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

by Eric Barker

The negotiator responds to the suspect: “Sounds like you’re frustrated.” Yeah, that’s an epic understatement, but it’s also a fundamental active listening technique: labeling. Giving the hostage taker’s emotion a name. Neuroscience research by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA has validated that labeling dampens powerful emotions.

the Grant Study at Harvard Medical School has been following a group of 268 men for over eighty years. The amount of data accumulated on them could fill rooms, and the insights about what makes for a long, happy life are plentiful. Yet when George Vaillant, who led the study for much of his own life, was asked what he learned from decades of studying these men, he replied with one sentence: 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. Our relationships to others make or break our lives.

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.

Profiling doesn’t work. It’s pseudoscience.

In 2002, work by three researchers, Kocsis, Hayes, and Irwin, showed that college chemistry majors produced more valid profiles than trained homicide investigators. Ouch. A 2003 study gave one group of police a real profile done by professionals and another group of police a fake profile of a fictional offender. Nope—they couldn’t tell the difference. And a 2007 meta-analysis (a roundup of all the research on a topic to get a big-picture view) said: “Profilers do not decisively outperform other groups when predicting the characteristics of an unknown criminal.”

The UK government looked at 184 crimes that leveraged profiling and determined that the profile was helpful just 2.7 percent of the time.

“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.”

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.

There’s a fundamental reason why astrologers outnumber astronomers. As Gilovich explains, humans are prone to seeing meaning where there is none. Emotionally, we want a feeling of control over the world around us. We desperately need the world to at least seem to make sense.

University of Chicago professor Nicholas Epley has found that when you’re dealing with strangers, you correctly detect their thoughts and feelings only 20 percent of the time. (Random chance accuracy is 5 percent.) Now, of course, you’re better when dealing with people you know . . . but not by much. With close friends you hit 30 percent, and married couples peak at 35 percent. In school that’s an F. Actually, it’s probably closer to a G. Whatever you think is going on in your spouse’s head, two-thirds of the time, you’re wrong.

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. That said, it’s not uniform. Women are no better at lie detection than men. The advantages are more pronounced in detecting facial expressions and in emotion recognition.

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.

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

But the literature is consistent—the value of consciously analyzing body language is grossly overrated.

body language is utterly useless without a baseline.

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.

Our first impressions are often surprisingly accurate. Not only do people usually agree on first impressions, but they’re also impressively predictive. Just seeing someone smile for the first time was enough for viewers to make accurate predictions two-thirds of the time for nine out of ten fundamental personality traits, from extroversion to self-esteem to political preferences.

if you think you can overcome these biases with conscious effort, you’re probably wrong. Numerous studies have shown we have a bias against noticing our biases.

when it comes to first impressions, the main battle is with “confirmation bias.” We’re prone to searching for and favoring ideas consistent with beliefs we already hold. We don’t test theories; we look for information to reinforce the position we’ve already decided on.

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

how do we resist confirmation bias? Three key steps:

1. FEEL ACCOUNTABLE If your opinion of someone could result in them getting the death penalty, you’d slow down and be more thorough. You’d want to double-check your accuracy before the concrete sets for good and there’s no changing it. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski’s work shows that when we set a high bar for accountability, our opinions don’t become inflexible until we’ve done a thorough review of the evidence.

2. DISTANCE BEFORE DECISION In Maria Konnikova’s wonderful book Mastermind she dives deep into the research of NYU psychologist Yaacov Trope, showing how getting some distance helps us be more rational and objective: “Adults who are told to take a step back and imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations, and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity.”

3. CONSIDER THE OPPOSITE Since our brains tend to remember hits and forget misses, we must force ourselves to consider those misses if we want to improve. Paul Nurse takes this attitude to the extreme: “If I have an idea and have observations to support it, rather than get that out there, I go around and look at it in different ways and try and destroy it. And only if it survives do I begin to talk about it.”

The other thing to remember: give people a second chance. Without the above strategies, you’re right only 70 percent of the time, max.

A 2009 study found Americans, on average, have four close relationships, two of which are friends. Yale professor Nicholas Christakis notes that those stats haven’t changed much in the past few decades, and you get similar numbers when you look around the globe. And while the majority of studies show quality is more important than quantity when it comes to friends, numbers still matter. Which folks are 60 percent more likely to consider themselves “very happy”? Those who have five or more friends they can talk about their troubles with.

studies show that the person we are most likely to have a lifelong relationship with turns out to be not a pal but a sibling.

nearly all children by age three show a preference for their own race. Kids with WS are, in fact, the only children ever found to show zero racial bias.

the more relevant problem with Carnegie’s techniques: not that they’re unscientific, but that they can be manipulative and lead to shallow friendships, the kind Aristotle was none too fond of.

Carnegie’s book is great for the early stages of relationships, it’s excellent for transactional relationships with business contacts . . . but it’s also a wonderful playbook for con men. It’s not focused on building “another self” and developing long-term intimacy: it’s much more about tactically gaining benefit from people.

As we discussed, friendship beats other relationships in terms of happiness, but what is it specifically that works that magic? Melikşah Demιr of Northern Arizona University says it’s companionship—merely spending time together. And, unsurprisingly, what does research say is the most common cause of conflict in friendships? Once again, time. There’s no getting around it: time is critical.

It’s ironic: when we meet new people, we often try to impress them—and this can be a terrible idea. Through a series of six studies, researchers found that signaling high status doesn’t help new friendships, it hurts them. Again, might be good for sales calls or conveying leadership, but it makes finding “another self” much more difficult.

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.

Narcissism is “highly comorbid with other disorders,” which is a fancy way of saying these people have more issues than Vogue. They suffer from higher rates of depression, anxiety, chronic envy, perfectionism, relationship difficulties, and last, but certainly not least, suicide.

Hustler v. Falwell is now routinely taught in law schools and regarded as one of the most important free speech cases of the twentieth century.

In a Jacksonville, Florida, survey, 60 percent of people said their spouse was their best friend. You know how many said the same thing in Mexico City? Zero. And cultures that romantically kiss are actually in the minority: only 46 percent of the 168 studied smooch.

As George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Fighting doesn’t end marriages; avoiding conflict does.

So we’re going to do a crash course in marital communication skills guided by Gottman’s work. His research allows him to predict which couples will be divorced three years later with 94 percent accuracy, a number nobody else even comes close to. This guy’s face should be on the Mount Rushmore of Marriage.

In 1920, 1 percent of the US population lived alone. Now one in seven adult Americans do, meaning more than a quarter of US households are just one person.

Fay Bound Alberti, a historian at the University of York, says, “Loneliness is a relatively modern phenomenon, both as a word, and perhaps more controversially, as an experience.”

Loneliness doesn’t care if you’re actually alone. Loneliness is a subjective feeling.

According to Robert Putnam of Harvard, 77 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “most people can be trusted” in 1964. By 2012, only 24 percent of people did.

Lee Marvin once said, “Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.”