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

by Eric Barker

It just doesn’t work. Every marriage therapist (and me) is wrong. The hostage negotiators are right. John Gottman, professor emeritus of psychology at University of Washington, actually put it to the test. 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. But marital arguments are different; they’re about you not taking out the trash. Mirroring, labeling, and accepting all emotions when you’re being screamed at by your spouse are about as natural as telling someone not to run away or hit back when physically assaulted. Gottman found that people just couldn’t do it in the heat of the moment. And in follow-up studies, with the few couples who actually could actively listen, it showed only short-term benefits. Couples quickly relapsed. In hostage negotiation short-term benefits are fine. Works long enough to get the guy in handcuffs? Perfect. But in a marriage that will (hopefully) last longer than hours or days, it’s a disaster. Therapists recommended it, but until Gottman, nobody had actually tested it. Except the hostage negotiators. Maybe that’s why research shows that only 18–25 percent of couples report any improvements one year after marriage therapy.

That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people. It seems absurd that so much research could be reduced to a single sentence. But it rings true. We spend so much time chasing the shallow things in life. But when tragedy strikes, or late at night when your brain asks too many questions, we know it’s the relationships that matter most. 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. Our relationships to others make or break our lives.

Wrong. According to Brad Ricca, author of Mrs. Sherlock Holmes, Grace laughed at the suggestion and replied, “No, I never read Sherlock Holmes. In fact, I am not a believer in deduction. Common sense and persistence will always solve a mystery. You never need theatricals, nor Dr. Watsons, if you stick to a case.”

In psychology it’s known as “the Forer effect,” or by the more telling name, “the Barnum effect.” Yes, after P. T. Barnum, the infamous huckster.

error our brains make. Noted Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich defines it: “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.”

The key issue here is what statisticians call “base rates.” Simply put, base rates tell you how common something is on average.

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. Phony psychics and stage magicians use a system called “cold reading” that leverages the Barnum effect and base rates to make it seem like they can read minds and predict the future. And our minds conspire to make the stories they tell us seem true. The mentalist Stanley Jaks demonstrated this by reading people’s fortunes and telling them the opposite of what standard palm reading would have said. The result? Didn’t matter. People believed it just as much.

As Gilovich explains, humans are prone to seeing meaning where there is none.

The real challenge in analyzing people often isn’t with them; it’s with us. Yes, decoding the behavior of others is difficult, but the hidden problem, the one we rarely realize and never address, is that our own brains are often working against us.

If you’ve ever heard the term double-blind study, you can thank Hans. He led to its creation, which had a profound impact on how research is done. Normally medical studies give half the participants the active drug and half a placebo. But let’s say that as the experimenter, I know which one is the placebo, and whenever I give it to someone I snicker and roll my eyes. Just like with Hans, the experimenter knowing “the answer” can consciously or unconsciously inform the patient and reduce the objectivity of the experiment. So studies are done “double blind”—neither the patient nor the experimenter knows which is the placebo. Like putting blinders on Hans.

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.

Since we can’t improve our people-reading skills that much, we have to focus our efforts on making others more readable.

Nonverbal cues are complex, context dependent, and idiosyncratic. We can never be certain what is causing what.

Truth be told, if you wanted to focus on something, skip body language and laser 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.

First impressions are generally accurate. But once they’re set, they’re extremely hard to change.

fact, it works too well. Doesn’t matter if you’re actually guilty or not: it’ll get a confession out of most people. Canada and the UK have both dropped Reid-style interrogation, finding it to be coercive and unethical. And yet this is still the dominant method used by law enforcement in the United States today. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also not scientifically valid. Aldert Vrij, a professor at the University of Portsmouth and a leading expert on lie detection, says the cues it relies on are not predictive. After Reid training, law enforcement officers’ ability to detect deception gets worse.

the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG)

This was a joint effort of the FBI (lead agency), CIA, and Department of Defense.

Okay, we’ve got the fundamentals. You did your homework. You’re playing Friendly Journalist, and they’re gabbing away. You’re keeping an eye out for when they have to think hard. Time to (nicely) smoke out a liar with two powerful techniques from the HIG report.

1. ASK UNANTICIPATED QUESTIONS

2. STRATEGIC USE OF EVIDENCE

Instead of focusing on not judging a book by its cover, it would be more useful to say we would be better off putting more effort into revising the judgments we will undoubtedly make.

to rituals. Think about the people you do keep up with, and you’ll probably find a ritual, conscious or not, underneath it. “We talk every Sunday,” or “we exercise together.” Replicate that. It works. Find something to do together consistently. Research from Notre Dame that analyzed over eight million phone calls showed touching base in some form every two weeks is a good target to shoot for. Hit that minimum frequency, and friendships are more likely to persist.

Arthur Aron (who developed the IOS Scale) got strangers to feel like lifelong pals in just forty-five minutes. How? Well, that leads us to our second costly signal: vulnerability.

Not only is vulnerability effective, it’s also not quite as dangerous as you think. Psychology has documented the “beautiful mess effect”—that we consistently overestimate how negatively our errors will be perceived. We think we’ll be seen as a moron and exiled to a distant village, but when surveyed, most people see the occasional screw-up as a positive. You make an error and are terrified you’ll be seen as inadequate. But when others make the same error, you’re rarely as judgmental, and it often warms you to that person.

Now, we’re not yet 100 percent on how that “friend in need” maxim should be interpreted, but we’re a lot closer to seeing how it functions and how it can work in practice. Make the time, vulnerably share your thoughts, and raise the stakes. If all goes well, they do the same. This gets us away from transactional relationships. With trust established, we can ignore costs to a greater degree, as can they. You don’t worry about how big the favor is or what they’ve done for you lately—you’re past that. Now you only have to ask one question: “Are they a friend?” And if they are, you help.

as Gottman found, unhappy couples all make the same four mistakes. And if we learn them, we can avoid them. He calls these problems the Four Horsemen, and they predict divorce 83.3 percent of the time.

1. CRITICISM Complaining is actually healthy for a marriage. Again, this prevents those “secrets” that fester, breed assumptions, and lead to NSO. It’s criticism that’s the deadly problem. Complaining is when I say you did not take the trash out. Criticism is when I say you did not take the trash out because you’re a horrible person. The

2. STONEWALLING And here we have the thing men do in arguments that powerfully predicts divorce. Stonewalling is when you shut down or tune out in response to issues your partner brings up.

3. DEFENSIVENESS Gottman defines defensiveness as anything that conveys, “No, the problem isn’t me, it’s you.” This,

4. CONTEMPT Contempt is the single biggest predictor of divorce that Gottman found. Contempt is anything that implies your partner is inferior to you. Calling them names, ridiculing or putting them down are all examples.