock Holmes does on TV, we need to actively elicit stronger signal...

The first and easiest method is to manip...

The wider the variety of stimuli you expose them to, the more facets of who they are will become clear.

When researchers had people on first dates talk about STDs, abortion, and other taboo topics, they not only learned more about the other person, they reported enjoying the conversation more.

We have a tendency to pay attention to the wrong signals.

the value of consciously analyzing body language is grossly overrated.

And this point is critical: body language is utterly useless without a baseline.

But if you don’t know their default, you’re just letting your brain spin fanciful stories again.

focus on their speech. When we can hear someone but not see them, empathic ability declines only about 4 percent. When we can see someone but not hear them, the drop-off is a whopping 54 percent.

Pay less attention to whether they cross their legs and more attention to when their voice changes.