The Commuter's Paradox: Why We Misjudge Social Connection (With Nick Epley)

Learn about the barriers we build between ourselves and the rest of the world—and how connecting more can make us happier and wiser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Katy Milkman?

  It's a crisp afternoon in May of 2019 in the Welsh city of Cardiff. Alison Owen-Jones is out walking her dog in a busy park when she notices an older man sitting on his own. She's in the park for almost 40 minutes, and in that entire time, no one engages with him. He just sits there by himself.

• 0:30Katy Milkman?

  Then Alison's dog playfully goes over to say hello, and the man's entire face lights up. Alison thinks, should I go sit with him, strike up a conversation? But then an instinct kicks in and tells her, no, he surely wants to be left in peace.

• 0:49Katy Milkman?

  So she calls her dog over and walks away, but not without noticing the man's smile disappear. She thinks then that he probably came to this park with great physical effort to find some company.

• 1:03Katy Milkman?

  On the way home, Alison realizes that the real tragedy isn't just that this man is all alone. It's that there are likely dozens of people there who would have happily talked to him if only they knew he wanted them to. So Alison decides to run a little experiment. She prints out a simple sign on green card stock, runs it through a laminator to protect it from the Welsh rain, and walks back to the park. She ties it to a bench. The sign reads, "The Happy to Chat Bench. Sit here if you don't mind someone stopping to say hello." A week later, a picture of the bench went viral, and the idea exploded globally.

• 1:46Katy Milkman?

  Local councils and charities from England to Australia replaced Alison's laminated paper with permanent, beautiful signs. And on those benches, incredible stories began to unfold. A grieving widower confessed that the bench saved him from a too-quiet house. An isolated young mother expressed gratitude just to have an adult conversation during the day. The truth is, parks are full of people open to connection. They're just waiting for a green light. In this episode, we look at the barriers we build between ourselves and the rest of the world, why we might misjudge the social value of a simple conversation, and how connecting more can make us happier and wiser.

• 2:39Katy Milkman?

  I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.

• 3:10Katy Milkman?

  My guest today is Nick Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of a terrific new book, "A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection." Our conversation is all about the science behind our social fears and what happens when we choose not to follow our instincts. But first, Nick will share a story about how even he, a world-renowned social psychologist, can be paralyzed by social anxieties, and the person in his life who challenges him every day to rethink his own assumptions.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  In 2016, my wife was pregnant, and at three months, we did the standard amniocentesis and learned that our daughter had Down syndrome. That was a shock to us at the time. I don't think any parent is quite ready for that. My first thoughts were fearful. Were we going to be able to do this? How was this going to affect our lives? It was my wife who reached out to some people she knew and was able to get in touch with some families who we thought would be willing to talk to us, to people who were raising kids with this particular intellectual disability, because it's hard to tell how you're going to feel in an experience that you've never been in.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  And we called a number of families, and they used the word blessing to describe their child's influence on their family, enriching in ways they wouldn't have guessed. And so we had gotten ourselves ready, and then at six months, we learned that Sophie, we had already named our daughter, had died.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  That was a horrible experience, easily the worst thing that's ever happened in our married lives. And we mourned that loss for about a year. Jen and I, in our own ways, we were very much feeling kind of stuck in our lives, as sometimes can happen when you go through a period of grief like that. And I remember one morning, very clearly, I walked into the sunroom at our house. We have two chairs there, and my wife was sitting in one. And I asked her, would you be interested or willing to consider adopting a child? Again, we had already adopted two children into our family, and my wife, almost without

• 5:39Speaker 01

  missing a beat, asked me, would you be willing, should we, could we consider adopting a child with Down syndrome?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  All of the pessimistic fears that I had at three months came rushing back. Can we really do this? How will this child respond to us?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Will we be able to handle this? And as any researcher will tell you, particularly, I think, in behavioral science, where the research we do comes so close to our everyday lives. And I started thinking about the conversations that we had before, and I had red flags going off in my mind suggesting to me that I was a participant in one of our experiments, and that here I was, with my own doubts about how we'd handle this, how well this would go. And thinking about our data gave me some data-driven courage that I was probably getting this wrong, and that was enough to give me the courage that at least I thought I needed to say, yeah, I think we can do this.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  So about a year after we made that decision, my wife Jen and I hopped on a flight with our four other children, two biological, two adopted. And we got on this flight. The kids weren't quite sure what to expect. We traveled to Fujio, which was where we met our daughter, where we met Lindsay, was two years old, was abandoned in front of a building about a couple of weeks into her life, not in good physical condition, left by a mother who we'll never meet, who was surely facing her own doubts and fears and anxieties and inabilities. She thought to raise Lindsay. We were a little nervous.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  They brought her in.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  She had, her cheeks, I remember, they were all red. They were raw because she'd been crying so much. We don't know what the days had been like before that for her, but she just had this unbelievable smile, like this level of resilience. I mean, you don't get to a position like that without going through a hard time, and you could see it on her face with her cheeks rubbed raw, and she still has some of those scars.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  But she gave us such a big smile, and she connected with us so quickly. She was relentlessly resilient, I would say.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  We brought her home on a long overnight flight, and I still remember the picture we have of her on the morning we got home, just as big a smile as the first moment, first moment we met her. She is, I swear, she is the most popular kid in her school. The way her classmates get her to come in off of the playground, like over 100 kids chanting Lindsay's name to get her to come back to the school. Of all people I know, she kind of embodies the message from our research better than almost anybody. She has no filter on her hello. She has no hesitation to reach out and connect with other people. When we walk around town, she's the one that everybody knows, because you just know

• 9:06Speaker 01

  somebody like Lindsay.

• 9:10Katy Milkman?

  Nick, thank you so much for being here with me. I really appreciate you sharing that story about Lindsay. It's so moving and it shows that even experts can be paralyzed by social fears and that we can't simply trust our intuitions.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  You bet, Katie. I'm delighted to be here.

• 9:27Katy Milkman?

  I want to segue from that story to talking about your research on our misunderstanding of how we'll feel when we reach out to other people. And in particular, you have described a lightning bolt moment on a Chicago commuter train that inspired some of your research studies run with commuters. Could you talk a little bit about that moment of insight?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's an interesting thing. As a scientist, we get the good fortune of studying the world out there that we live in. And every now and then, you'll have a moment in your life when you stop and just pay attention to it like a researcher might. And you have this, it just looks suddenly different to you when you put that lens on it. And I was in a train one morning on my ride into the University of Chicago, which I'd done for years by this point. But this morning, it just really struck me as odd what we were doing. I'd been writing a chapter in my first book, Mindwise, where I was describing how we've got a brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others, how we're made happier by connecting with other people. And yet, here we all were on this

• 10:29Speaker 01

  train. And I just looked around and here all of us were, sitting on this train, completely ignoring each other. We're treating each other like a lampshade. And I was really struck by the disconnect between those two things. For my entire career, I've studied mind reading. I've studied how we make inferences about each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and mostly how we screw that up and misunderstand each other. And it made me wonder whether we were kind of all doing that right here, right now. And that morning, I had a woman sit down next to me. She was probably 15 years or so older than I was at the time, I would guess in her early 50s, African American woman, very professionally dressed for work, wearing this amazing red hat. And, you know, we're sitting hip to hip. And I

• 11:11Speaker 01

  decided I was gonna, I was gonna run an experiment on myself that morning. And instead of sitting there doom scrolling my phone or checking my email, I would, I would just try to have a conversation with her, get to know her. Now, it might sound weird to listeners to think of that as some kind of crazy experiment. Like, we talk to strangers all the time. But here, I was really paying close attention. And my brain started, of course, shouting all, all of the reasons why I shouldn't do this. Surely, she'll think you're a creep trying to hit on her. You'll make her feel uncomfortable. You don't want to do that. You don't want to be that guy, right, who's, who's irritating and intrudes into people's lives. If she wanted to talk to you, she'd already be talking to you. But I ignored that part of my brain. And instead, I just, I turned to her and worked up my courage a

• 11:56Speaker 01

  little bit. And I said, Hi, my name's Nick. I love your hat. I have one just like it. She turned to me with a smile. She chuckled a little bit, right? We laughed a little. And then the conversation just kind of started flowing. I got her name, found out what, you know, her job was, learned a little bit about her kids, learned that she was kind of stuck in her job. She wasn't real happy with it. We talked about what would her dream job look like for you? Talked a little bit about my work and the experiment I had just enrolled her in. And the, the ride just went by in a flash. And that's a half hour commute for me into Hyde Park. And as I got up to leave, and she stopped me, and she said, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. And I felt the same way, like that,

• 12:42Speaker 01

  that 30 minutes was good. But what struck me was, not just that it was good, but that it was surprisingly good, right? That my expectation was that this would be awkward or weird or not so great, or kind of make me feel indifferent. But I left feeling quite uplifted. And I thought, if that's a kind of misunderstanding that I'm doing in other places too, and I'm making, I'm missing opportunities like this in other parts of my life, then that's going to change the way I live my life. And if we're all doing this here, like, everybody on the train is doing this this morning to some extent, then that's a, like, that's a big idea. Obviously anecdotes are not data, they're

• 13:24Speaker 01

  single experiences. But it's where many of us start in our research, that you notice something, aha. And you wonder, might that be a thing out there? And turned out to be a thing, not just a thing, a really, really, really big thing.

• 13:39Katy Milkman?

  Could you tell us a little bit about your papers where you asked some people on trains and buses to talk to a stranger and some to sit in solitude? So you scaled up the experiment from that N of one?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. We went out into the world, and I was lucky, very lucky at this time, to be working with a PhD student, Juliana Schroeder, who's now a professor at Berkeley. And we went out to a station on my train line, Homewood, Illinois, which is just north of where we live in, in Flossmore. And we recruited people for a commuter survey, and, and offered them $5 Starbucks gift card for participating. Once they were interested, then and only then, did we randomly assign them to do one of three things on the train this morning. In one condition, we asked them to just focus on their day ahead, just enjoy their solitude. That was a solitude condition. In another condition, we told them, just do whatever you normally do. That's our control condition. Typically, it's keep to themselves. In the third condition, we asked them to do something

• 14:32Speaker 01

  radical. When somebody comes and sits down next to you, just try to have a conversation, try to get to know them a little bit, try to make a connection. Okay? That was our connection condition. We then handed them an envelope with a survey in it, a paper and pencil, old school. These days, we do it on people's phones and surveys. And we told them at the end of the commute to fill that out, drop it back in the envelope, send it back to us. We got about 80 to 85% response rates, which were consistent across conditions, which is pretty good. Did a few other behavioral tricks. We had them sign commitment forms and things like that to encourage them to send it back to us. And we asked them a number of questions. The first ones were the ones we were most interested. We asked them, how productive was your commute compared to normal? On a scale that went from minus

• 15:13Speaker 01

  three to three. And they, we didn't see any differences across conditions in that. We then asked them some, three questions about, essentially, how good was your commute? We asked how pleasant it was compared to normal, how happy they felt after the commute, and how sad they felt. We reverse scored the sadness item, collapsed that into a single composite. And what we found was that the commuters in the connection condition actually reported having the most positive experience, and those in the solitude condition reported having the least positive experience. So it didn't seem that talking to a stranger sucked. People seemed to have the same kind of experience that I did. But to see whether they might be holding themselves back by the same kind of barrier that was affecting

• 15:54Speaker 01

  me, we recruited another sample of train commuters and described each of those experimental conditions and asked them to predict how they would feel if they were in each of those conditions. And what we found was that people thought they would have the least positive experience in the connection condition, and have the most positive experience in the solitude condition. Their expectations weren't just wrong, they were precisely backwards. But you can see then why you'd get a trainload of people choosing to keep to themselves if each of them kind of had a sense that I'll be happier keeping to myself, right? They were behaving in some way rationally, in line with their expectations. It's just that their expectations, I think, were wrong compared to people's actual experience.

• 16:36Katy Milkman?

  And Nick, that begs the question, why are we so miscalibrated in our judgments of how much we'll enjoy a conversation with a stranger and how willing they'll be also to engage with us?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is like an archaeological dig where we go deeper, deeper into the underlying mechanism. Each, each explanation requires its own explanation. On the trains, what we found was a tendency we've seen lots of other places, which is to think that other people just aren't that interested in connecting with us. People were pessimistic about how others would respond when they reached out to connect with them. People thought, for instance, only about 45% of people on the train would be willing to talk to them if they tried. We don't know the actual percentage, but we didn't have anybody on the train who sent us back to survey saying that they tried to talk, but nobody was willing to

• 17:31Speaker 01

  talk to them. We had some people who said they couldn't find somebody to talk to, or nobody sat down next to them. We had a few like that. But, but people were not rejected here. And so I think that was really the barrier, is believing that other people weren't interested in talking to you. And that is a phenomenon we've seen across now, many, many different experiments of thinking that if I reach out to engage with you, you're not going to respond as positively as you actually do. And where that comes from are a few other kinds of mistakes that underlie that. We have different perspectives. We tend to focus on our competency, whereas other people tend to evaluate us in terms

• 18:14Speaker 01

  of our warmth. So when I turned to that stranger on the morning of the train with a smile and a hello and a little joke, being clearly, like genuinely friendly, that's what she cared about. I was worried about carrying on the conversation. She just wanted to know, was I a friendly person or not? And if I'm paying attention to the wrong thing, I'm going to underestimate how positively somebody is going to respond to my warmth. We also find that people neglect to consider the dynamics of social interaction. The most dominant norm driving social behavior is reciprocity. I say hi to you, overwhelmingly, you say hi back to me, right? I smile at you, you smile back to me. I wave at you, you wave back to me. It goes back and forth dynamically. But people don't seem to appreciate

• 18:59Speaker 01

  that dynamic, right? And then the last thing is that pessimism turns out to be self fulfilling. And so if, if there are seeds planted of doubt, right? I'm paying too much attention to my competency. I'm not appreciating positive reciprocity. Then I might not reach out to you. So Katie, if I thought that talking to you might be unpleasant, I get, you know, you get on the train, you got your earbuds in, you seem not to want to talk to me. I think it might be unpleasant. I won't try. And then I'll never find out that I might be wrong. Optimism gets calibrated because you try things. Pessimism, avoidance, tends to be self fulfilling because you don't reach out and try things. You don't get the data you need to calibrate your beliefs.

• 19:42Katy Milkman?

  That's such an interesting and important observation. I'm sure it underlies many, many of our mistakes and it's not one actually I've thought about enough. You've done some really interesting work showing that we expect having a deep conversation with a stranger will be particularly awkward. And in fact, when we do talk with strangers, they often welcome our personal revelations and empathize deeply with us. Could you talk a little bit about the studies you've done on this incorrect inference that will get an awkward interaction when we go deep and what you've taken away from them?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the same barrier that makes us reluctant to talk to strangers, right? That's, that's a choice. Social connection isn't something that just happens to us. It's a choice we make over and over again, when we choose to reach out and engage with somebody or choose to hold back and avoid them. And once we're talking with someone, right? Once we've gotten over that element of the choice, now we have to figure out what are we going to talk about? And if you think other people maybe aren't so interested, right? In going deeper, the same kind of thinking that keeps you from reaching out in the first place, then we might spend a lot more time than we need to in small talk. And indeed, in, in experiment after experiment, and now in public presentations that I do,

• 21:00Speaker 01

  I, I put people in experiments that ask them to have deeper conversations than they might normally. I see this phenomena over and over again. I'll put up on the screen, for instance, a series of questions that they're going to have a conversation with somebody else about. Questions like, if I was going to become a good friend of yours, what would be most important for me to know about you? What are you most grateful for in your life? Please tell me about it. Or can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? Right now, behavioral science nerds on this podcast will recognize that those questions come from Art and Elaine Aaron's Fast Friends Procedure. They're way in the deep end of that spectrum, typically deeper than the kinds of things we ask people when we're just getting to know them.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  And when I put up those questions, you just see this, you know, the air go right out of the room. Like everybody takes a deep breath. Some have swared audibly in the front row when I've done these things. Everybody's kind of eyeing the exits, wishing they, they kind of hadn't come to this session. Today, all of our incoming MBA students at Booth now do this, for instance. I then put them, I put a QR code up on the screen and I have them go to a survey and they tell me how they think the conversation is going to make them feel, how awkward it's going to be, how strong a bond they'll feel, how much they're going to like their partner, how much they'll have in common. And also ask them to tell me what choice they would want to make. Ask them about their preference. What would you prefer to do right now? Take a break, that is get up and leave, or have this conversation?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Okay. Now they don't get to enact that choice. What we then do is have them actually have this conversation. And once I do that, the problem I have is getting them to come back, right? They, they will wander off and I have a hard time getting them to stop talking. They then go back online to the survey and they tell me how the conversation actually made them feel, how awkward it actually was, how strong a bond they actually felt to their partner, how much they liked their partner, how much they actually had in common. And I have them tell me, what would you rather have done just now? Had that conversation or taken a break? And the gaps between their expectations beforehand and their experiences afterwards are just crushing.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  On average, about 33% of folks say, I'd rather take a break than have this conversation now. So you can imagine a third of people getting up and walking out. Afterwards, that 33% figure comes down to about 7%. Right? It's a huge, it's a huge difference.

• 23:27Katy Milkman?

  That's amazing.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And you can feel it. And what happens is people beforehand think that other people or anticipate that other people aren't going to be as interested in having this conversation as they will be. They don't think that their partner is going to open up and be as honest as they will be. And as a result, they think the conversation is going to be pretty mediocre. Afterwards, what they find out is that when I open up and invite you into a meaningful conversation with me, when I, when I actually can have a meaningful conversation with you, you tend to open up back to me as well. So after the conversation, they report that their partner was basically just as open and honest with them as they were to their, to their partner. And that's what makes it go better than expected.

• 24:12Katy Milkman?

  It's so interesting that we underestimate all of these benefits we get from talking to strangers. But one of the other really interesting things about your work is that not only do we think this will be socially awkward, that other people don't want to talk to us, that, you know, we won't enjoy it. We also don't expect to get a lot of information and value from these conversations. And I know you've also shown that we learn a lot from talking to strangers. Could you describe a little bit of that work that's shown?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:43Katy Milkman?

  How much value we're leaving on the table, not just in terms of happiness, but in terms of knowledge acquisition, which of course is near and dear to my heart.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah. I mean, I think about what you know, right? Most of what you know has come not from direct observation, but from other people, right? Not always talking with other people, but learning from other people. And yet, when you go into conversation with somebody, you have no idea what's between their ears. We think finding something in common with someone, like finding a needle in a haystack. And in some ways it is, but conversation is like finding a needle in a haystack with a magnet. Because the conversation tends to go in directions, particularly when it's open conversation, that's mutually interesting. And I start asking you questions about things that I'm interested in. You start telling me things that are related to the thing I'm interested in.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  And so naturally it goes in a direction, you know, if we have time and the, and the ability to do it, in a direction we find mutually interesting to us. And people don't seem to anticipate that. So in these experiments, what we do is we have people have a conversation where the topic is closed. It's kind of fixed. They can't, they can't really go lots of different places. Or the topic is open and it can go kind of anywhere we want it to go. And what people underestimate, really underestimate is how much they're going to learn in that open conversation, which suggests that what people are missing are the dynamic properties of conversation that cause it to ebb and flow in a direction that we tend to find mutually interesting. I was in an Uber a little bit ago in, in LA.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  And I can't stop thinking about this conversation. I sit down with the guy in the, in the Uber. He's Iranian. And I ask him, could you tell me how you feel about the war in Iran? Would it be okay for me to ask you that? And he starts, you know, I don't, I don't have a whole lot of love for the, for the regime there. And the conversation starts a little slow, but I, you know, keep asking, you know, a little more about his experience. And as the, as the ride unfolds, he starts telling me about his history there and about how he lost a son, 15 years old, shot in a protest there while he was in Doha, running his business, which had been very successful. He, he had four kids.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  He returned back to Iran to retrieve his son's body against all the advice that he had received. He shows up at the airport. He is arrested, thrown in a dark prison. He was in prison for six years. He's shown me the, the scars on his hands and his arms from being there. He eventually makes it to the United States. He applies for asylum over a period of years, is denied multiple times. Eventually gets his asylum claim approved on the day that his wife dies in the hospital from a coma that she had been in now for a while. She had really gone downhill after their son's death. At the end of this ride, 23 minutes, we're both in tears, hugging in the back of his car, right?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  In the trunk as we're getting out my luggage. This was a grizzled, older man who I never would have guessed was carrying that kind of pain with him, right? You just never know what's going on between somebody's ears when you reach out to connect with them. And when you invite somebody into a conversation, as, as I now have many, many times, I'm sometimes just blown away by the things, by the things you'll learn when you actually open up and let people tell you their story. I don't think he had ever told that story to someone before in his, in his car. And it's not like he's not thinking about that, right? And I had never imagined somebody in my midst carrying that with them.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  And it was, it was revelatory for me and, you know, as two fathers, it just was a moment. You really just felt a, a kinship with another human being, connecting really kind of on basic levels.

• 28:40Katy Milkman?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Katy Milkman?

  Nick, if our listeners could take just one actionable piece of advice from this conversation, what would you want it to be?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  What I would suggest is to be on guard for a certain set of beliefs, flags that go up in your mind, that you should just test in your own life, right? And those are the ones where you might like to reach out and engage with somebody, but boom, you got an alarm bell go off in your mind suggesting, mm, I'm not so sure that person wants to engage with me, right? And that's how I think you apply this in your own life. You just see opportunities to engage with people, to be kinder, friendlier, more welcoming. Look, I'm a college football player. I'm not the cuddliest guy. Historically, I have not been the cuddliest guy. It's just changed the way I live my life.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  It's made me more open. I've turned countless strangers into acquaintances, made my acquaintances better. I've gotten to know all kinds of people in the office. My friendships are better. I think I'm a better husband. I think I'm a better father. Not by one big thing, but by noticing when I'm often making that choice to avoid other people and just testing, what happens if I make it a little differently? And then you start to just make those choices differently.

• 30:00Katy Milkman?

  That's an amazing piece of advice. It also makes me think of all the work that we haven't had a chance to talk about, but that I try to live by, that you've done, showing that we underestimate the importance of acts of kindness and gratitude and compliments. And so I just really appreciate, and I want to compliment, your amazing research and all these insights, which truly have made my life better because I apply them constantly. And I know our listeners will have the same experience. So thank you for taking the time and for all of your stories and for telling us about your amazing daughter and adoption.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Thank you, Katie. I'm grateful for you giving me the chance to tell these stories and talk about our data.

• 30:45Katy Milkman?

  Nick Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and he's the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want, as well as the new book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection. You can find links to his research and the books in the show notes and at schwab.com/choiceology. One of the big takeaways from this episode is that we often hold back, assuming other people aren't interested in hearing from us, or that sharing more would be uncomfortable. That same instinct can show up in a conversation with a financial advisor.

• 31:28Katy Milkman?

  On the Financial Decoder podcast, there's an episode called, "What Should Your Advisor Know About You?" It explores how being more open can lead to better guidance and why we often underestimate that. You can listen by visiting schwab.com/financialdecoder or in your favorite podcast app. On commuter trains and in public parks, Nick's research has shown time and again that our social instincts are reliably wrong. We expect talking to strangers to be awkward. We expect them not to want to interact with us. And in almost every case, we're wrong in the same way.

• 32:10Katy Milkman?

  Other people are more open, more grateful, and more enriching than we imagine. The fix isn't complicated. It's just noticing when that warning bell goes off, the voice in your head saying, "She probably doesn't want to be bothered," or "He seems busy," or "This will be weird," and choosing to ignore it. And it's not just that we should be connecting more with strangers. The same instinct that keeps us from chatting on the train can keep us from opening up to the people whose job it is to help us: a financial advisor, a doctor, a lawyer, a coach. We may hold back, assuming that sharing too much will be awkward. Nick's research suggests that we're probably wrong about that, too.

• 32:54Katy Milkman?

  The more you let people in, the more they can actually help. Sometimes, the result of being a little more social is a pleasant commute. Sometimes, it's a 23-minute conversation that leaves two strangers in tears by a car trunk. And sometimes, if you're very lucky, it's a daughter with no filter on her hello. Speaking of what happens when we open up to the world, next time, I'll talk with Leslie John, professor of negotiations, organizations, and markets at the Harvard Business School.

• 33:37Katy Milkman?

  We'll chat about her new book, Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing, and we'll dive into the psychology of disclosure, discussing widespread misunderstandings of when disclosure helps us and when it harms us. And we'll explore the connection between vulnerability and trust, which ties right back to what we talked about today. Until then, if you're looking for more ways to use behavioral science to improve your own decision-making, you can check out my book, How to Change, or subscribe to my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. And if these episodes are helping you navigate your choices a little better, please take

• 34:21Katy Milkman?

  a moment to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or follow the show in your favorite app. I'm Katie Milkman. Thanks for listening. And if you get the chance this week, try striking up a conversation with a stranger.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/choiceology.