Escaping Perfectionism

Perfectionism is everyone’s favorite flaw. It’s easy to assume that our push to be perfect is what leads to academic, athletic, and professional success. But how do we distinguish between high standards and unrealistic expectations? This week, we bring you a favorite conversation with psychologist Thomas Curran. He says perfectionism has a dark side, and that there are much healthier ways to strive for excellence. Then, we bring you the latest edition of our segment "Your Questions Answered." Sociologist Allison Pugh returns to the show to respond to listener questions about connective labor — the work of seeing another person, and having that person feel seen.

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

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. They're on our TVs, on our phones, and on highway billboards. Flawless, air-brushed images of beautiful people, living beautiful lives.

• 0:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Their complexions glow, their wealth seems effortless, and their children are always smiling.

• 0:25Shankar Vedantam?

  All of us are surrounded by these pictures of perfection, pictures that contrast all too starkly with our own complicated, messy lives. Social media platforms exacerbate this. Friends post pictures of their idyllic vacations. Colleagues announce promotions. A lot of people use the hashtag #Blessed.

• 0:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Meanwhile, divorces, demotions, and despair, or the challenges of making ends meet, these show up rarely or not at all.

• 1:02Shankar Vedantam?

  What is the effect of the sharp contrast between the worlds we are shown and the worlds we ourselves inhabit? We may remind ourselves that what we are seeing has been airbrushed and filtered, but the contrast still burrows into our unconscious minds.

• 1:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Some researchers have argued that this contrast produces in us nagging feelings of inferiority, shame, and resentment. It causes us to feel we never have enough and to reach endlessly for the next ring, the next achievement, the next milestone. The Castes of Chasing Perfection, this week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:00Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:31Speaker 01

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• 3:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us, learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable, online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at SNHU.edu/brain.

• 3:35Shankar Vedantam?

  F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, describes the story of a man who desperately tried to climb the social ladder. The final lines of the novel are amongst the most famous in literature. They read, "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow, we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther, and one fine morning..." So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

• 4:14Shankar Vedantam?

  At the London School of Economics, psychologist Thomas Curran studies how many of us are modern versions of Jay Gatsby. He explores the psychological consequences of living in a culture that is obsessed with appearance and achievement. Thomas Curran, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Thomas, you grew up in a working class family in a small town in England. And as a teenager, you were acutely aware of the social status of two friends, Kevin and Ian, and the contrast with your own family's means. Can you paint me a picture of what that was like?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my upbringing was one of love and support, but also material lack. We didn't have a great deal of money. And one of my earliest memories of that is going to school with the wrong backpack or the wrong pencil case, the wrong brand of sneakers. I didn't have gadgets like a Game Boy or a Playstation. Phones were just coming in then, I didn't have one of those either. And when I compared myself with these two characters, Kevin and Ian, who had all of those things and were able to express, I guess, their personalities and their identities with these material goods. You kind of feel like, even though this is all stupid stuff, right?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Just stuff, but it really matters to a kid, especially if you don't have it. So as I grew older and things like cars started to come into the picture, this kind of shame really started to get really into my bones. And that was huge, actually. Cars was a massive part of this because cars are kind of the ultimate status symbol, right? You just look at how they're advertised. All my friends were bought these really super sleek cars with modifications and all the rest of it. And that was like really crushing for me. That was really embarrassing not to be able to have one too. I didn't have the freedom that they had, I couldn't go anywhere. I was just tagged along really in the backseat. And I suppose this is where I first learnt about shame,

• 6:13Speaker 02

  what it meant to feel ashamed and embarrassed about where I am in life and what I have. And I sort of learned that you kind of got to buy your way out of that shame in this world. And that became, I guess, an early motivation.

• 6:30Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that at one point Kevin and Ian asked you what car you were going to be buying, Thomas. What did they ask you? What did you say?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  So they had these, what we call hot hatchbacks in the UK, you know, the really fast, exciting pieces of machinery, I suppose. And everybody around the town would be asking, you know, what car are you going to get? And you're going to get this one, you're going to get that one, you're going to get these plates? And what about these trims and these wheels? You know, I used to love looking at car magazines and craving for a car of my own. And I would always say, you know, well, I'm going to have this and I'm going to have that. And when I get my car, it's going to have a silver trim and chrome wheels and all of these things that everybody else was talking about. I would say that one day my dad's going to come back and he's going to buy me a car

• 7:22Speaker 02

  or it's not going to be long now, you know. I kind of wished, I hoped that that would happen. But of course, unlike them, my family didn't have the means to be able to buy me these things. And it wasn't my fault, there was nothing that I could have done to change those circumstances. But you feel in some way that you're inadequate, you're less than.

• 7:45Shankar Vedantam?

  So later on in life, you were determined to get ahead and you became the first in your family to go to college. You had a fearsome work ethic. Tell me about it, Thomas.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  So I came through the education system, actually a really unique time. In the UK, Tony Blair was the Prime Minister and he had a great education push at that time. This was the late 90s, early noughties. And there was a lot of financing to go to university. So I took that up and I managed to scrape my way to a local teaching college to study sport. With every intention of being a PE teacher, that was going to be my ambition. And I guess you could say I was lucky really, because at my time at that teaching college, I happened to intersect with a professor who was on his way to a more prestigious university. I must have impressed him because he took me with him to do a PhD. And that was when things started to really get quite crazy.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Because I remember instantly being inside this hyper competitive university environment, being surrounded by people who were just way smarter than me, more erudite, way more put together. People were pumping out publications, some of them were even getting grant money. And in that environment, those early feelings of shame and inferiority that are kind of brought with me started to come back again in mega doses. And I think my response, really, looking back, was to develop what can I really describe as an urgent need to lift myself above other people through an excessive form of striving.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Like, made sure I was the first in the office and the last to leave and made sure people saw that. You know, I'd regularly do 80 hour weeks and I'd let everybody know in the office that I was doing that. I sent these kind of weird conspicuous emails to my academic supervisors in the early hours of the morning and sometimes last thing at night, just to let them know that I'm working. And I can remember one Christmas, doing a thousand words in my thesis on Christmas Day. And at that time, I felt really proud of it. You know, these are incredibly unhealthy things to do. But nevertheless, I believed if I didn't do these things, then there's no way I was going to succeed.

• 10:08Shankar Vedantam?

  So you eventually achieved prominence in your field. You got a job at a top tier university. And your new status lifted you into unfamiliar realms where you often felt out of place. You were once invited, for example, to give a high profile speech at a fancy resort where people had paid a lot of money to attend this event. Tell me what happened, Thomas.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so all that work did end up paying off and I was able to elevate myself uh through the academic la- up the academic ladder, I should say, into second tier and then elite institutions. And that's when I did a very important TED Talk at a resort in the US back in two thousand and eighteen. And I think going to that TED Talk was when I finally realised I'd sort of made something of myself here. But nevertheless, I really felt out of place at that conference. There's people there who were paying thousands of pounds. Uh they were from, you know, you talk to them, they're from this mega firm or that

• 11:13Speaker 02

  mega firm or that big industry. And it was kind of overwhelming a little bit. And they'd sort of just carried themselves with confidence. And again, this kind of really picked at my thoughts of inferiority. And and the weird thing was, I was the one on the stage. Yeah, like I was the one who they were there to see.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Now, how many times have you heard that one?

• 11:41Shankar Vedantam?

  How did the talk itself go? Give me a sense of the preparation you put in and how the talk itself was delivered and how it was received.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  So the talk itself was extremely nerve wracking. But I'm not a natural speaker. It's not something that I ever thought I would do. And I've kind of just been thrust into in a profession that kind of requires you to be pretty good at speaking. So one of the things I do to combat the anxiety that's associated with that is to overthink things, over prepare, because in my mind, that's the most fail safe way to make sure things don't go wrong. It's so important that you don't show an ounce of weakness or vulnerability, because in that moment, things can cascade, they can spiral. And when it's so public, that's when you feel like your deficiencies or shortcomings are

• 12:31Speaker 02

  being exposed. And in the end, I was able to recite a fifteen minute talk, word for word, without any mistakes, which was incredibly important for me. But at the same time,

• 12:43Speaker 02

  It wasn't the most charismatic of talks. It wasn't the most inspirational, but I did it. And people were very polite and they applauded and I'm sure they appreciated it. But at the same time, you could tell that it wasn't quite the showstopping talk that perhaps other people at the conference had been able to deliver. And that, you know, you do think about that.

• 13:09Shankar Vedantam?

  So in the aftermath of the talk, when you sort of look back on it, did you remember sort of the polite applause? What portion of it did you end up ruminating on?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  I was very aware that, you know, it wasn't a rousing speech that others had delivered. And so I wondered, you know, okay, did it look stilted? You know, was it very one dimensional or monotonic? You know, was I able to convey the ideas in a way that changed people or in some way made them think differently about the topic? You know, these were the goals I had going in, but I wasn't sure in those moments where I'd actually achieved them.

• 13:43Shankar Vedantam?

  So your anxieties about your shortcomings reached something of a peak after a romantic relationship ended, Thomas. Tell me about that period in your life and what happened.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  It was a very messy breakup that happened in a really exposing way. And it was something that made me feel very humiliating. Humiliate, excuse me. I worried about how it would look to other people. I trust eyes myself about that breakup and what it said about me. And that was turning itself into all sorts of negative beliefs about myself. You know, why can't you snap out of it? Why can't you just get through this? So I felt a lot of self loathing, a lot of shame, a lot of grief. And I went into a really dark place in those moments. And what I needed to do more than anything else was to just stop and deal with the emotional plunge that I was experiencing.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  But my personality wouldn't let me do that. And if anything, I was trying to push myself even harder to overcompensate for the things that are now starting to go wrong as a function of the breakup and how it impacted on my emotional wellbeing.

• 14:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Some months later, Thomas was working in his office when he started to see flashes. He had no idea what was going on.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  And the flashes started to get brighter, they started to obscure what I could see. I couldn't concentrate on the thing I was reading. I had trouble breathing, my throat became really tight. And so I tried to get some water, but that was no use. I ran out into the open road and tried to suck the fresh air, but none of it was really working. And it just started to take over and this panic was starting to feed the panic. And then you worry, what on earth is going on? Am I dying? Is this it? And then after a few minutes of complete meltdown, I would say, my body just started to come back to me.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  I was able to regulate my breathing, my heart rate came down and I was almost, I suppose, back in the world again. And at the time, and I didn't know what on earth that was, and I'm sure many of your listeners can resonate, but that was a panic attack that comes from the bursting of the dam of this kind of suppressed anxiety that we're just holding back. And that panic attack was really the first of many, but it was an eye opener for me and showed me that the way that I was approaching life, trying to achieve, trying to prove to everybody that I was good enough, was actually coming at a great expense for mental health.

• 16:30Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, Thomas explores the root of his self doubt and self castigation and discovers that his affliction is all too common in our modern world. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 16:54Shankar Vedantam?

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• 17:57Shankar Vedantam?

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• 18:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 18:52Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. A few years ago, an electronic trading platform ran an ad that was simultaneously funny, sad, and revealing. A young man sits on an airplane. The kid in the seat behind him kicks his tray table into the young man's backrest over and over again. Glimpsing a better world in the front of the aircraft, the young man makes his way to an open curtain. In the first-class cabin, beautiful people lounge on spacious sofas. They drink champagne in long-stemmed glasses. But just as the young man thinks he's going to be invited into the special world, the open curtain is slammed shut.

• 19:34Shankar Vedantam?

  The tagline reads, "First class is there to remind you you're not in first class."

• 19:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Psychologist Thomas Curran knows all about that curtain. He has seen it in his own life, but also in the lives of his students.

• 19:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Thomas, your students at the London School of Economics are smart and hardworking, but many of them come to you in a state of distress. You talk about one student whom you call John, who exemplified this phenomenon. What was John's story?

• 20:08Speaker 02

  What I see in young people and students that come through the door is a lot of tension that's bound up in a intense need to excel. And all of my students at some level feel this, but there was definitely a vivid case in John, who I think was a very extreme case of that intense desire and need to do things perfectly, excellently, to excel at all times. He would constantly come to me in meetings, telling me that his grades weren't good enough, even though they were really high, that they weren't good enough, that he didn't feel like he was succeeding in the measure that he expected of himself.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  And no matter really how I tried to reconcile those things and tell him that what he's doing is exceptional, he always recasted those successes as abject failures and how he'd let himself and other people down. And this was... It was so sad because John really found it difficult to see his successes in any other way. And his justification really at all times was very simple. How could he be a success when he was trying so much harder than other people just to get the same outcomes? Well, that's the thing with being at LSE, everyone's exceptional. And not being able to derive any lasting satisfaction from success is really a kind of signature of

• 21:32Speaker 02

  the way my students interpret their experience at university. They find it difficult to deal with setbacks. And I think sometimes we misunderstand this as being fragile or young people lacking resilience. But but really, it's just excessive self-imposed pressures and a deep and profound fear of failure.

• 21:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So Thomas, you eventually came to recognize that both you and and students like John were suffering from the same affliction. What was your insight?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  So it became evident to me that myself, my students, and many, many people around me were struggling with something called perfectionism, a need and desire to do things perfectly and nothing but perfectly, that comes from a sense of lack, a sense of inferiority, a sense of deficiency, a sense that I'm not perfect. And in order to gain approval and validation in this world that I'm worth something, that I matter, that I need to be perfect.

• 22:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So you've conducted a study that has tracked levels of perfectionism over time. What do you find?

• 22:51Speaker 02

  So we found recently that perfectionism is increasing among more recent generations of young people. This was a study we did back now in two thousand and sixteen, two thousand and seventeen, essentially looking at college student data of perfectionism. So we have about thirty years' worth of perfectionism data, looking at various indicators of perfectionism.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  And we found when we ran the numbers that perfectionism was increasing and increasing really rapidly. It's up about forty percent since nineteen eighty nine. And that's concerning because it's associated most strongly with negative mental health outcomes like depression, anxiety, self-harm. And this hard data is telling us something significant and something that we need to be paying attention to.

• 23:41Shankar Vedantam?

  So perfectionism is really fascinating because unlike many other flaws, many people celebrate this trait. You call perfectionism our favorite flaw. What do you mean by that?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Perfectionism is something that I think in modern society is lionized, celebrated. We know it carries self-sacrificial patterns of behavior, makes us feel a little bit miserable. But nevertheless, we also think that perfectionism is what carries us forward and makes us successful, a necessary evil, so to speak, something that if we want to get ahead, we might need a bit of perfectionism.

• 24:23Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, this has become something of a joke as well, Thomas. In many job interviews, when candidates are asked to name a flaw, many of them will say, I'm a perfectionist.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And recruiters, time after time, tell us that that's the most overused cliche in job interviews. And I think it says something about what we consider to be socially desirable weaknesses, that if somehow we can communicate that we're willing to sacrifice ourselves in some way and push ourselves beyond comfort, that that is something they'll see as positive, something that they really want on their team or in their organization. So that speaks really to the ubiquity of perfectionism at the moment.

• 25:05Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to spend a moment talking about what perfectionism is and what it's not, because I think many of us might use the same word but mean different things by it. Many people might say perfectionism is about setting high standards and working hard to meet them, but that's very different, I think, from your definition. You say perfectionism is less about pursuing success and more about avoiding failure. One of its hallmarks is something you call a deficit orientation. What do you mean by this term?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  So a lot of people associate perfectionism with really high standards, that's true. But actually, perfectionism is far, far deeper than what we see on the surface. Because what's really matters is where it's coming from. And where those excessive amounts of striving and high standards and go-getting attitudes that you see on the surface are coming from in the perfectionistic people is is a place of lack, a sense that I'm not good enough, that I'm not perfect enough. And I need to prove to other people all the time that I'm worth something, that I matter in this world.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  And the way that I do that is through being perfect, because of course, if I'm perfect, I'll get their validation. And that will make me feel better. That will soothe those shame-based fears of not being good enough.

• 26:27Shankar Vedantam?

  So two people could work very hard, they can both have high standards, they can both care about getting things right. You know, but one person might just be conscientious while the other person is a perfectionist. And the distinction you're drawing is really what's driving them on the inside. Are you chasing success or are you fleeing failure? But there are also some external markers of perfectionism. And when perfectionists encounter adversity, you found they often respond with shame and with guilt. Can you explain what that means, Thomas?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  So what we see in the lab is exactly what I experienced when I encountered that breakup in my own life. When you put perfectionistic people in stressful situations, perfectionism will aggravate the stress. So every time you go into the lab, you tell perfectionistic people to do stressful things, like maybe give a public talk or complete a competitive task against other people. And in the end, you say you didn't do very well or you failed. What you'll see is perfectionistic people respond with intense amounts of self-conscious emotion, lots of shame, lots of guilt about having slipped up in some way, particularly

• 27:42Speaker 02

  if that slip up is public. It validates in them a sense that that fear that they're not good enough. Whereas people who score lower on the perfectionism scales, well, yes, of course, these things do have an impact on their emotional state, but it's a far less profound impact and they're able to bounce back quite quickly.

• 28:08Shankar Vedantam?

  You told me that after that talk that you gave, you engaged in a lot of brooding and rumination about how the talk went and you're worried that it had not landed properly or what could have gone better. But you're also seeing this in the data, that perfectionists engage in a lot of brooding and rumination and revisiting things over and over again.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, perfectionistic people, people who are higher in the perfectionism spectrum, what you tend to see is they also score higher on what we would call self-sabotaging thought patterns. So things like you mentioned, worry, rumination, they're really hypervigilant about where they sit relative to others, how they're performing relative to others. They find it very difficult to exist in the moment or be mindful or appreciate successes.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  And so perfectionistic people really find it difficult to thrive or flourish because they're constantly worried about what's going to go wrong or how other people are doing.

• 29:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, perfectionistic people often work very hard, but one of the really curious insights that you and others have had is that they often don't pay attention to working smartly. They're sometimes indifferent to what's called diminishing productivity returns. What does this mean, Thomas?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's a really curious finding, actually, in the perfectionism literature. We know perfectionists work really hard and they push themselves well beyond comfort into a zone of declining and diminishing returns for every little bit of effort that they put in. Failure is very common among perfectionist people because the goals that they set themselves are way too high. And, and even if they do succeed, perfectionism really just turns those successes into dead ends. Because the better we do, the better we feel like we're expected to do. And so we just continually keep ourselves on tiptoes, clinging for more and more. I suppose it's like running on a, on a treadmill that, that never slows down.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Um. So it's really tough, the success equation for perfectionists, because they really never feel like they've ever made it.

• 30:27Shankar Vedantam?

  You and others have argued that perfectionists sometimes engage in what is called perfectionistic self-preservation. What is this idea, Thomas?

• 30:36Speaker 02

  So this is the second reason, I think, why we don't see very strong correlations between perfectionism and performance. When things start to go wrong, perfectionists do something really, really interesting. They withhold their effort in order to save face, to kind of preserve their, their image and their sense of self. And we've done a lot of experiments looking at this phenomenon. And one of the most illuminating, those experiments is when a colleague of mine, Andrew Hill, took people into the lab, gave them a cycling task and said, you've got to complete a certain distance in a certain amount of time.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  And based on your fitness, you should be able to do X amount of distance. So he got them going with the task and everybody worked really hard to meet the goal. And at the end, he told them, no matter how well they did, that you failed. Now, what's really interesting here is that after telling people they failed, he asked them to do it again. And that's where something remarkable happened because people who didn't have a great deal of perfectionism, on that second attempt after the first failure. Didn't really change the amount of effort they put in, if anything, it went up slightly. But the people who scored high on perfectionism did the exact opposite. They withheld their effort on the second attempt. Because the thinking in their mind is you can't fail at something you didn't try.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  And if I put all of myself into this first effort and still didn't make it, well, I'm not gonna do that again. Because the feelings of shame and embarrassment were so intense that I just don't wanna feel those things again. And so this is, this is the perfectionism paradox, I suppose. This is that they really are so intensely fearful of that failure that when it looks like it's going to be a very likely outcome of anything that we're doing, then they take themselves away from those situations. That's incredibly self sabotaging. It doesn't just like, look like complete withdrawal, by the way, it can also come in the form of procrastination. So we'll remove ourselves from doing activities that are really difficult in the moment because the anxiety is so intense. All of those things are not at all conducive to performance.

• 32:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So I guess this is why you would say you would not want to have a perfectionist who is the pilot of your plane or a surgeon carrying out an operation on you.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  There is no way you would want someone like me flying your plane. Because if an engine suddenly craps out at thirty five thousand feet, you're gonna need somebody who's able to think very clearly about the procedures. There's gonna be, by the way, no perfect way to get out of that situation. There's gonna be many, many good enough ways to get out of that situation. And what a perfectionist will do will search for the perfect outcome. Whereas somebody who is more conscientious, meticulous or diligent, they'll be able to know that there are many different options that we can take. And the most important thing is to take the option that lands the plane safely.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  And that's the same with a surgeon, that's the same with, you know, working in a nuclear plant. Any of these kind of very high risk activities, conscientiousness, diligence, really important qualities, but not perfection.

• 33:57Shankar Vedantam?

  So Thomas, research has found that there's not just one kind of perfectionism, but really three, and each type comes with its own particular kind of psychological hardship. The first might be exemplified by something that happened a few years ago to a tennis player named Mikhail Yushni. At one point, he was the number one player in Russia and a top 10 player in the world. During a match at the Miami Open in 2008, he missed a point and slammed his own face with his racket. After the third blow, with blood streaming down his face, he required medical attention. Would he be an example of what you would call a self-oriented perfectionist, people who subject themselves to incredibly harsh criticism?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I saw that point, actually, I remember it well, and it was at the end of a very long rally in which, really, the shot that was missed was one of the easiest shots. And that intense emotion and outburst that came from a place of just complete self-loathing for the fact that, having made all of these really tough shots, you couldn't make the easy one. And these are the intense expectations that self-oriented perfectionistic people hold themselves to.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  And the moment they fall short of it, particularly in very important situations, the self-loathing, the sense of how on earth could you have been so stupid, what on earth are you thinking, how could you have let yourself make that mistake, can be really so intense that, in the extreme cases like this one, they can engage in some really quite aggressive self-castigation. And that's a signature of a self-oriented perfectionist. There is just simply a lack of self-compassion and a strong sense of self-loathing.

• 35:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Some years ago, Thomas, Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor, wrote a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. And at one point in the book, she tells her older daughter that if her piano playing isn't perfect, she is going to take her stuffed animals and burn them. I want to play you a clip of a book interview with the author on PBS.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  If you read the back of your book, it explains how to be a tiger mother. There's a long list of things you didn't allow your children to do, your two girls. Let me read a couple of them. They were never allowed to attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the number one student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin. When you hear that list read to you, does it sound extreme?

• 36:44Speaker 04

  Well, it sounds tongue in cheek to me, but it doesn't sound so extreme. And you know, when I talk to a lot of immigrants or immigrants' kids, they find it hysterical. They know that it's poking fun a little bit, but it really captures some truth.

• 36:58Shankar Vedantam?

  So that is a remarkable interview. I was really struck when the interviewer listed the number of things that Amy Chua kept her kids from doing. Now, what I'm hearing is that Amy Chua feels that some of what she wrote was over the top. But I'm wondering, Thomas, do you feel that this clip captures what you call other-oriented perfectionism?

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, other-oriented perfectionism is when we turn perfectionism outwards onto other people and we expect them to be perfect and nothing but perfect. And we'll certainly let them know. You'll know an other-oriented perfectionist when you meet one. They tend to be quite brash. They will let you know when things haven't gone quite to plan. And it's what we call, I suppose, what Freud would call "projection," the sense that my intense desire to be perfect is projected outwards onto you too.

• 37:49Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, Steve Jobs had a reputation for being like this. People described him as, you know, berating other people for not living up to his high expectations. What's the line here between someone who has high expectations and is a demanding manager or a demanding boss and somebody who is an other-oriented perfectionist?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Well, the line is really the inability to accept at any time that things are good enough. Whereas, you know, someone that's demanding yes, wants high standards, yes, is also somebody who can accept and appreciate when things have gone well, when there's been a success, and can give praise and appreciation for that. And I think that's the difference.

• 38:31Shankar Vedantam?

  A third type of perfectionism is known as socially prescribed perfectionism. Explain this idea to me, Thomas.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Socially prescribed perfectionism is the most extreme form of perfectionism, and it's a perfectionism that comes from outside. A sense that everybody and all around me expects me to be perfect, and they're watching and waiting to pounce if I show any form of weakness. And carrying that around of you all the time is really tough. You need to be perfect at all times. You need to make sure that your life is curated to show other people, you know, there are no weaknesses. And that is really tough to live under that microscope and to think that everybody in all times is watching.

• 39:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So you found that socially prescribed perfectionism might be rising fastest amongst all the kinds of perfectionism in our society. Can you talk a little bit about what the data show and why this might be happening?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Essentially, what we're seeing today is a rise of about 40% in socially prescribed perfectionism from the late 1980s to the present day. That's a really, really big rise, which continues to increase.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  And it's most concerning because it's most strongly correlated with really quite negative mental health outcomes like anxiety, depression, low mood, a sense of hopelessness and helplessness, so things that are really quite significant when it comes to our mental health. And I think it's indicative perhaps of what I've called a hidden epidemic of unrelenting expectations for perfection which are kind of taking over among young people.

• 40:18Shankar Vedantam?

  And why do you think this might be the case?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Obviously, the one that most people point to is social media and the comparative lens that social media offers us 24/7 and without escape. But it's not just images of perfection in social media, it's unrelenting pressures to excel in schools and colleges, it's the modern workplace and the intense pressures to hustle and grind, it's changing parenting practices, they're responding to pressures in schools and colleges, and you know, the more competitive landscape to get into elite college by pushing young people in the realm of education. So there's all sorts of different pressures now that are weighing on young people and they're being internalized as pressures to be perfect.

• 41:06Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to escape the perfectionist trap. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 41:33Shankar Vedantam?

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• 42:05Speaker 05

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• 42:29Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Thomas Curran is the author of The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough. Thomas, you call yourself a recovering perfectionist, and you've talked about the ways in which you're working to relinquish your perfectionism. And yet, someone looking at you from the outside would see a prominent professor with a job at a top school, someone who writes books and articles and gives talks that garner wide attention. Someone might say, clearly perfectionism worked for Thomas. It got him to where he is today. How would you respond to that?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Well, clearly, my perfectionism has pushed me forward in moments where I've needed it to. But the reason why I'm here is because I was very, very fortunate to come through at a time where people like me were supported to go to university, where it just so happened to me the right professor at the right time. He took me to the right university. But without those remarkable moments of luck, I wouldn't be here. The second thing to say is that I look, I guess, on the surface, like a very successful individual. And in many ways, I suppose I am. But I can't afford to live in the city that I work. I don't have a house.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  I've had to put off things like having a family and relationships. I've lived in countless different homes. I can't set root in communities or build a long and lasting friendship group because my life has just been essentially one long period of flux. So, yes, it looks like success, but it doesn't feel like success. And when I look and reflect on this journey and how difficult it's been and the sacrifices I've had to make, I sometimes question whether I might have been better off back in my working-class community with a job that gives me some sense of purpose, with a family and a house and a community. Maybe I would be happier.

• 44:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Is it possible that for some people perfectionism might be something they say, yes, it's a curse, yes, it's psychologically unhealthy, but yes, also, I'm glad I chose this life. I don't know if Steve Jobs was or wasn't a perfectionist, but if he was, you know, I suspect that if he was around, he would tell us, you know, I got to start a $3 trillion company. And yes, I drove myself and everyone around me nuts, but that's what I did, and it was worth it. Would that be okay for him to say it was worth it? Or do we get to diagnose him from the outside?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  No, I don't think we get to speak for Steve Jobs at all. If somebody carries perfectionism around with them and they're really successful, and they, yes, they go through all of the things that I've experienced, and for them, it's worth it, then who am I to tell them that that isn't the case? All I can say, from what I understand about the work that I've done and my own experiences, is that perfectionism carries a really heavy cost, and that actually, there's plenty of evidence that we can be just as successful, if not more successful, and not carrying around the emotional baggage that we carry around with perfectionism.

• 45:54Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the people who might fit that bill is the writer Margaret Atwood. She's written nearly the equivalent of a book a year over six decades. When asked how she does it, she says, I'm not a perfectionist. That's one clue. So it's possible you can be very productive and get a lot of things done and not be a perfectionist. In fact, it might even be easier to get a lot of things done when you're not a perfectionist.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  And you'd be a lot more happy to. I think Margaret Atwood is a great example of someone who can combine a desire, a joy, a real sense of purpose and vocation in what she does, i.e. writing, and being able to do that in a way that doesn't carry with it this kind of constant self-worry and self-doubt about it being perfect. Or exceptional. And really perfectionism is the thief of creativity in many ways. It stops us from putting things out there when they're not quite right, because we worry about how that's going to be received. And I could tell you that firsthand from having written a book. You know, my editor, I think, was ready to throttle me at the end of the

• 47:00Speaker 02

  process, because I was still tinkering iterating right to the end. And it was so intensely difficult to get this one out. And Atwood has almost the opposite perspective. There seems to be a joy and an embrace of the process in her writing. And that really comes through in her pages. And it really comes through in her self analysis of how she writes and why she writes and the motivations behind it. So I think she's a really good example, actually, of how you can be incredibly successful. You can contribute so much to the world and not be a perfectionist.

• 47:41Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, we're talking about perfectionism mostly in a work context in this conversation. And that is perhaps where perfectionism mostly manifests itself. But it can also show up in the domestic sphere. There's a phrase you like, the good enough mother. Tell me the story of Donald Winnicott.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Donald Winnicott was an English pediatrician, and he wrote extensively on parenting in the 1950s. And his idea of the good enough mother was something that was of a bombshell, I suppose, to mothers of the day who were holding themselves up to really impossible standards that were being placed on them in terms of the way they parent and the way they raised their children. And the idea of the good enough mother wasn't simply that perfect mothering or perfect parenting is not possible. Of course, it's not possible. But it was also that it's not even desirable for the mother themselves, but also for the child. Because the child needs to learn about setbacks, difficulties, things not going quite to plan. And they need to know how to handle and deal with the frustrations and

• 48:43Speaker 02

  disappointments of those moments, because the world is going to present those things to us all the time. And I think those were the key lessons that Winnicott really wanted to instill in mothers, that the good enough mother can help to raise children that are well adjusted and happy and have a zest and purpose for life.

• 49:08Shankar Vedantam?

  You say there are steps that we can take as individuals to reduce the harmful effects of perfectionism. And one of the things that you've mentioned to me, Thomas, is that perfectionists tend to engage in a lot of rigid and unrealistic thinking. They tell themselves, I must perform flawlessly, and if I don't perform flawlessly, everything around me is going to fall apart. You have a writing technique that you use for yourself and that you recommend to others that pushes back against this kind of thinking. What do you do?

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so perfectionism indeed involves those really intrusive patterns of thinking. I must do this, I have to do that. Why can't you be this? Why can't you do that? And I think the most important thing to do when those feelings are starting to make themselves known to you is to write them down, think about them, reflect on them, and ask yourself, maybe on a scale of one to 10, how realistic is this? How achievable is this? And importantly, do I actually need to do this right now? What if I don't? What would happen? And again, often the consequence is when we actually sit down and reflect, and not

• 50:20Speaker 02

  as catastrophic as your perfectionism would have you think that they might be.

• 50:25Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, so often, Thomas, perfectionism is about seeing our work and our accomplishments as extensions of ourselves. But of course, we don't have to do this. Instead of making ourselves the focus, we can make our work the focus. Now, you had a role model close to home who exemplified this idea of the work being its own reward. Tell me about your grandfather.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  My late grandfather was a master craftsman, and I used to watch him for hours as he would fashion everyday things like banisters, chairs, window frames in his workshop. And they were immaculate. From the vantage point of a child, they just seemed magical. How on earth were you able to create these wonderful pieces of furniture? And of course, his meticulousness, his diligence, his conscientiousness, his high standards were unquestionably the traits of somebody who worked really hard and wanted to do things well, but they weren't the traits of a perfectionist. And, you know,

• 51:30Speaker 02

  when I reflected on his way of striving versus mine, it became evident to me really that the big difference was that when he had created the things that he created in his workshop, he just took them to where they were going to live and left them there. He didn't loiter for validation, he didn't need that five-star review. And as far as he was concerned, they just needed to exist way more than he needed to be loved or recognized or appreciated. And that is the thing about high standards, I think. They really don't have to come with insecurity. Only perfectionism grasps the two together. And that's why perfection

• 52:10Speaker 02

  isn't about perfecting things or tasks. It's about perfecting our imperfect selves and going through life trying to conceal every last blemish and shortcoming from those around us. So whenever I'm back home, I visit the places where my grandfather's carpentry is still installed, because all those banisters and stairs and window frames that he brought into the world are really evidence of a man who had a vocation way bigger than himself. And of course, none of those things bear his name, but they're used and enjoyed by hundreds of people every single day. And I think just knowing that gave him an incredible sense of pride and accomplishment. And that's a wonderful way to live and one in which I'm hoping in myself that I can also find that.

• 53:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Thomas Curran is a psychologist at the London School of Economics. He's the author of The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough. Thomas, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 53:17Shankar Vedantam?

  If you liked today's episode on perfectionism, please consider sharing it with one or two people in your life who could benefit from it. You know who they are.

• 53:28Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, your questions answered. Sociologist Allison Pugh returns to the show to answer listener questions about connective labor and why feeling seen by other people is so powerful and underappreciated. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 54:58Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever been to a doctor's office and felt your physician was not really paying attention to you? Or maybe a time when a teacher seemed more interested in her computer than in you, the student sitting before her? You've certainly had a meal with someone and noticed them drop out of the conversation to check their phone. Why do we experience these moments so keenly? And are we aware when we are not fully present for others? What is the cost of such social disconnection?

• 55:33Shankar Vedantam?

  At Johns Hopkins University, sociologist Allison Pugh studies how we relate to one another. She's the author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World.

• 55:48Shankar Vedantam?

  In this edition of Your Questions Answered, we've asked Alison to return to the show to answer your questions about connection. If you missed our earlier episodes with Alison, you can find them in this podcast feed. The first is called Relationships 2.0: The Price of Disconnection, and the second, available to Hidden Brain Plus subscribers, is called Relationships 2.0: Recovering the Human Touch. In that first conversation, Alison told me a story about growing up as the youngest of five children in her family. When she was about three years old, her family moved to New York City, and her parents had to find schools for all the children to attend.

• 56:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, so my father was busy at work, and my mother was kind of in charge of figuring out what schools the kids would go to. And she solved the problem for my oldest brother, and he was, I think, 14. And then my sister, then my brother, then my sister. And then, you know, I think somewhere around August, she looks down and she sees me and is like, wait a minute, I don't have a place for you to go. So, you know, I think she, you know, made some last-minute arrangement that got me into a preschool.

• 57:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Alison laughs about the moment now, but she did notice that her mom had basically ignored her. In our second conversation, she recalled another moment, this time as a grown-up, when she felt unseen, or at least, misseen. She was working in the Foreign Service, and a senior diplomat made an assumption about her.

• 57:21Speaker 07

  My familial background involves, I have, you know, some Irish in me, and a big portion of my identity is Italian. And my family has recipes for lasagna, and red sauce, and calamari, and stuffed peppers. And, you know, like, I am an Italian-raised cook. And so- So when I was about 24, 25, I was in Honduras as a Foreign Service Officer. In my, in Honduras, they have, the garlic they sell is unusually small. The cloves are really tiny. And I remember my ambassador kind of joking about how hard it was to cook with these tiny little. And then he's looking at me, he goes, what do you know, you know, about, why am I talking to you about this?

• 58:06Speaker 07

  You're just some wasp. You don't know anything about garlic. And I was just taken aback by the misread, like he had no idea. You know, I might look like a wasp on the outside. That's my father's background. But, you know, he had no idea that, you know, my great grandmother was a contract bride from Southern Italy. You know, she was not literate. And he saw this external self and not, not this part that, you know, is actually a big part of my identity. So that was a misread, I would say.

• 58:37Shankar Vedantam?

  So when he sees you as, as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but in fact, that doesn't align with how you see yourself, how did that change your relationship with him? And how did it change how you experienced that moment, Alison?

• 58:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it was a kind of jarring moment because, but I did still know he was a nice guy. There was nothing pernicious about it, but there was, it did make us a little more distant, you know, or it did make me see, it helped me understand how little he knew who he was talking to.

• 59:09Shankar Vedantam?

  Alison, one of the primary ideas we talked about in our previous conversations is what you call connective labor. What is connective labor?

• 59:19Speaker 07

  So connective labor is the work of seeing the other person and having the other person feel seen. And it's all the work that that requires, from reflective listening to kind of adjusting what you're saying, given what they're, how they're responding. It's an interactive dance and the interactive part is very important.

• 59:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, I can think of professions like a psychotherapist or a chaplain at a hospital, where I can imagine these skills are really, really vital. But you are saying it's not just in these professions, which call for hearing and listening, that these skills are important. You're saying these are important skills more generally, right?

• 1:00:05Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly. They underlie so many occupations from therapy, you know, teaching, primary care, but also, you know, your hairdresser, your real estate agent, your soccer coach, the lawyer, you know, there's the manager, for sure, high-end sales. There's many, many people who use this kind of connective labor to achieve the outcomes for which they're getting paid.

• 1:00:37Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, we've all had the experience of, you know, having, you know, like a contractor or someone who's providing some service come to your home, and the person either listens to you carefully or doesn't listen to you carefully. And it's an example of connective labor in a place where you wouldn't think it matters at all.

• 1:00:55Speaker 07

  Exactly. I mean, those are really great examples. You, we, you know, the fact that we associate this kind of work with only very particular, very kind of feeling professions mean we're really underestimating its prevalence and its importance. And also, may I say, it's kind of gendered. We're misunderstanding it as only the province of women. When men do it, we ignore it. So it's gender, you know, how we respond to it is gendered, but I think it happens all over the economy.

• 1:01:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk a moment about the effects of connective labor? So you mentioned, for example, the salesperson who is selling you a car or a refrigerator. Talk about the effect of actually forming a connection with your customer when you're trying to sell something to him or her.

• 1:01:49Speaker 07

  Well, for sales in particular, I mean, actually, this is happening in many different occupations. To be seen by another human being is, you know, has some profound effects. There's a ton of research that talks about that for teaching and for therapy and for medicine. But even in sales, you know, salespeople know this. When you, when you, the salesperson, effectively identify somebody's problems or, you know, their perspective, it is much more persuasive. It's very powerful to be seen by another human being, even when that's just for persuasion.

• 1:02:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah. And I've had conversations with salespeople who are very skilled. And even when I know that they're just trying to manipulate me, or even if I know that they're just, you know, going through the motions, it does make me feel great when they basically feel like they have understood why I need this particular device or why I need this particular service.

• 1:02:53Speaker 07

  Yes, the feeling of being understood is a powerful one. And the feeling of being misunderstood, or feeling invisible, or misrecognized, that is kind of equally powerful in a negative sense.

• 1:03:18Shankar Vedantam?

  So this brings us to a question from a listener named Frances about cross-cultural communication. And you could argue in some ways that all communication is cross-cultural communication. We're always communicating across cultural divides. But when we're conversing with someone from a different background, does that make the job of connective labor even more difficult?

• 1:03:39Speaker 07

  That's a super important question. Given that we don't know the other person, even when we think they do, it's not a terrible approach to kind of start with humility. So even it's perhaps easier when you know they're from a different culture or background or race or whatever. But we should all, I think this starts with humility. And actually, there's been great psychological research talking about how we shouldn't think of this as perspective-taking. We should instead think of this as perspective-getting. So it starts with asking or checking on your assumptions about them.

• 1:04:24Speaker 07

  So your posture towards reading them is not like, this is what you're feeling. It's, it's, so it sounds like something like this. You know, it's a, it's a more tentative and you're, you're aware. Your, your first task is to listen and to be humble. And that's, that's, those sound simple, but actually when, you know, so much of our misreads happen under conditions of trying to do it quickly. So many of the practitioners in these, in these fields, like start with, let's start with primary care physicians, you know, have like no time. So I have a lot of sympathy for the working conditions that are making it hard for them to see other people, but I would say try and hold that off

• 1:05:08Speaker 07

  because your efficiency pressures are going to make you do this poorly.

• 1:05:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. I'm wondering if there is some tension here, which is that when we know we're interacting with someone who comes from a very different background than ours, I think, you know, you might call it humility. I might call it tentativeness, which is we are a little cautious in terms of what we say and what we do. We're afraid of giving offense. We don't want the other person to misunderstand what we're saying. But I'm wondering if all of that walking on eggshells actually makes the job of connective labor more difficult? Because of course, you're not connecting fully. You're not jumping into the conversation fully. You're sort of walking very tentatively. Is there a tension between these two things of, you know, trying to be very humble and be cautious about what you're doing? And also trying to reach forward and make a deep connection with someone else?

• 1:05:58Speaker 07

  Hmm, that's interesting. I'm not sure, when I'm saying tentative, I'm not saying, "Don't do it." So, don't, you know, take the risk of saying what you think they're saying to you. But just be aware that you might be wrong and be open to that and being like, and correcting that. There's a lot of research that shows that when you correct something that's wrong, they feel more seen. But really, it's the task of listening and taking a risk. I gave a talk in Oregon recently and someone was telling me about how they had had a horseback riding accident and they almost couldn't walk as a result, but then they managed to, you know, now they are walking, are able to run, etc. But she talked about

• 1:06:42Speaker 07

  how her feelings about her body, she's become much more cautious and wary and uncertain about what her body can do. And listening to her, I said, "It's like a loss of innocence." Like before, she was innocent about, and just taking risks because it was fun and she could do it and whatever. And now she no longer believes that about herself. And her response to that, "It's a loss of innocence," was like, "When you do connective labor, well, it's like powerful relief, a great sense of affinity." You know, like really, we were really bonded in that 30-second interaction. And then to me, to me, that

• 1:07:26Speaker 07

  felt like, "Take a risk." You know, like, what she was saying to me, I was just saying back to her. And so I wasn't tentative, but I was certainly open to the fact that I could be wrong. So yeah, I guess the tension is, you have to take that step, you have to make that, take that risk, but also be very correctable.

• 1:07:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Sometimes the emotional connections we are called upon to make involve delicate social relationships with strangers. Marsha had a question about emotional connection, but I think at some level, it's also a moral question. Here she is.

• 1:08:05Speaker 05

  I go into Philadelphia once in a while to visit my friend, and I will often pass by homeless people on the sidewalk or leaning against a building. I'm uncomfortable just passing by without making any eye contact, but I also often am not in any position to give them any kind of a donation or help. It seems rude to walk by, and yet I'm not sure how it would feel to look them in the eye or acknowledge them and then continue to walk on. What's the best way to handle this kind of a situation?

• 1:08:42Shankar Vedantam?

  So I don't think this is an easy question at all, Allison. I think it's an everyday kind of occurrence, but I think at some level, it's a profound question. What do you think?

• 1:08:51Speaker 07

  I agree, it's a profound question. I also agree it is an everyday one, especially for those of us who live in urban environments. And it's not just about the unhoused. It's also about just seeing people in our midst who have deep need that you can't meet. Just speaking directly to this questioner, I would say, in my experience, they really appreciate your acknowledgement. I think the worst is when you don't acknowledge them at all. So, you know, just looking them in the eye and saying, you know, "I can't help you today, but I hope you have a good day," or something, you know, something that acknowledges them

• 1:09:36Speaker 07

  as a human being is, you know, one way forward. In terms of like, kind of the broader question of like, how do we handle interactions with those who are coming to us with much greater need than we can meet? And I heard this again and again from people I talked to because the people who do this work are often on the front line of, you know, societal need that some of us might be more protected from. So I'm talking about like bus drivers, or librarians, or social workers, or community police. These are people who are

• 1:10:18Speaker 07

  like, right on the edge. Again and again, they told me how desperate it felt out there. They feel incompetent, or helpless, or, you know, kind of overwhelmed. And that can be really daunting. We have to kind of recognize that many people are feeling, not just the pernicious effect of inequality and all these unhoused, but also many people are feeling really invisible. They feel like a number. They're being kind of processed in standardized

• 1:10:57Speaker 07

  ways all day, every day. And the sense of invisibility is creating really a, you know, a depersonalization crisis. And you're not going to be able to solve that completely. But you are going to be able to see them for a moment. And I do think it makes a difference. There's a lot of research that suggests these, you know, kind of minor interactions that we might dismiss actually and make a difference.

• 1:11:35Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, more questions about social disconnection and connective labor. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:11:53Speaker 05

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• 1:12:34Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Sociologist Allison Pugh studies how we relate to one another. She believes that an essential component of most jobs, perhaps the essential component of most jobs, is not technical skill or knowledge, but the ability to see and hear other people, to be present for them, to give them attention. Allison, you have a lovely example of a moment when you were on the receiving end of connective labor. You had a mentor in grad school at UC Berkeley who did this for you. Tell me that story.

• 1:13:08Speaker 07

  Sure. Yeah, I am grateful to be mentored by Arlie Hoek Shield. She's a sociologist of great renown, who is actually a really tremendous, kind of the quintessential connective labor. So when I was in graduate school, I came upon, I thought of an idea for a dissertation that captured my interest in the conflict between work and family. And that was a sociology of sleep. And so I did some interviews and my advisors, including Arlie, were extremely excited about it. They saw it as original, unique, no one's talking about this. And I can see now, like

• 1:13:51Speaker 07

  in retrospect, that they are right. It was a, you know, kind of unconventional and, and good idea. But I lost interest in it and I decided not to do it. And instead I embarked on a study of consumer culture and how much we spend on kids and how that varies by class and race and the meaning of, of stuff to kids. And it went fine, but there was some disappointment, I think, among my advisors for something that was probably a little more conventional a subject. And at the same time, Arlie was not like, no, you can't do that. She just kind of was trying to coax my song out of me. And that's the, the PhD advisor's task.

• 1:14:36Speaker 07

  And I felt, not only did she give me permission, or, you know, not only was I able to do this, I just felt throughout, you know, that our decades-long relationship now, her capacity to read and reflect what I was giving off to her. And that really is, is profoundly moving and also empowering on some level. So yeah, it's a blessing to have that, someone like that in your life.

• 1:15:06Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I'm thinking that this is part of the role that parents play in the role of children, where you're trying to say, I want you to sing your song. And it's difficult, partly because parents also have a view of the song that their children need to sing. And the, and the songs that their children are good at singing. And so in some ways, it requires you to hold back your own views of what the other person should be thinking, should be doing, and allow the other person to basically shine forth.

• 1:15:34Speaker 07

  That's so well put. Parents shouldn't be saying, I want you to sing my song.

• 1:15:41Speaker 07

  Parents should be saying, I want you to sing your song. You know your kids so well. It's very tempting to be like, this is what I see and I am right. They have to make their way. And yeah, that's the restraint that that requires among those of us who have maybe studied our children all their lives is considerable.

• 1:16:14Shankar Vedantam?

  So in our initial conversation, we talked about the benefits that patients experience when their doctors take the time to connect with them. A listener named Molly wrote to us with a question about how connective labor affects the person making the effort, the connective laborer, if you will. Molly is a school therapist and feels she provides a lot of connective labor to others, but feels she receives very little in return. She writes, I think this leads to cultures of venting and burnout when you provide this connection for others, but have nowhere to seek it yourself. What are your thoughts on how to better support people providing emotional connection as part of their professional responsibilities?

• 1:16:57Speaker 07

  I mean, I hear the pain in that question, and I would say it's widely shared. One of the reasons why I wrote the book I wrote was to give people a vocabulary to be able to assert their needs as connective labor practitioners. Because what I found is that too often, we are relying on people as individual heroes. And instead, there's a social architecture that organizations put into place that support it or impede it.

• 1:17:36Speaker 07

  And it sounds like this writer is working in a context in which her labor is being kind of... Taken for granted and perhaps even impeded by her organization. And that that actually is a tragedy. You know, I ended up finding a set of factors that contribute to kind of a good social architecture where what kind of organizations are doing it right. And one of them, one of the key factors is are there other people to talk to who do this? I ended up calling that a sounding board and are there sounding boards out there? And this is, you know, something that therapists know, teachers know, you know, like they

• 1:18:20Speaker 07

  have those, that's a kind of common practice to have a group of people who are, you know, I had one teacher who was, he was like the math family, you know, the people who teach math, that's who I'm talking to about problems. Or therapists have a kind of very extensive, you know, supervision, but also, you know, kind of consultative practice with other therapists where they can talk about what they're experiencing or finding or processing. Those are, those are crucial. I want to say one other thing about the kind of what I'm hearing underneath that emails lament, and that is about burnout.

• 1:19:02Speaker 07

  A lot of the treatment for burnout is, you know, take a day off, take a vacation, take, make sure you take your lunch, you know, practice mindfulness. It's very individual. And I, and it also kind of all subscribes to the theory that it's too much relationship is causing burnout. There's too many people kind of sucking you dry. And I actually think that that's a misread because so many people talk to me about how sustaining they find these relationships. So I started to think like, we're running around with a metaphor of workers as like

• 1:19:46Speaker 07

  kind of these buckets of compassion that spring holes from which their compassion drains away. And actually, I don't think that's the right metaphor. I think we should think about like, kind of, the workers are as soil and the relationships as rain. And sometimes the rain is torrential or toxic, and sometimes the soil is too dry. But it's not that we don't need rain. It's that we need the working conditions that enable the rain to be restorative.

• 1:20:22Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, in Molly's case, where she basically says she's providing this service to others but feels she doesn't receive a lot of it herself. Some of it, in fact, might be what her organization can do, maybe provide these sounding boards, encourage people to find these sounding boards. But I'm also hearing, in some ways, from Molly's own perspective, maybe she should go looking for sounding boards. She should actually try and develop a network of people who can be sounding boards. In other words, if the systems that we're embedded in do not provide those things for us, perhaps we can go some ways in trying to get those things for ourselves, Alison?

• 1:20:57Speaker 07

  Yes, for sure. I just don't want all the onus to be on the individual people who are doing so much work. But I agree. I think sounding boards are a crucial component to finding relationship work sustaining. And so, yes, you should petition your manager to set that up, or you can, you know, maybe end, you can work to find them yourselves.

• 1:21:22Shankar Vedantam?

  A listener named Hazel wrote in asking about connective labor and authenticity. She says, "When I think of the term connective labor in my personal life, it makes me sad because at some basic level, it feels like work we do out of obligation or habit and not authentic or real connection. Ultimately, I'm curious about the potential for connective labor to backfire." And I think what she's saying here, Alison, is that if I tell myself, "I need to do connective labor, I need to do connective labor, it's important for me to do connective labor," and someone's in front of me now and I'm saying, "Okay, what do I need to do?" And I'm running through a checklist in my mind, at some level, that's not only going to feel onerous for me, but it's going to feel inauthentic to the other person.

• 1:22:08Speaker 07

  I mean, I completely agree. As soon as it becomes a duty, it does start to feel onerous. I guess I'm feeling like these two questions are related. Like, I think feelings of inauthenticity, or, you know, feeling like it's something you have to do rather than something you want to do, is related to having to give, give, give, and it feeling like they are draining you rather than sustaining you. And yet, so many people I talk to said that this is the most meaningful work that they do.

• 1:22:48Speaker 07

  So my goal is actually to get people who write those kinds of questions over to the, you know, kind of feelings that my, you know, respondents, many of my respondents were attesting to. And I think part of that is about thinking about where authenticity comes from. So in my experience doing this research, authenticity in connective labor comes sometimes from whether you feel kind of affection for the other person, or whether you feel like you're doing it as part of your professional practice and you get some kind of pride from doing it in that way.

• 1:23:29Speaker 07

  But for the first part, the feelings of affection, I actually want to kind of push back on that a little bit. Like, I don't think you have to care about the other person too deeply or much. I mean, I talked to many therapists at the VA Hospital, for example, who work with, you know, extreme cases of people with PTSD who might rant and vent and yell at them, just like that other questioner was mentioning. And so they were like,

• 1:24:06Speaker 07

  You know, my task is really to, you know, see the other person, but I don't have to have these great wells of affection for them. And I think that is powerful and important to kind of say that this work doesn't rely on the, you know, having to emotionally care for somebody. You can still do it well. You can still convey to someone that they are a human being and that they deserve, you know, to be heard and listened to without that.

• 1:24:38Shankar Vedantam?

  We received a question from listener Jane in Florida, who is a volunteer at a hospital. And she plays a very difficult role trying to build a bridge between the medical staff and families.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  As a volunteer, we're trying to do a work group to determine how we keep our connection as we liaise between the surgical teams and the families who are waiting to hear how their family members are doing following surgery. But we want to keep the human connection and also reduce stress. Is there something with AI that you could suggest that would keep that social connection and yet also validate the commitment and our excellent volunteers? Thank you.

• 1:25:27Shankar Vedantam?

  So Jane points to something interesting here, Allison. There are many jobs where people are essentially playing a go-between role. In this case, Jane and her fellow volunteers are working with doctors and then talking with patients and their families. And that's got to be very tough because in some ways they're playing this translation job back and forth.

• 1:25:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, that sounds very difficult because whatever opinions the family members or the, we could call them more generically, the recipients or the, you know, students, the patients, et cetera, might have about the professionals, you have to kind of mediate that. And that, that does sound difficult. At the risk of sounding like, you know, I have a hammer and everything's a nail, my opinion is that if that person effectively sees.

• 1:26:18Speaker 07

  The family members, that can actually go a long way in that mediation process. For example, I spoke to someone who was a home healthcare aide and she was known by her employer, her employing agency as a hard cases specialist because she was really good at seeing the other and just that can really calm down the outrage if people are dissatisfied in any way. Sometimes the family members are probably not dissatisfied, but when you're kind of handling that mediating role, it's really good. I think actually probably both of them need seeing labor, need connective work.

• 1:27:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, so but just stay with this for just a second. So in this situation, let's say that, you know, the patient is, let's say, or the family of the patient is unhappy about something that happened at the hospital. Maybe there was a surgery that didn't go as well as it could have gone and they're very upset about it. And the volunteer basically spends time with the family, seeing and understanding why they're upset, making them feel seen and heard. I can see how that feels very good for the family. The volunteer is now also talking to the medical staff and the surgical staff, and maybe they have a very different perspective. Maybe this was a very complicated situation. Maybe the surgery was unusually complex and unexpected things happened. And again, if the volunteer is playing the same role with

• 1:27:45Shankar Vedantam?

  the surgical staff, you listen to them and you see them and you make them feel seen and heard. At some level, are you containing these two views that in fact don't see each other, but you're seeing both of them? That must be a difficult and painful place to be, Alison.

• 1:28:01Speaker 07

  Hmm, I agree. And actually, I bet that I think there are many different occupations that have this kind of mediating role, for sure. Seeing those individual sides doesn't sound that hard to me. What sounds hard to me is if you have to make them agree. And I think there are professions where you have to somehow bring those parties together. Assuming there is distance between them, that's the hard part because especially since they aren't doing the work of seeing each other.

• 1:28:37Speaker 07

  So yeah, I think, you know, I think probably professional mediators have this role, for example. And yeah, I think they would say, you know, given these, I think they would say something like, given these two parties that disagree, how do we get the, you know, get to a point where each of them, you know, feels like they have won or something like that. It's my experience that it's not painful to see people who disagree with each other. Because I guess in my experience of doing it, you're so kind of present with that person.

• 1:29:16Speaker 07

  And you're just trying to understand their perspective. So somebody else's perspective is only relevant if you're like trying to kind of fight with them or something. But really, you're just trying to hear what their story is. I don't think that that would be very difficult. The difficult part is if you have to make them agree somehow.

• 1:29:44Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the rapidly expanding role of new technologies like artificial intelligence in performing connective labor. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:30:14Speaker 05

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• 1:31:36Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:31:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Sociologist Allison Pugh studies how we relate to one another. She's the author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World. One of the things that Allison and I talked about in our initial conversation was that we live in an increasingly measurement-focused world. Doctors have to account for how much time they spend with a patient. Teachers are evaluated on how well their students perform on tests. But it's hard to measure human connection. The teacher or doctor who spends an extra 10 minutes helping someone feel seen and heard, this does not show up on performance metrics.

• 1:32:19Shankar Vedantam?

  I asked Allison how remote work has affected this. If many people are now interacting in their work through screens, can that reduce the personal touch? Is technology making the problem of human disconnection worse? When you talk to therapists, many of them say so many people only want to meet on Zoom now. So COVID and the pandemic really altered the terrain, the working terrain for them. And they say you can see the other over Zoom. Now, that's actually controversial because you can't really have eye contact. And so you're missing a lot of the bodily, kind of just the vibe and the nonverbal communication

• 1:33:03Shankar Vedantam?

  that happens when you're in the same room. And you're missing other things, of course, also. But

• 1:33:09Speaker 07

  But you can do it, but I believe, according to what I hear from practitioners, it's completely exhausting. So one of the things that I wrote about was how sustaining this labor is actually for people. Like, they they get so much out of it. People let people tell me, like, I feel honored. I feel incredibly privileged that I get to hear this. You know, like, it's a deeply, powerfully sustaining practice for people. And I think when it's on Zoom, it's exhausting. That's what I hear.

• 1:33:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So, speaking of therapy, there's been some interest in the idea of using technologies like artificial intelligence to provide therapy to people. Alison, therapy is one of the most profound forms of connective labor there is. What do we find in that regard? Can a machine provide connective labor?

• 1:34:02Speaker 07

  It's such a good question. And I think the newer versions of ChatGPT and its inheritors can feel like being seen on some level. I've heard people say, wow, that I feel like I feel like I'm being seen right now. And I think the kind of emotional, human-like syntax and the not entirely predictable responses help people feel seen.

• 1:34:37Speaker 07

  There's a couple of problems with it. The first is that it's not an interaction. Because it's not a human being on the other end, there's actually no risk of judgment. And on one level, that's a great thing for all the people who are afraid of the shame and judgment of others and who are walking around with dark secrets. Many people can walk around with shame, and the idea of having therapy that doesn't involve a human gaze can be very appealing.

• 1:35:19Speaker 07

  But because there's no risk of human judgment, people also are less attached to it. This is also something that research has found, that people like kind of are less motivated because they know it's not a human being. So it's kind of a, it's a, it's a kind of thing that engineers actually struggle with. The more human they make it, the more judgment it involves, the less appealing it is to those who want to avoid judgment. The less human they make it, the more appealing it is to those who have shame. But also then the quicker the drop off because people don't consider the, the reflection of the other

• 1:36:04Speaker 07

  that hard won or that worth much. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:36:08Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. So where do you come down eventually on sort of technology and connective labor, Alison? Is this, is this ultimately a force driving us in a good direction or a bad direction?

• 1:36:20Speaker 07

  Well, I do think that there's probably some minor uses that are important. I think the same level like those who could get help from opening a book, I think, can get help from seeking out some kind of technological assistance. But I do think that there's something profound that happens between people and we risk losing that. And it's so valuable, not just, not just for the consumer or the learner or the patient, but actually for society. For many people to be seen every day by different kinds of people

• 1:37:04Speaker 07

  produces a kind of belonging that has community effects. And I do think that some of the kind of populist rage, et cetera, is stemming from people feeling unseen. And so our democracy, our, our kind of social fragmentation is reliant on whether or not people feel, you know, unseen or seen like it's, it's, I think, a vitally important. And a kind of practice that underlies not just individual well-being, but but social well-being. So we go to the technology at our peril, I think.

• 1:37:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. I mean, when we think about the different ways in which people are turning to digital platforms as substitutes for human connection, you know, so social media, you know, has become a replacement for social connection, even, you know, sexual intimacy, whether in the form of pornography or artificial girlfriends or boyfriends, you know, are becoming a replacement for the real thing. So you really are seeing examples of technology coming to substitute for what you are calling connective labor.

• 1:38:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, people, it does feel like many early adopters are just running to embrace a technological replacement. And I worry about that. But while doing my research, I actually think there's other things to worry about that are equally problematic. One is the idea that, you know, rich people will get, you know, artisanal connective labor from a human being and poor people will be the ones getting theirs from a bot.

• 1:38:57Speaker 07

  And I, and I think that's certainly implicated when people say, oh, it's better than nothing. And I'm like, well, would you choose it for yourself? So if the answer's no, then it's not better than nothing. It's not something we should subscribe to as a society. So that's one, one future that I see that is practically a present. And then the other thing is this kind of triage model where the simple transactions, the simple interactions become automated. And we already see that with like call centers and stuff like that. When you finally get a human, it's after you've been shouting agent or whatever at your phone for some time, like the complex goes bumped, gets bumped to a human being.

• 1:39:41Speaker 07

  And doctors talk to me about how they think that that's a potential, like they, they, some of them were open to that and some of them just saw that coming.

• 1:39:55Shankar Vedantam?

  When I spoke with Alison a second time, I asked her to share some of the methods she uses to try to provide a feeling of emotional connection.

• 1:40:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, I try and shut my own, like, turn down the volume on my own issues or whatever, and really just try and hear what they're saying. I'm trying to think about like, what was it that let me say that's like a loss of innocence to that woman who broke her leg in horseback riding? And for me, that was like trying to rephrase

• 1:40:35Speaker 07

  the statement that, you know, the story that she was trying to, she was telling me a story, but under the story, there was an emotional message. And I was trying to put that emotional message into words. So I am deeply listening to the kind of facts of the case, but I'm also kind of trying to hear how she feels about the facts of the case. And then I'm trying to rephrase it. Or maybe even find an image or a metaphor that captures it or something like that. Yeah.

• 1:41:11Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, and that is where the power lies, isn't it? Because sometimes, in fact, we ourselves are not aware of that subterranean emotional layer. And when someone comes along and listens to us carefully and says, "Look, here's this underground river that's flowing through what you're saying." We suddenly have this moment of epiphany of saying, "Oh, my God, of course, that is what I'm saying."

• 1:41:30Speaker 07

  Exactly. And that epiphany, it's like a release valve. It has this, this relief that, that people feel and convey. It's very, it's the power of naming what is unnamed. And that can be unnamed to you or unnamed to other people because you don't feel like it's safe. Like by naming it, you're saying to the other person, "It's safe to say this in front of me." So sometimes there's an epiphany like, "I didn't even realize." And sometimes there's an epiphany like, "Oh, I can say this out loud." And both of those are very strong, have, have strong effects.

• 1:42:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Sociologist Allison Pugh at Johns Hopkins University studies how we relate to each other. She's the author of The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World. Allison, thank you so much for joining me again on Hidden Brain.

• 1:42:35Speaker 07

  Thank you. I really appreciate the time.

• 1:42:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Powell, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:43:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Our unsung heroes today are a group of Hidden Brain superfans I met while on tour in Dallas: Celeste and Chris Peterson, Rick and Lisa Eliason, and Rick Tett. It was truly wonderful to share a meal and get to know you. Thank you so much for your support of our work at Hidden Brain. We're truly grateful.

• 1:43:36Shankar Vedantam?

  If you'd like to support our show and have access to episodes you won't hear anywhere else, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. You'll be playing a vital role in supporting the research, fact-checking, and audio production that go into every episode of the show. You can try Hidden Brain Plus with a free seven-day trial at support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. Those sites again are support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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