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. Giving the hostage taker’s emotion a name. 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.

Mirroring. Another pillar of active listening. In the form of a question, repeat the last thing they said. Keep ’em talking.

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

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

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.

Often our problems with others start with our inaccurate perception of them.

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.

“the observer effect.”

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.

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.

How can we be so off base? And yet so confident in our inaccuracy? The technical term is egocentric anchoring. Epley says we’re too caught in our own perspective: “Survey after survey finds that most people tend to exaggerate the extent to which others think, believe, and feel as they do.”

Motivation is almost a neuroscientific panacea. Giving a crap makes our brains better at almost everything because our default is barely paying attention to anything.

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.

we need to actively elicit stronger signals to get more telling reactions.

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

And this point is critical: body language is utterly useless without a baseline. Some people always fidget, and it means nothing. Other people rarely fidget, and it’s very telling. But if you don’t know their default, you’re just letting your brain spin fanciful stories again.

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

HSAM (highly superior autobiographical memory).

because we do judge a book by its cover. Immediately and instinctively. We can’t help it. And that cover is usually someone’s face.

We make our minds up about someone’s assertiveness, beauty, competence, likability, and trustworthiness in less than a second. And, like mind reading, more time doesn’t noticeably change our opinions, it just increases our confidence.

More interesting is that not only are these judgments immediate but they’re also consistently shared. Faces I see as trustworthy, dominant, or competent are very likely ones you’ll see the same way. Fundamentally, these decisions are not rational. There’s no time to think them through. They’re usually bas...

The kicker? Our first impressions are often surpr...

You’re also good at instinctively determining someone’s competence after a brief encounter.

Numerous studies have shown we have a bias against noticing our biases.

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.

Once we get a story in our heads about who someone is, it’s very hard for us to update it.

The First Impressions Paradox™.

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

First impressions are sticky, even when we think they’ve been overcome.

Motivation is critical, and focusing on making others more readable will deliver bigger improvements than trying to improve your reading skills.

when we set a high bar for accountability, our opinions don’t become inflexible until we’ve done a thorough review of the evidence. A fun way to do this is to turn it into a game. Push yourself to be more accurate and hold yourself accountable.

“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.” These are exactly the skills we need to size up new acquaintances more accurately and resist our brain’s impulse to immediately go with our first impression.

“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.” And maybe that’s why he won the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Make sure you show them the side of your personality that you want them to lock onto—because they will.

your negative judgments about people will be less reliable than your positive judgments. And research also shows we have a higher bar for rating someone positively than negatively, and our positive impressions are more easily reversed than our negative ones. There’s no appeals process when you avoid someone for the rest of your life.

Yes, some folks are good lie detectors, but you wouldn’t want to be them; they’re people who have had strokes and experienced significant damage to the left lobe of their prefrontal cortex.

Never be a “bad cop.” Be a “friendly journalist.”

Herein lies the problem in dealing with slippery people: they get good feedback, you don’t. If I lie and don’t get caught, I see what works. If I lie and get caught, I see what doesn’t work.

The Friendly Journalist Method™ doesn’t focus on making your lie detection skills better; it focuses on making their lie-telling skills worse. How do we do that?

What does work is applying “cognitive load”—making liars think hard. As Vrij notes, lying well requires a surprising amount of brainpower.

Instead of asking yourself, Is this person lying?, ask yourself, Do they have to think hard? A

In fact, if there’s negative information to be gleaned, avoiding accuracy improved relationship stability.

Too much negative info or too perfect a memory just doesn’t make for good relationships. We need to round off the edges, to be able to give the benefit of the doubt, to miss something that’s true but unrepresentative.

you also want to stay happy, motivated, and confident, even when things aren’t looking so great. (Or especially when things aren’t looking so great.)

social situations (let alone job interviews and first dates) simply cannot handle utter truth 24/7.

As T. S. Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

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.

fact, strict reciprocity is actually a profound negative in friendship. Being in a hurry to repay a debt is often seen as an insult. With buddies we act like costs and benefits don’t matter (or at least not nearly as much).