The Empathy Gym

Some people are good at putting themselves in another person's shoes. Others may struggle to relate. But psychologist Jamil Zaki argues that empathy isn't a fixed trait. This week, we revisit a favorite episode about how to exercise our empathy muscles. Then, Leslie John answers listener questions about the benefits of opening up to others, in our latest installment of Your Questions Answered.

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. In May 2007, an artist living in Chicago moved into a new place. It was a small room with white walls. The interior design was minimalist. There was a bed, a desk, a computer, a lamp, and a paintball gun.

• 0:26Shankar Vedantam?

  Affixed to the gun was a webcam. It livestreamed the room to the internet. Anyone could look in, and anyone could take control of the gun, aim, and fire.

• 0:38Shankar Vedantam?

  At all hours of the day and night, the paintball gun would spring to life and begin shooting yellow pellets into the room. Some hit the walls or the furniture. Some hit the artist.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I was shot 70,000 times, and I received 80 million hits on the internet from 128 countries.

• 1:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Wafa Bilal spent one whole month in the room, targeted tens of thousands of times by random strangers around the world.

• 1:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Why would he choose to do this?

• 1:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Wafa was born and raised in Iraq. He came to the US in the early 90s.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  I live this duality of living in two places. One is a comfort zone of the United States, and the other one is the conflict zone in Iraq, where my family, friends live.

• 1:37Shankar Vedantam?

  In 2004, Wafa says one of his brothers was killed in an airstrike.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  One of my brother, Haji, was killed in air-to-ground missile. And I didn't know what to do.

• 1:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Wafa is a performance artist, and he wanted to engage others in the conversation that was running through his mind. Three years after his brother's death, he got an idea.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  I said, I want to lock myself in the gallery space for 30 days. And I'm going to build a robot connected to the internet. And the robot shoots a paintball. And viewers online could direct that gun and shoot at me. It's day 16. My body is just getting weak by the day. I thought I felt better.

• 2:35Shankar Vedantam?

  As the days went by, Wafa started to feel crushed by the experience.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  It's late night. Feel extremely tired.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  But I'm afraid to go to bed.

• 2:57Shankar Vedantam?

  In some ways, Wafa was attempting to do what civil disobedience movements around the world have done. He was deliberately putting himself in harm's way in order to draw attention to a problem and affect change.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  I have United States, I have Denmark, I have Ireland, I have the UK, I have France again, Canada. So it's not one place. It is almost global shooting. And I don't know.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Somebody should imagine an entire nation living like this.

• 3:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Why did strangers who knew nothing about Wafa take it upon themselves to hurt him? Do technology and modern life and the anonymity they offer make us less caring as human beings? On today's show, building empathy in a connected and confrontational world.

• 4:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Farmers Insurance. At Farmers, they believe insurance should be in terms you can understand. Like with coverage on a page, you get a clear view of what is and isn't covered in your policy in plain, simple language, so you're not left with any surprises. Does your insurance do that? Check them out at farmers.com. Underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or Affilia. Products not available in every state.

• 4:56Speaker 02

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• 5:26Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit mazdausa.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. Jamil Zaki is a psychologist at Stanford University. He's the author of the book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.

• 6:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Jamil, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 6:15Shankar Vedantam?

  You have a very powerful story about how you came to be interested in the subject of empathy. Tell me about your parents, where they are from, how they met, what they went through, and what you learned from the experience.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  So it turns out that in the early 1970s, Washington State University in Pullman had a program where they granted full scholarships for graduate studies to students from the world's poorest nations. My mother received the scholarship from Peru, and my father did not receive a scholarship, but nonetheless came to Washington State from Pakistan. So they traveled from Lima and Lahore, these two massive cities, to the sleepy town of Pullman, where they fell in love. When I think about my parents, I think the biggest thing that they had in common was their sense of foreignness in the US. They sort of took comfort in each other in a place that neither of them understood. But as they grew more comfortable with the US

• 7:14Speaker 03

  and more acclimated to it, they grew less comfortable with each other. And they divorced. They started splitting up when I was eight, but didn't finish until I was 12. And theirs was a long and acrimonious split. And I am their only child. And so a lot of my childhood was spent kind of bouncing around between their houses. And it really felt like I was bouncing between parallel universes because their priorities and values and fears are really as far apart as their hometowns. So I would often feel confused. You know, as a small child, I would try to, when I was with my mom, figure out the rules that governed her heart and mind and make them true for myself.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  But then, when I would go to my dad's house, those same rules would stop working. And it was just very confusing. And it felt, I think, to all three of us like I would really have to choose one of my parents and give up on really knowing the other. But I knew that I had to try, for all of our sake. So I did, and I kind of kept working at it and eventually got better and learned to tune myself to my parents' different frequencies. And that kind of saved me as a kid. I think empathy saved me. Not because it's easy, it was work. I always think of my parents' divorce as an empathy gym for me that forced me to work out my ability to care about and understand other people.

• 8:48Shankar Vedantam?

  And you, as you've said, described this as an empathy gym. Were there times when you failed to show them empathy? I mean, I must imagine that as a small child, it must have been very difficult in many ways to comprehend what was happening and why these two adults were fighting over you and each was demanding that you see things from their point of view.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the big realizations for me as a kid was realizing that both of them were in pain. I think as a child, it's very easy to focus on your own perspective and what you're going through and to blame others, especially adults. I think when I realized that my parents were both struggling, just like I was, it actually made me feel kinship towards them and made it easier to understand that I could connect with both of them. In fact, because what we were going through wasn't that different.

• 9:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Talk a little bit about the benefits of empathy. There's been a lot of work that looks at what happens when people receive empathy from their partners, for example, or from their doctors.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, in many cases, empathy benefits all parties involved. So, for instance, patients of empathic doctors are more satisfied with their care but are also more likely to follow doctors' recommendations, which is important for things like preventative care. And spouses of empathic partners are happier in their marriages. But one thing that I think people don't realize as much is that people who experience empathy for others also benefit. It's not just receiving it, but giving it helps us, too. Feeling empathy for others reduces our stress, and adolescents, who are able to pick out other people's emotions accurately, are better adjusted during middle school.

• 10:35Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, parents everywhere recognize the value of empathy. We have courses and classes that try and teach children empathy. I came by this clip on Sesame Street featuring the actor Mark Ruffalo and the character Murray. Take a listen to the clip.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Murray.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  What?

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Did I tell you about that time when I lost my favorite teddy bear?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  It was...

• 10:59Speaker 02

  This is very sad. Did you love that teddy bear?

• 11:04Speaker 04

  I loved that teddy bear.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  I can imagine exactly how you feel. It's really sad feeling. It makes me want to cry like this.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  It was sad. It was so sad. But you know what?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  What?

• 11:21Speaker 04

  You know what empathy is.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  I do?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  That was empathy.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  What?

• 11:25Speaker 04

  You could understand how I was feeling, exactly how I was feeling, and understood it. That's empathy.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  I get it now.

• 11:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Jamil, you've used a similar kind of scenario to explain empathy. Someone's talking with a friend. The friend gets a phone call. Walk me through the rest of that scenario and the three components that you've identified that make up empathy.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so again, imagine that you're sitting with a friend having lunch and they receive a phone call. And whatever the person on the other side of the line says makes them visibly upset. You don't know what's wrong, but your friend starts to cry and it's obvious that something is wrong. Well, as you see this, a bunch of things might happen inside you. First, you might become upset yourself, sort of vicariously catching their feeling. That's what psychologists often call emotional empathy. You might also try to figure out what's wrong, what they're feeling and why. That's what we call cognitive empathy. And if you're a good friend at least, you probably will feel concern for what they're going through and a desire for their well-being to improve.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  That's what psychologists call empathic concern or compassion. And even though these pieces of empathy sometimes go together, they also split apart in interesting ways. So for instance, different brain systems support emotional and cognitive empathy and empathic concern. And different groups of people struggle with different flavors of empathy.

• 12:54Shankar Vedantam?

  That's fascinating. It's almost like these are different muscle groups and you need all the muscle groups to be functioning to, in some ways, actualize your full capacity for empathy.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  I love that analogy. Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it.

• 13:08Shankar Vedantam?

  At the same time that parents and books and motivational speakers and faith traditions cite the value of empathy, many of us are living in ways that isolate us from the people around us. Among people 18 to 34, for example, 10 times as many people live alone today as did in 1950. I asked Jamil whether there's a link between going solo and the amount of empathy we feel for others.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  It's hard to say. And I do want to be clear that in looking at any demographic trends over time and trying to link them to empathy decline, we're necessarily speculating, right? There's no way to run an experiment where you have history occur multiple times and fiddle with different pieces of it to see what causes a decline in empathy. But certainly, you can point to big shifts in the way that people live, and one of them is that we're becoming more urban and more solitary. And when we interact with people, it's often in more transactional ways, right? Sort of some of the regular rituals that used

• 14:13Speaker 03

  to bring us into contact with other people often are giving way to more solitary pursuits. So there's some evidence, for instance, that anonymous interactions do not favor empathy. So I don't know, there's not data specifically on solitary living, but to the extent that living in a giant city but by yourself, where most of the people who you see are total strangers, there's some evidence that suggests that perhaps that might have an effect on our empathy.

• 14:45Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, one of the other places where anonymity rules is the internet. And when you look at some of the changes that have unfolded and the timetable of those changes, they do coincide, at least correlationally, with the rise of internet technologies. And I'm wondering, is there reason to imagine that there's a connection between these two things, that the connections we have with one another online and on Twitter or social media, where we often don't know whom we're communicating with, or who's listening or who's not listening? Could this in some ways be behind this decline in empathy?

• 15:17Speaker 03

  It certainly is possible. You know, I think that the Internet and social media, I don't think of them as inherently antisocial. In a way, you can think of the Internet as humanity's greatest empathic opportunity ever. We have the chance to connect with people around the world at any time on their own terms and respond with compassion. I mean, I think if you go back and read Wired, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, people were waxing poetic about the way that the Internet could bring us all together into a global community. I think in some obvious ways, that hasn't always occurred. And I think that has to do, in part, with some of the ways that we tend to use the Internet

• 16:02Speaker 03

  that might not be empathy positive. So, for instance, oftentimes, online, we don't have a chance to see each other's faces and voices in sort of real-time interactions, the kind of richness that we have when we hang out offline. Instead, we see avatars and strings of text, and those might not be great triggers for empathy. There's a great study by Juliana Schroeder and her colleagues, where they had people describe their political opinions, sort of in an audio recording. They then had a separate group of people listen to those audio recordings or read a transcript of them. And what they found was that people were more likely to dehumanize

• 16:47Speaker 03

  the person whose opinion they were reading about if they were only reading it. Whereas if they were hearing the person's voice, they were less likely to dehumanize that individual. So it's almost as though we're leaving behind, when we go online, some of the cues that allow us to detect each other's real humanity.

• 17:06Shankar Vedantam?

  And there's a deep irony there, isn't there, Jamil? I mean, when we live in these big cities, we're living cheek-by-jowl with lots of other people, but in some ways, we're not connecting with them. And the same goes with the Internet. We have the capacity to connect with large numbers of other people, but we're connecting in often the superficial way instead of this deeper way.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  It is ironic, isn't it? I mean, we, in cities, for instance, we see more people than we ever did in human history, but we know fewer of them. And it almost is as though our interactions sort of favor a dehumanized perspective on each other. I mean, I know when I'm sort of stuck in traffic or trying to make my way down a crowded block in Manhattan, people become, not people, but obstacles for me on my way. And I think that that's sort of the, the way that it can often feel in, in modern contexts.

• 18:00Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, more on the signs of empathy and why being empathetic can sometimes be bad for you.

• 18:09Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 18:17Shankar Vedantam?

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• 18:55Shankar Vedantam?

  1.6% of global GDP and the partner of choice for 86% of Forbes AI 50 companies that have monetized to date. Learn how you can power any business model at stripe.com/billing. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Defender. Even the boldest journeys start small with a single decision to go somewhere new. The Defender 110 is a vehicle built for those moments for drivers capable of great things, whether they're headed toward uncharted territory or just a weekend away. The Defender 110 combines on-road presence with off-road capability. It looks tough because it is, with an exterior engineered for durability.

• 19:37Shankar Vedantam?

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• 20:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Jamil Zaki is the author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. He conducts research on empathy at Stanford University. Jamil, people who have been through terrible suffering can respond in different ways. Some people turn inward to avoid future pain, while others turn outward. They show empathy for the suffering of other people. I feel like I've seen research studies that show both these things. Can you talk about these studies and why people might go in one direction or another after they experience trauma?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I think that we often think of trauma, you know, sort of things like being through a war, or being assaulted, or suffering a terrible injury, as things that, again, as you, as you put it nicely, sort of draw us into each other. Or even that trauma might perpetuate itself. We often hear about cycles of violence, or the idea that hurt people hurt people. And that's certainly true in some cases, but there is a lot of research that's actually much more hopeful on what psychologists call altruism born of suffering. This is the idea that sometimes, when we've gone through great pain, that actually sort

• 21:30Speaker 03

  of opens us up to caring more about other people and their suffering. So there are all sorts of examples. Samples of that as well. So for instance, people who have suffered from addiction often change their lives and become addiction counselors. People who have been assaulted often change their lives and become assault counselors, sort of because they resonate with the frequency of other people suffering more acutely. Psychologists don't really know that much about sort of what causes people, when they experience suffering, to go in one direction or another. But one important factor that they have identified is the support that we receive from other people.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  So if after a trauma, an individual is able to find a community of others who support them, well, then they're more likely to recover from their own trauma. And they might also be more likely to turn around and provide that support to others.

• 22:28Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm thinking about research that Michael Wall and Nyla Branscombe and others have done, looking at how, when you remind people of past traumas, you remind Americans, for example, of the 9/11 attacks, Americans become more willing to endorse or tolerate harsh interrogation techniques in the fight against terrorism. And in some ways, at one level, this seems very intuitive, that you feel like you've been through something bad, and I remind you of the bad thing you've been through. And there's a part of you that says, I don't want that bad thing to happen again. And that increases my willingness to permit actions or behaviors that I might otherwise say, hang on a second, this is going to cause harm to other people.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think that it cuts both ways, right? I mean, I think reminding people of collective trauma, for instance, can make them more weary of outsiders and sort of more, as you say, willing to even endorse violence or aggression towards outsiders. But thinking of a common threat is also one way to bring people within a group closer together. I remember after 9/11, the way that Americans really felt like we were all one because we were facing this really deep trauma together. And likewise, there's all sorts of evidence that when people feel that they have a common

• 23:53Speaker 03

  threat that they're facing, they band together.

• 23:56Shankar Vedantam?

  So it's really interesting. What you're really pointing out is that empathy in some ways has this double-edged sword quality to it, which is, on the one hand, it's prompting us to be outward-looking, but it's also driven, in some ways, by factors about who's in our in-group and who's not in our in-group. The psychologist Paul Bloom, who wrote the book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, he argues that empathy tends to be parochial, and it tends to be biased. And that's why, when we ask people to be empathic, we're really inviting them to be prejudiced. Is that true?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  I think that Paul is right in certain ways. Absolutely, empathy begins parochially. Our instinctive empathy might be more driven towards people in our tribe than outside of it. I often think of oxytocin, this chemical that causes us to bond to other people. We often think of oxytocin as the love drug or the cuddle hormone. But it turns out that if you give people oxytocin intranasally, for instance, they become more caring about people in their group, but less caring about people outside their group. In essence, turning up people's empathy, in that case, means turning up their parochialism.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  I think a big place where Paul and I differ is on what we do with this information. So Paul, I think, believes that, OK, empathy tends to be parochial and biased towards insiders versus outsiders, so we should give up on it altogether. I think differently. I think that that's a problem with how empathy tends to operate. But I try to focus us on the fact that we can control how we empathize and make choices about the way that we deploy our caring. And if we recognize that, hey, I'm empathizing in a parochial way, in a tribal way, we can try to make a different choice and broaden our empathy even towards people who are different from ourselves.

• 25:58Shankar Vedantam?

  You've done some very interesting work with police officers where you're brought to bear this insight that you just talked about. Tell me about that work and tell me about how sometimes the right recommendation might actually be to tell people, behave a little less empathetically.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so for the book, I profiled Washington State's Criminal Justice Training Center. Although these officers were very empathic towards citizens, they were even more empathic towards fellow police officers. And that included fellow police officers who had engaged in potential police misconduct, right? So while I was there, there was a case of police officers who had shot an unarmed man named Antonio Zambrano-Montes. And during my visit to CJTC, the officers involved in that shooting, they're not indicted at all. So that seemed like a travesty of justice to many people in Washington State, but the

• 26:57Speaker 03

  people at CJTC were adamant that these were good guys who had just made a mistake. That level of empathy for people in their own group, I feel, and this is just my perspective, might have interfered with their ability to understand how the rest of the world saw what had happened. And in fact, this is consistent with research by my friend Emil Brunel. He's studied sort of parochial empathy in a lot of different intergroup contexts. And what he finds is that sometimes if you want to predict when someone will be willing to be aggressive towards outsiders, or unwilling to compromise with someone on the other side

• 27:39Speaker 03

  of a conflict, it's not enough to measure whether they empathize with the people on the outside. You have to also measure how empathic they are to their own group. And it turns out that people who are extraordinarily empathic towards people in their group, even if they're also empathic towards outsiders, are unwilling to compromise, unwilling to do anything that could threaten their own tribe.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  So what this suggests is that sometimes if we want to open ourselves up to other cultures, to people on the other side of a political or racial divide, maybe what we should start out doing is not just trying to get to know them and empathize more with them, but to recognize if we're empathizing so much with our group that we'll be unable to be flexible emotionally.

• 28:30Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to talk about another paradox of empathy. You say that about 50% of oncologists report feeling intense heartbreak when they communicate bad news to patients. So even as empathy is this very powerful driver of positive outcomes in medical settings, for example, it also seems to come at some personal cost.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, in fact, even having medical students simulate delivering bad news makes them anxious, makes their palms start to sweat and their hearts start to race. Empathy is hugely beneficial, including in medical contexts, for the people who receive it. But it can be an occupational hazard for the people who give it.

• 29:10Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that a friend of yours is a psychotherapist and she avoids scheduling depressed patients at the end of the day for, in some ways, the same reason?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, because she feels as though their negative mood will seep into her and sort of leave her unable to interact well with her family. And I think this is part of the double-edged sword of empathy for people in caring professions. On the one hand, many of these people are driven to their work by a preternatural care for others. But on the other hand, that same care can cause them to lose themselves, especially if they're in really intense medical settings where they're surrounded by, sort of chronically surrounded by, other people's deep suffering. And as a result, oftentimes, I think, people in caring professions feel like they're stuck

• 30:00Speaker 03

  in a double bind between caring for other people adequately but potentially grinding themselves down or turning themselves off. This is something that is called, in the medical profession, defensive dehumanization, the idea that physicians and other healthcare professionals feel like they sometimes have to turn off their empathy and stop seeing their patients as people just so they can go on being people.

• 30:28Shankar Vedantam?

  You cite this interesting study that Mark Pancer conducted in the 1970s, which is another example of this kind of defensive behavior, where people avoid situations where they might be called upon to demonstrate empathy. What was the study and what did he find?

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was a fascinating study where Pancer placed a table, sort of asking for charitable donations, and the table had a request for donations to charity. Sometimes the table had no one manning it, and sometimes the table had a person there who was in a wheelchair. And what he found is that when he put those empathic triggers on the table, people actually walked further away. They sort of went out of their way to avoid the table more. It was almost as though they were trying to keep physical distance between them and something that would make them feel empathy, either because it would feel bad, or because it would force them to do something like donate that maybe they didn't really want to do.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  I think a lot of us have this experience when we see, for instance, a homeless individual on the sidewalk ahead of us. I've heard of people who cross the street to avoid that encounter, maybe because they don't want to sort of see that person suffering close up, because it will make them feel sad, or guilty, or both.

• 31:45Shankar Vedantam?

  There's some irony there, isn't there? Which is that the person who is likely to actually be more empathic is also the person who's likely to cross the street, because they recognize that the empathy that they have inside them is going to make them feel bad.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah. I've talked with lots of people who identify as empaths, and basically say that they're crippled by their overabundance of care for other people, and that sometimes they avoid sort of busy cities overall, just because they don't want to be inundated with other people's pain.

• 32:23Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, empathy not only can produce pain, pain can not only produce disengagement, but we can actually almost dehumanize other people because we're so, in some ways, reluctant to accept the pain that comes with actually empathizing with them.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely, especially if you or a group that you belong to is responsible for that pain, because then empathy can twist into a sense of guilt or even self-loathing. And there's a dramatic example of this that was studied about 10 years ago with death workers in the American South. These are executioners. And what they found is that people who worked on death rows were likely to dehumanize inmates and say that they had given up the right to be treated like people. And this was especially true if they were the ones physically involved in delivering lethal injections and the like.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  So again, in lots of ways, empathy can hurt us, right? It can be unpleasant or cause us to view ourselves in ways that we don't like. And that in turn can cause us to avoid it.

• 33:38Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to manage this tricky balance and how we can train ourselves with deliberate practice to be more empathetic. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 33:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed, it's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want: a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain.

• 34:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:03Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 35:09Shankar Vedantam?

  During his month-long performance art piece, tens of thousands of paintballs were fired at Wafa Bilal in his studio. The white walls of his gallery turned fluorescent yellow.

• 35:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, so you could just keep repeating, getting hit. On day 11, a shooter from Estonia began bombarding his lamp until it fell apart.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  It was sad for me because the lamp represented just the only thing that stayed alive beside me in the space, especially at night.

• 35:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Viewers online could see Wafa's sadness. Later that day, one of those viewers came to visit him in person.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  The lamp was totally broken, and I have a person here walked in with a brand new lamp.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  Hi, my name is Matt. I was watching the camera this morning. I saw the lamp went out, so I had some time. I thought I'd run to Target. Got a new lamp and some light bulbs, so I know sometimes you need all the help you can get, even in a situation like this. So I'd bring that by and just help you out a little bit.

• 36:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Jamil, talk about this moment. Perfect strangers are attacking Wafa, and then a perfect stranger shows up to help him. What do you think causes someone to take the step of saying, "This problem is my problem. This suffering is my suffering"?

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Well, it's a beautiful story and there's so many like it. And I think it really, Wafa's story shows you the two sides of how empathy can work in our modern context, right? On the one hand, you've got people who are anonymous, sort of feeling as though they've had the brake lines cut from their social lives and they can do whatever they want without having to worry about the consequences. So they're acting aggressively towards a total stranger. On the other hand, you have someone who taps into that stranger's story, who's paying attention to Wafa. He's watching the video of him and realizing what he's going through, sort of able to tap into the story of this stranger.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  And that, instead of destroying his empathy, builds it, stretches it towards this person and drives him, inspires him to help him.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I forgot to mention something that's really important. Matt is a Marine.

• 37:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Matt wasn't the only visitor.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Laura. I live here in Chicago, so I came down to the gallery and I made some of my famous muffins. It's actually my sister's recipe. I noticed the other night when I went to sleep, they had one black sock on and one white sock, so I brought you some socks.

• 37:55Shankar Vedantam?

  There were lots of people online who helped Wafa too. Sometimes, they took control of the paintball gun by repeatedly pressing down a key and pointing the gun away from Wafa. He called them his virtual human shields.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Something is really amazing happening right now. I have about 36 or so people pressing the button down on the left, preventing people from panning into my direction.

• 38:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Here is Wafa on day 31, after stepping outside the gallery building for the first time in a month.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And the whole idea is reinforce my belief in humanity and human kindness. So thank you very much for keeping the hope alive. And please keep the conversation going.

• 38:58Shankar Vedantam?

  It may seem surprising that Wafa's month in the Paintball Gallery left him feeling optimistic about humanity. But he's not alone in that optimism. Jamil Zaki also thinks there are ways we might use technology to form connections with people whom we previously did not see as being like ourselves. He's done work looking at how virtual reality might help people identify with others whose lives are very different from their own.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  What we wanted to do is use technology to bring people, not just to sort of observe the experiences of a homeless individual, but observe them from the inside. So we had a simulation where people went through a series of scenes, these are sort of virtual reality scenes, of what it might be like to become homeless. So in one scene, they've been evicted from their apartment and they're trying to figure out what they can sell to make ends meet and stay in their apartment just one more month. In the second scene, they've failed to stay in their apartment and are now sort of sleeping in their car, which is then impounded. And then in a third scene, they're on a local bus line, which in fact, in the Bay Area, there is a bus line that homeless individuals

• 40:10Speaker 03

  often take to for shelter during the night. So again, this showed people, in an interactive, immersive way, the process that an individual might go through when they become homeless. What we found was that this short simulation powerfully affected people's empathy for the homeless. Even a month later, people who had gone through that simulation, as opposed to a control condition, were less likely to dehumanize homeless individuals. And they were more supportive of policies that would produce affordable housing for people in the Bay Area, which is a very sort of hot-button issue around here. So again, this suggests that by putting ourselves into the story of people who, on the surface, appear different from us, we can recognize, as you put it nicely,

• 40:55Speaker 03

  our common humanity with them. And that can trigger empathy in a really natural way.

• 41:09Shankar Vedantam?

  There are also some less high-tech ways to get people to walk in the shoes of other people. And one of the things you mention in the book is the idea of the theater. How does being an actor in some ways prompt you to develop the muscle of empathy?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if you think about what acting is, that you really immerse yourself so deeply in the character that you stop being yourself and start being them for a little while. I mean, I'd say it's more than walking a mile in their shoes. You're almost walking a mile in their skin. And as a result, there's some evidence at least that acting, in fact, bolsters people's empathy. So in a great set of studies, Talia Goldstein looked at adolescents who were in performing arts high schools and compared them, you know, at the beginning and end of the year to students who were being trained in visual arts. And what she found is that sort of acting, training in acting, improved kids'

• 42:10Speaker 03

  empathy more than training in a different type of art. Which is not to say that training in the visual arts doesn't have advantages. I'm sure it does. But sort of embodying another person in the way that actors do almost is like, I would say, a performance-enhancing drug for empathy, if you will.

• 42:26Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, does the same go for narrative fiction? I mean, I feel like when I'm reading a great novel, you know, I, as you said a second ago, become transported. I become, you know, a woman who's living in the 19th century. And in some ways, deeply-written, beautifully-written narrative fiction has this ability to pull us deep into the lives of other people.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this is why I love fiction as well, because it really allows us to effortlessly voyage into the lives of other people and not just see them, again, from the outside, but see them from the inside. There's a fair amount of evidence now that sort of the more fiction that people read, the more empathic that they become. So there's a number of correlational studies that show, for instance, that children who read lots of storybooks versus those who read less fiction become more empathic. And that's holds for adults also. Unfortunately for me, reading nonfiction like scientific articles, not that helpful.

• 43:27Shankar Vedantam?

  The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology doesn't do it.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  It's not really the empathy gym that some of us are looking for. But there's also some experimental evidence now coming out that even small doses of fiction produce small but reliable improvements in people's empathy. And I think this is especially important because fiction is one of the most powerful ways to connect with people who are different from us, who maybe we might not have a chance to meet otherwise. So for instance, you can, maybe it would be hard to meet someone who is, I don't know, a Bolivian minor, but you could probably go to a bookstore and find a novel about their experiences. And likewise, there's some evidence, for instance, that when people read novelistic,

• 44:16Speaker 03

  vivid accounts of the experiences of Arab Americans or people of different gender identities than themselves, they form greater empathy for those other groups.

• 44:29Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked in different ways about how redefining who's in the in-group can reshape our capacity for empathy. You mention a very interesting research study in the book involving fans of the Manchester United soccer team. Do you remember that study? And if you do, can you tell me about it?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love this study from Mark Levine and his colleagues. So they recruited rabid Manchester United fans.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  And fandom in UK soccer is very important. And they asked them to write about why they loved Manchester United so much, and then told them that they would go to a different building on campus to watch film of Man U playing. While they were on their way across campus, they came across a jogger who appeared to twist his ankle and fall to the ground, writhing in pain. This person was in fact an actor, and the trick here was that the psychologists made it such that sometimes that actor was wearing a Manchester United jersey. Sometimes they were wearing a jersey of Liverpool, which at the time was Manchester United's

• 45:38Speaker 03

  most hated rival, and other times they were wearing a blank jersey. And what they found was that Man U fans were more than willing to help fellow Man U fans, but also more than willing to basically step over a Liverpool fan as they sort of writhed on the ground in pain.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  This is sort of classic tribalism in terms of our empathy and generosity. But what I love about this study is that the psychologists ran a second version of it. And here, instead of asking Man U fans to write about why they loved the team, they asked them to write about why they loved soccer, why it is such a beautiful game. And then they put them in the same scenario. And what they found was that after writing about how much they loved soccer, individuals were not just willing to help fellow Man U fans, but also willing to help Liverpool fans. They still didn't help the person in the blank jersey, which I guess suggests that it's (laughter) which I suppose suggests that it's better to be part of any tribe than part of none.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  But I think there's a deeper takeaway from this study, which is that, yes, it's easier to empathize with people who are like us than unlike us. But all of us have many different selves inside us at any given moment. And each self carries with it a different group, maybe of a different size. So if I think of myself, for instance, as a Stanford person, well, then people at UC Berkeley are my mortal enemy, especially during the big game. But if I think of myself as a Californian, then my in-group, the people who deserve my empathy and who it's easy to empathize with, that group grows. And if I can think of myself as, I don't know, an American or a human being, then that group will grow even further.

• 47:25Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I'm thinking about the story you told me about your parents' divorce when you were a small child. You write in the book about your parents, that two people's experiences could differ so drastically, yet both be true and deep, is maybe the most important lesson I've ever learned.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  I think, you know, I often attribute that period of my life to really making me who I am at the deepest level. I mean, I think, not for nothing, they say that research is me-search, right? At least in psychology, people tend to gravitate towards ideas that have made an impact on their life. And I think for me, empathizing with my parents was a survival skill that I needed just to sort of keep my family together at some level. But it also taught me at a much broader level that people can be fundamentally different from each other for fundamentally similar reasons, right? My parents had totally different values,

• 48:29Speaker 03

  not because one of them was wrong or because one of them was a bad person, but because of the lives that they had lived and the experiences that they had had and the things that had hurt them and helped them along the way. I think that this is a lesson that I try to impart to all of my students as well, is that oftentimes when we encounter someone who's different from ourselves and has an opinion or a viewpoint, maybe that we even abhor, it's easy to just view them as being either obtuse or dishonest or both. But that's a mistake. It's something that psychologists call naive realism, the idea that your version of the world is the world. And I think that empathy at a deep level is the understanding

• 49:13Speaker 03

  that someone else's world is just as real as yours.

• 49:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Developing that understanding of another person's world requires real vulnerability. We can only begin to see things through another person's eyes if they are willing to tell us who they really are. Being that open with another person can be daunting and terrifying.

• 49:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Recently, we talked with psychologist Leslie John about the secrets we keep and when, how, and why we choose to reveal them to others. Those episodes were titled, Keeping Secrets and Coming Clean. Shortly after those episodes came out, we received a voice memo from a listener named Mung.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Right around the time I listened to the episode Keeping Secrets, I suffered a sudden hearing loss, where I woke up one day and one of my Years I just couldn't hear much and just didn't know what happened.

• 50:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Mung freaked out. She didn't know what to do. One day, her child had a playdate with another child. The mother of the other child and Mung spent some time together.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  So when we were hanging out, she asked me, how are you doing? You know, normally you just say, I'm doing well and keep carrying the conversation. But instead, I just listened to your episode. So I told her, I actually, I just lost my hearing on one side of my ear. Um, I don't know what's causing it. I saw my primary care physician, she couldn't see anything wrong. She sent a referral to a specialist, but I need to wait for insurance clearing. But it has been going on for um, over almost two weeks now. And my friend got really concerned. She said her partner had the same issue and he didn't go see a doctor until a month and a half later after he lost his hearing.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  And he never was able to got his hearing back because he lost a crucial window to see the doctor. So my friend urged me to go see a doctor right away.

• 51:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Mung listened to the advice. She drove to the emergency room where she quickly got a referral to a specialist who figured out what was wrong and what to do. Moving quickly, Mung says, is the reason she got her hearing back.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  So I really appreciate uh, all my friends were there to support me to get the treatment right away. If I didn't share my secret, like I would probably not be able to hear on my life year anymore. So that was a really great experience and I learned when you have people you trust, you can feel you're able to be vulnerable. You actually can have shared um, life experiences and benefit everyone. So that's just something I want to share with you.

• 52:13Shankar Vedantam?

  We all wonder how much of ourselves to share with others. Often, in social situations like the one Mung was in, we make small talk. "Oh, the weather is awful right now. Did you see the game last night?" But Mung discovered that sharing her worry helped get her the help she needed. She also made a deep connection with a friend.

• 52:37Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, Hidden Brain listeners share their stories and questions about revealing their inner selves. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 52:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 53:29Shankar Vedantam?

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• 54:13Shankar 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.

• 54:27Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 54:31Shankar Vedantam?

  In last week's segment of Your Questions Answered, we talked with psychologist Leslie John about the costs of keeping secrets and the pain we feel when others keep secrets from us.

• 54:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie is the author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Today, she joins us for listeners' questions and stories about what happens when we let another person in and unburden ourselves of our secrets. Leslie John, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 55:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie, we talked before about how our impulse in many interactions is to stay at a surface level, even when we want to go deeper. What does the research say are the benefits of opening ourselves to others?

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Oh, there's so many benefits. The core benefit is trust. When we open up to others, when we share something a bit sensitive and personal, we are actually modeling that we trust the person. We're implicitly saying, "I'm telling you this because I trust you to not make a fool out of me." And so, that in turn is so powerful, it makes them trust us. And trust is really the kernel of all social relationships, right? Which are so important for human flourishing. There are mental and physical well-being benefits to revealing. Revealing wisely and opening up a little bit more makes us feel closer to our spouses, to our friends. It makes us feel known for who we really are. The research I've done in the workplace

• 56:02Speaker 02

  has really surprised me because we've also found that leaders, when they're a little vulnerable, when they share some of their weaknesses, for example, that makes their teammates and their employees trust them more and be more motivated to work for them.

• 56:17Shankar Vedantam?

  We often hear the term "too much information" or TMI when we overshare. You have a term called TLI. What is TLI?

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's too little information. I mean, we're culturally obsessed with TMI, with oversharing. And yes, TMI is a thing. But, oh, we've paid so little attention To TLI, too little information. And the more I study and experience it, the more I think TLI is probably a bigger problem than TMI.

• 56:47Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the benefits of sharing a secret is what you call reciprocity. We received a note about that from a listener named Nguyen. I discovered after my mother died that I have a half brother that she never told anybody about. And when I tell people that, I usually get a disclosure of a similarly significant family secret from the person I'm talking to. And in fact, I was at a dinner party once when I made the disclosure and everyone else at the party at the table had some similar family secret like that. So there is a lot of reciprocity associated with the disclosure of secrets. Talk about this idea, Leslie. Why is it that when we reveal our secrets to others, it becomes easier for them to reveal their secrets to us?

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, reciprocity comes so naturally to us. I mean, I might even say it's an instinct. So when we make ourselves vulnerable by sharing something sensitive, we're showing that we trust the person, we're communicating that we're safe, because we've just put ourselves out on the line. And that prompts people to reciprocate that. It's also a gesture, a gesture of, it's a kind gesture, right, to say you trust someone in that way. And it prompts them to engage back. Because also fundamentally, opening up is something that does feel good to the right people in the right place.

• 58:06Shankar Vedantam?

  In one study, Leslie, you found a hurting effect in revealing secrets. Describe the study and what you found.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what we did in this study was we asked people a bunch of questions that varied in how sensitive they were, like, have you ever eaten meat, poultry, or fish? That's like a softball question that went all the way up to like, have you ever had sex with a friend's spouse? So like way the whole range. And what we found was that this hurting effect whereby if you know that other people have admitted to something or revealed something, it makes you more comfortable revealing back. And the interesting thing about this study is that it wasn't a face-to-face conversation where you may feel kind of socially compelled. Rather, it was this bare bones online surf.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Where we just asked people questions and we told them how other people had ostensibly answered the questions. And basically, when we told them that many people had admitted to calling in sick when they weren't sick, for example, people were more likely themselves to admit that relative to another version where we, you know, we said, almost nobody is ever calling in sick when not sick. So, so it's easier to reveal when you know that you're not alone.

• 59:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm.

• 59:27Shankar Vedantam?

  The need for reciprocity in sharing with others can sometimes backfire on us. We've all been in situations where we reveal something vulnerable about ourselves and expect the other person to reciprocate, but for whatever reason, they don't. Here's a story along those lines from listener Abigail.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  I was thinking while I listened to the episode about the cost of not reciprocating when someone is open with you, what that can do to a relationship. My son recently upset another mom's son at school by accident. And they were planning to talk about it the next day with the teacher, but he was really upset about the idea that his friend was mad at him. And I said, why don't we send him a message? So I gave my son my phone and he sent a message to his friend to the mom's phone number,

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  saying, I'm sorry, and it was an accident, and just expressing a bit of vulnerability, which was a big deal for my son. And then the mom responded later, saying, oh, no worries, no big deal. And I know they're going to talk about it in school tomorrow anyway. And I felt really bad from that response. And I didn't really understand why until I was listening to the podcast. And I realized that both my son and I, I think, by participating and sending this message, were trying to reveal something vulnerable and reach out and say.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  I'm sorry I hurt you and looking for something reassuring in return like I'm not angry with you or I am angry with you and here's how to make it better. And with the mom giving this really noncommittal response that didn't really say whether she or her son were upset, it kind of denied us the opportunity to have the conversation and it made me feel really distant from her.

• 1:01:33Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, you called the type of situation that Abigail experienced a reciprocity fail. What is that and how can we get better at avoiding a reciprocity fail?

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so exactly. A reciprocity fail is when you feel you've put yourself out there and be vulnerable and you kind of get shot down or you don't get a welcoming response or a reveal back. And that's what Abigail is describing here. So a few things strike me about this example. One is vulnerability over text messaging and email, non-face-to-face or non-phone. I think that's really tough. That's a tough setup because it's so hard to interpret emotions when you're communicating virtually like that. So the number one thing is first to set yourself up for success is to talk on the phone or

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  in person because then your emotion translates. The second is I think that we, this is a perfect example of how we often expect someone to react in a certain way or want them to react in a certain way. And then when they don't, we get really disappointed. Well, what might we be able to do to change that? We can actually say what we need. We can actually be proactive and say, I feel terrible about this. This is a hard thing for me to say and I'm hoping that you can tell me how you feel after hearing this, right?

• 1:03:06Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, it also struck me, Leslie, that we are aware of our own motivations when we say something, but of course. All that someone else can hear are the words coming out of our mouths. They don't have access to all of our internal feelings. And I guess it underlines the importance of really making sure that what you say reveals and reflects your inner concerns, that you're not giving short shrift to them.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Yes, completely. And a key part of that is sharing your feelings. I think too often we think that feelings are these la, la, la, foo, foo, foo things. But feelings are data. Feelings are informative. And feelings, when you share them, they're actually very persuasive. Why? Because it's hard to fake feelings. And you also can't really argue with feelings in the way you can with facts, right? Feelings aren't really subject to logic and debate the way a fact is. And it's also disarming a little bit because if you, they're non accusational if you share how you feel as opposed to comment on someone's behavior, right? So sharing our feelings is something that I really think in most areas we would benefit by doing more of.

• 1:04:16Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how our propensity to share with others depends on who we are sharing with. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:04:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 1:05:10Shankar Vedantam?

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• 1:05:45Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When we overshare with the wrong person, it can be embarrassing. But at Harvard University, Leslie John says not sharing anything at all could be worse.

• 1:06:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie, I often find that when I'm deciding what or how much to share of myself, it can really depend on who I'm talking to. We received a voicemail along these lines from a listener named Jeremy. He shared that he's recovering from an addiction to pornography. As a teenager, he grew up religious, so Jeremy decided to confess his sins to his church leader.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  I went in there and I was so terrified. My hands were sweaty. I remember just sitting in that room and just not wanting to say the thing. And he could tell that there was something I wanted to say, and he kept just gently asking. And finally, I just, I said the thing. I said, you know, I've been looking at a lot of pornography, and I cried. And, and he said, "Well, you should just stop." And I'm telling you, I was so devastated at that response. It felt like I had taken so much courage and so much energy and strength to go in and say this thing. And his response was just stop. And I had tried everything in my power to possibly stop, and I just couldn't.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  Between hormones and, and just, you know, being a teenage boy, of course. Well, all that did was drive me more underground, and I became better at hiding it.

• 1:07:12Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, talk a moment about the importance of recognizing someone's courage when they tell us a secret, not just responding to the content of the secret.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. We think way too much about the content and not enough about the gesture of disclosure. And when we're on the receiving end, we, it's hard for us to empathize with just how hard it is, especially when there's power imbalances, as there was in Jeremy's example. And so I think like, when someone says that, think of it as a Gift and say, thank you for sharing that. Like truly, even if it's something that you're dissatisfied with, you you can recognize that this took courage. And there's actually been some really interesting studies on what can, when you're on the receiving end of someone's sensitive disclosure, what is the best way to help them? And again and again, the best thing to do is validation.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  So we often think that we should problem solve, right? Like in this example, like, what are you going to do about it? But actually, less is more, just like recognizing their disclosure and saying, I hear you, that must be so hard. I would feel the same way, too. These are forms of validation, and that is so comforting to people. It really reduces their their momentary stress levels and helps them see things more clearly and be more clear headed.

• 1:08:35Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to bring you to the next part of Jeremy's story, Leslie. As he grew into adulthood, he continued to struggle with his addiction, until a partner learned about it. And finally, there came a point at which I was discovered, which is often the case for people like me. And I had no choice but to come clean. And she didn't want to hear my coming clean. But I did find a program where I had some support and people who really understood what I had gone through and how this thing works. And when I did that to a person who really, really understood, what I felt was freedom, understanding, comfort, love to a level that I'd never felt before.

• 1:09:18Shankar Vedantam?

  I think it gave me a real good step into not having the problem. So Leslie, I'm struck by the contrast between Jeremy's different experiences of sharing his secret. And I'm also struck by the fact that he received the most support from other people who had been through what he went through. Have you studied the power that support groups have in helping people unburden themselves of their secrets?

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  It's so powerful, knowing that you have a shared reality with someone, that they have been going through the same things. Because when you think about it again, this idea of like feeling known for who you really are is so soothing. And so if you've had unique experiences with addiction, talking, it's it's one thing to talk to an understanding spouse, but it's it's also incredibly curative to talk to other people who have been through similar things. After the first hidden brain, Did together, a bunch of my old friends from ballet reached out to me. I trained professionally, classical ballet when I was a lot younger and they reached out to me. And this was third, this is the last time I saw them was thirty years ago.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  And we met last month, the four of us met together. We hadn't seen each other in thirty years and it was unbelievably bonding and wonderful and beautiful and and we talked about some of these things that at the time, you know, we lived together in grade six and seven. We were like sisters. And we went through like it was, it was a privilege, a total privilege to get to do this, to train at this level, but it was also really hard and you know, these things, it it made me realize that things that we, that I hadn't really processed that were kind of lurking that, you know, I have dreams, nightmares every month or two. Now I don't have them anymore so far. Because we were able to talk about these things that that were really messed up and and and make sense of them. Like one of these things is

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  when you, when you do point work, you're standing on your toes, your, your, your feet bleed, especially at the beginning and and we never told our teachers that our feet were bleeding. So we just, we just danced with these raw feet and and the thought of telling them did not even occur to us because the this, the, the norm, this authoritarian competitive norm was so entrenched in us that if we revealed we would be weak. And I just made that realization with them a couple of months ago. And so it just feels so good to like process these things that you've uniquely been through. It's, it's very, very healing.

• 1:11:48Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm also wondering if it's possible that when we share things with people who've essentially been through the same experience like, like you had with your friends. One of the advantages is that there is so much that can be left unsaid and unspoken because in fact you share all of this implicit understanding and knowledge.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's so efficient. Now I'm type A business school prof. It's efficient.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  But it is, I mean, you don't need to set the stage. You already know the cast of characters. You know the personalities and you just go right back. It was, it was beautiful.

• 1:12:25Shankar Vedantam?

  We received this message from a listener named Merrill that also has to do with the audience for our self disclosures.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  Two years ago, I was the victim of a bank fraud. Three well-trained impostors from abroad contacted me by phone over a six-week period. They hooked me in with kindness and had me believing that it was in my best interest to follow their instructions. As an elderly person, I was easy prey for them. When my checking account was depleted, I didn't know who to turn to for support. Not wanting my intelligence to be judged, I kept the secret intact. Imagining words like, "How could you? Didn't you see where this was going? Why did you listen to people you didn't know? And why didn't you call me?" Kept the secret even tighter.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  The deputy attorney general in the state I reside in contacted me by phone to speak at a symposium about fraud. Speaking with him for one hour gave release. The conversation was safe and nonjudgmental because I knew this higher-up legislator was talking to other people in my state who were in similar circumstances.

• 1:13:39Shankar Vedantam?

  So that's a powerful story, Leslie. And I think many people can relate to Merrill's experience. You know, you sit next to somebody on a bus or a train or a park bench, and you tell them things that you haven't told your closest friends. Why do you think that is?

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's freeing because you know you're not going to see them again. It's freeing because you don't need to worry about them judging you. And in fact, sometimes, especially when we know the person, it feels very, like it's very hard to reveal things. And I really feel for Merrill because that's a really hard thing. You know, it can really happen to anyone, but it would be, you'd feel so stupid. And it would be very hard to talk to. And I'm really glad that she, there was a professional who was really well-trained and received those disclosures in a great way.

• 1:14:28Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering how much it matters whether the people we unburden ourselves to share the same values or worldview as us. We received an email from listener Allison. She writes, "Before the 2016 election, when Donald Trump's comments about women and sexual assault were coming to the surface, I spoke up about how my own experience with sexual abuse had destroyed me in an attempt to show friends how serious I felt the statements were. I did so selectively, but I live in a very conservative community, and I had a handful of friends tell me that I needed to get over my feelings about sexual assault in order to vote for the greater good. I fell into a deep depression that I haven't really pulled out of.

• 1:15:10Shankar Vedantam?

  I used to be friendly and outgoing, heavily engaged in my neighborhood church and PTA, but even after years of therapy, I still isolate myself. I don't know my neighbors anymore. I rarely see friends. Investing in relationships, especially new ones, just feels too risky." So Leslie, how do we still share of ourselves, our experiences, our stories, when we feel that the people we're sharing with are not on the same page as us?

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really important question. And I think this speaks to the importance of curating your audience. Now, you can't predict people's reactions 100%. So it's not like the revealers problem all the time. But one thing that we can try to do in with these really sensitive things is instead of just kind of feeling like it's a one-shot thing, we're going to just say the thing to a bunch of people, we could try, for example, we could try first saying the words out loud privately. How does that feel, right? And then try saying them to someone that is really close with you. Yeah.

• 1:16:16Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I'm also reflecting that one of the things that Allison was doing was she was trying to frame her disclosures in the context of, you know, a very tense political situation. And I'm wondering whether Allison might have had more success if she was in a situation where even if she was with people who disagreed with her politically, she's finding some kind of a common, you know, activity or an event that people are interested in, and then sharing her self-disclosure in that context where it's not going to be interpreted through a political lens.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. I mean, the context massively shapes the interpretation of the self-disclosure, for sure. Another thing that comes to mind is, if she was here, what I would love to ask her more about is her why. Like, what's her purpose? What's her motive for revealing? Because a story of mine, it's not a terrible event like what Allison experienced. But, you know, when I was first pregnant with our first little guy, I was overjoyed and in a spirit of warmth and transparency, I kind of blurted it out to our landlord. Well, that sent a series of chain reactions that basically ended with us having to move out. It was definitely a disclosure that came back to bite me. Everything worked out in the end. But, you know, and in hindsight, I'm like, why did I

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  do that? Well, I wanted to get coups and love. And was my landlord really the right person to do that? Absolutely not. So kind of thinking those things through your goal and whether this audience is the right, the right person or context.

• 1:17:59Shankar Vedantam?

  We've all heard the phrase humble bragging. We reveal something that looks like a flaw, but it's really designed to draw positive attention to ourselves. When we come back, how to reveal things that show us in a good light. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:18:37Shankar Vedantam?

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• 1:19:09Shankar Vedantam?

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• 1:19:40Shankar Vedantam?

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• 1:19:58Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Lesley John is a psychologist at Harvard University. She's the author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Lesley, we've been talking today about self-disclosure of secrets that are often painful or embarrassing. But you also studied how it can be difficult to share something that we are proud of. How so? Yeah, it can be hard because you don't want to make your loved ones and friend ones feel badly. You don't want to spark envy, right? You don't want them to feel jealous. And so oftentimes then, what we end up doing is we end up just like not sharing the thing. And that's also problematic.

• 1:20:41Shankar Vedantam?

  This reminds me of my colleague Oval Caesar's work on humble bragging, where what we try to do is we try to then often couch the, take the edge off the brag by couching it with a display of humility. Like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe my boss asked me to lead this meeting, right? Or it's so hard when I get so many text messages from all my friends, it's really hard to respond to all that.

• 1:21:09Shankar Vedantam?

  And it's just like mega eye roll, right? And

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  So so don't humble brag. It's better to outright brag, and by that I mean say the positive thing. But there's there's ways of being like really thoughtful about it. Like, you got to consider the timing. You don't want to tell your bestie that you got a promotion when your bestie had a really bad day and is feeling down. Another thing you can do is reveal like the story of how you got there. Like that you worked really hard and you've been thinking about this a long time. So it's not like, oh, hey, I got promoted like I'm the best. It's so easy. So you can reveal kind of the struggle. I think we need to be very careful about the timing, the recipient and the context.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  And you can see that context very dramatically in how much self praise or self promotion or saying positive things about myself is acceptable. Like, if you're on LinkedIn, it's weird not to self promote. It's weird not to, right? So you really have to read the room.

• 1:22:15Shankar Vedantam?

  A listener named Patricia called in with a story. She's from Australia and had a new boss at one point. And she shared a story with him about how she had challenged authority and gone outside the rules in a previous job. And in many ways, it turned out really well. Patricia was working in child protective services and she really did right by the children she was working with. And she hoped that this story would show her new boss what an exceptional employee she was going to be. Unfortunately, her boss did not see the story in the same way she did.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  He no longer talked to me after I told him this story, no longer looked at me. I was like someone that he wanted to get rid of. And I couldn't understand why. And it's because he realized that I wasn't someone that would just easily follow anything that he told me. And he wouldn't be able to control me and he wouldn't be able to make me easily conform. So after I told him that story and realized the consequences of it, I felt nothing but dread and regret. And I thought, oh, God, this is one situation where I probably shouldn't have disclosed. Because this guy was all about having power and control over his employees.

• 1:23:30Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, talk about the role that power plays in these self-disclosure dilemmas, because it seems to me that perhaps this is especially tricky terrain where we have to be careful about when and with whom we disclose.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Completely, yeah. And the workplace is a very tricky situation because, you know, in any given day, most of us, a lot of us, move up and down the status hierarchy, right? Like, when I'm talking to the dean, I'm low status. When I'm talking to my MBA students, I'm higher status. And so that really shapes disclosure, too. Like, your status has a big impact on what's safe. And generally, as you move higher up the status pole, it's more safe to reveal sensitive things. Patricia's example is a great example of how a well-intended disclosure can come back to bite us, at least in the short run. Since we have the benefit of perspective and not being in this situation ourselves,

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  a couple of things struck me. One is, I know this is hard, but I wondered how much she had talked to her boss about, you know, why he reacted the way he did. Because sometimes, if you can have a meeting and ask the person about more about their reactions, you will learn things that, of the perspective, that completely maybe explain their reaction and is not what you were thinking. So I think we kind of under-ask. But I don't say that lightly, because when there's big status differences, it's hard to ask someone higher status a question like that. The other thing, again, with the benefit of being way zoomed out here, is, so, this person didn't appreciate the efforts that she had gone to. And I think

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  that should prompt a question, is this the person I want to work for? Is this the organization where my values fit? And if you do have the luxury of maybe looking elsewhere, like, that's an interesting data point to consider. So I think, like, a big thing that I've learned is, like, when your self-disclosures don't go the way you want them to sometimes, if you think of them as failures, then that's really demotivating. But try to think of them as what you learned. A lot of times, you learn even more from the times when you get surprising reactions.

• 1:25:40Shankar Vedantam?

  In a negative way, right? Hmm. I'd like to switch gears for a moment and talk about disclosure in romantic relationships. Many people have found that there's a topic that can be particularly difficult to discuss with their partners, and that's the topic of past relationships. Listener Janet had been seeing a boyfriend for six years when she decided it was time to have the talk.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  I had not shared with him that I was in a very seriously damaging relationship about 20 years ago. Police were involved. There was, it was pretty bad. And I just felt like I wanted to share it with him. It was something that he should know about me.

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  So we were having a conversation about vulnerability. And I said, there's something I'd like to share with you, and it's not going to be easy for me to tell you.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  And you may judge me, but I feel like I need to tell you. So I told him the story, and he sat and listened. And when it was all done, there was just silence. I didn't know what to do, so I just sat there. And ultimately, we ended the conversation, and he decided to get up and leave and go home. And from that point forward, our relationship changed pretty profoundly. We still see each other as friends occasionally, but that's it. So that's the story.

• 1:27:11Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, it looks like Janet was punished for being vulnerable in disclosing something that happened to her in the past. How should we think of these moments when we put ourselves out there and the other person has a negative or awkward reaction to our disclosure? I think it's information, right? As hard as it is, and I feel so badly for Janet, I admire her courage, and it just sucks so badly.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  Bad when someone doesn't even know what to do with it and leaves. That said, it is a very clear signal, right? Like, this person can't handle it. I mean, especially if, unless there's like a day or a few later, he comes back, he's like, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. Like, this was overwhelming, right? Like, but if it's not paired with some kind of hugely rectifying behavior like that. I know this is gonna sound crazy, but it's a bit of a gift because this person revealed himself to her. Now, it happened after six years, I think, she said, which is, that's, that's, that's incredibly hard to take. It's one of those things that's just self-disclosure. It's often very hard in the short run, but so good for us in the long run.

• 1:28:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Listener Rachel had a psychologically complex question. Can we ever use disclosure and vulnerability as weapons?

• 1:28:30Speaker 05

  One thing I was just curious to hear her talk about was whether something like being vulnerable could be used sort of as a form of manipulation. It's a behavior I think I witnessed sometimes where people sort of use their vulnerability to sort of get close enough to people to kind of manage the situation. But I just wonder if that, if that is a possibility, you know, both in the public sphere and in personal or work relationships where the idea of like putting yourself in a vulnerable position to sort of gain a little more power within like a relationship dynamic.

• 1:29:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, Rachel didn't actually give us a specific context or an example, Leslie, but what do you think? Can vulnerability and disclosure ever be used as weapons of manipulation?

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, this is a kind of interrogation 101, right? Is saying something about yourself that's sensitive and that builds rapport with the person you're trying to get to confess or whatever. So that's like definitely in that trick book. Um, scammers, they, they say they're vulnerable. They say, oh, no, my, my, my father's dying, right? So we feel very, we trust them because they're like revealing to us, even though, you know, objectively, we know we should not. There's something about that gesture. So absolutely vulnerability can be used against us and it is, and we need to be very careful. And when we We are in a vulnerable or weakened state.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  We are more susceptible, like even I remember when I was lonely and in my mid thirties and I found myself single and I was dating again, like I caught them before I got looped in, but there was a couple of people that were definitely scammers in hindsight. Um, they were, and there was, it was the situation of like too close, too quickly. Um, and I, I did see through it, but it's, it's just when, when you want something to be so true with connection. If you're looking for love, like that's one of these moments when we're very susceptible to a vulnerability, um, being manipulated by that way.

• 1:30:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. We got an interesting question from listener Nora about using self disclosure as a way to reduce tension and conflict.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  When I first started dating my husband, I met a lot of his college friends and one of them was this woman who always behaved kind of strangely toward me. Uh, whenever I made an attempt to talk or joke with her, I was met with this chilliness or sarcasm that, that really seemed unwarranted. And, um, when I asked my husband about it, he kind of brushed it off and assured me it wasn't because of any jealousy or past that they had. But as you can imagine, every time I saw her, it was a point of anxiety and, um, really hampered my enjoyment of whatever the occasion was. So this went on for years and one day I decided to invite her over. Uh, we had never hung out one on one before and it took a few tries, but she finally came.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  And I told her how I felt, like there was this resistance from her that I couldn't figure out and how it perplexed and saddened me really. And I swear it was like a pressure release valve just opened up for both of us. Um, she told me she felt the same way and we essentially figured out that we both tend to mirror other people's energy when we meet them. And I guess we were picking up on each other's hesitance or weird vibes. So things just went wrong.

• 1:31:50Shankar Vedantam?

  From the very beginning, but anyway, we ended up bonding over that and a number of other things. We may have even cried together at some point. But from that day on, we've had this incredible connection and fondness for each other that continues today. So Leslie, that story might be the poster child for the benefits of disclosure. To talk about the risks and benefits of being vulnerable with someone that you are in conflict with.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  I love this. This is so beautiful. There's two things that really stand out to me about this. The first is the self-awareness, right? The, ooh, I feel weird around this person. There's something, right? Identifying that instead of brushing it to the side, identifying it. The second thing I love about it is the nature of the disclosure. It's a meta-disclosure. It's like, what? Like, I'm feeling this thing. What is it? And it's kind of, now you're engaging that person in a joint problem-solving task, right? So it's not, it's not like a, you're like this, and I'm like this, and how are we different? The frame there is making the whole thing collaborative, which is very beautiful. But you can think of like, revealing

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  sensitive things about yourself, like political affiliation. And like, I'm thinking of my in-laws, where we have different political affiliations. And it's, it can easily be conflictual, these conversations. But what I've learned is that if you can actually approach them from a lens of curiosity, like real curiosity, we still disagree, but I, I understand better and I empathize more. And so if you can get to that point, which takes practice, I think, I have found it takes practice. And as we've been saying, feeling understood for who you really are, is the key part of connection. I also wanted to say, I thought of one anecdote, as you were describing this, one of my father's greatest moments. So when we were a kid, my

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  parents had tons of dinner parties. And there was this one dinner party, I just remember this because I was sitting in the other room watching TV and things got really heated. They were like arguing, I don't even know what they were arguing about. And what my dad did was he walked over to the, the record player, and he puts on, what is it, Monty Python's, Are We Having An Argument? This is not, How to Buy An Argument, How to Buy An Argument. And he puts it on full blast, and it just completely cut the ice. And so it's one of These like meta comments, right? It's commenting on the situation. It's like, oh, this is feeling really conflictual. And we don't hate each other. What's going on? And when he put that on, it was just like everyone burst out and laughing.

• 1:34:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Nora also had a practical suggestion on how we might go about having a conversation like this. And I wanted to play what she shared with us.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  When I invited her over, I had created a special space that I learned from doing talking circles, where we sat across from each other on the floor and had a talking piece that we passed back and forth, which I think really helped set an intention of really hearing each other and wanting to heal this thing between us. Like if we had just met for coffee or sat at a kitchen table, I'm not sure the outcome would have been the same.

• 1:35:03Shankar Vedantam?

  So Leslie, what do you make of the technique that Nora used? And are there other techniques like this that can help us be more open with others?

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  Yes. Really important things are receiving the person's disclosure well, listening, making eye contact. And less is more. Your job is not to fix. Usually it's to listen and make them feel heard. And to do that, you validate, right? You say, you repeat back what they're saying. You say, I hear you're feeling frustrated. That makes sense. It makes sense that you would feel that way. Like those things, I know it sounds like therapy speak, but this has been showed in many, many studies that validation is the single best thing you can do when you receive people's disclosures. But you also want to, you know, if you're like in a, just like Nora's situation, this rule of reciprocity, right? You want to, you want to share your feelings and you want to invite the other to share theirs.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  And you want to kind of go back and forth like this. And, and so really the process really, really matters.

• 1:36:01Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, it's a dance. That's what you're saying.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  It's a dance.

• 1:36:04Shankar Vedantam?

  It's a two-person dance.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:36:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University. She's the author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:36:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, 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. If you enjoyed today's conversation, don't keep it a secret. Please share it with a few friends, family members, or coworkers. Word of mouth recommendations really help new listeners find the show.

• 1:36:56Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 1:37:01Shankar Vedantam?

  Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out, the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or hiddenbrain.org.

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