Nicholas Epley looked around the commuter train he was riding to his office at the University of Chicago.
“It was just headphones and screens,” Nicolas reflects in David Brooks’s book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
A thought occurred to Nicolas. “As a behavioral psychologist, he was well aware that social connection is the number one source of happiness, success, good health, and much of the sweetness of life,” David writes. “Human beings are social animals who love to communicate with each other.”
Yet, no one on the train was talking to anyone.
“Why aren’t these people doing the thing that makes them the happiest?” Nicolas wondered.
So, he decided to run an experiment. He instructed the study participants to strike up a conversation with someone on the train. Researchers would then ask how much they enjoyed the ride when the trip was over.
“The comments were overwhelmingly positive,” David notes. “People, introverts as well as extroverts, reported that a commute spent talking with someone was much more fun than a commute spent locked into your screen.”
So why do we default to staring at our screens?
Nicholas’s research shows that we don’t have conversations “because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them,” David writes. “We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal. . .
“People are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood,” he notes. “And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen.”
2: What do to fix the problem? The answer is “simple, easy, and fun,” David suggests: “Ask people to tell us their stories.”
Which is what David has done since learning about Nicholas’s research.
“And as a result, I’ve had many more memorable experiences than I would have had if I had just been ensconced with my headphones.”
One day, David was sitting beside an older man on a plane traveling from New York City to Washington, D.C.
“Instead of burying myself in my book, I asked him where he was coming from, and then I asked him about his life,” he relays.
“It turned out he had been born in Russia and had immigrated to the United States alone at age seventeen. To earn a living, he started by sweeping floors at a factory and then wound up exporting T-shirts and other articles of clothing from the States to the developing world. . .
“Then he pulled out his phone and showed me photos from the vacation in Italy he had just completed—cruising around on big yachts, surrounded by glamorous-looking people, hoisting bottles of champagne. This guy was still running around like a playboy at age eighty!
“He ended up telling me the whole story of his life, which involved more twists and turns—and more divorces—than I could keep track of. He’s not the type of person who would be in my inner circle of friendship, but it was really fun to peak into his world.”
3: How does David approach these interactions?
First, he aims to make them “storytelling conversations” rather than “comment-making conversations.”
This approach aligns with the work of psychologist Jerome Bruner, who distinguishes between two different modes of thinking: paradigmatic mode versus narrative mode.
“The paradigmatic mode is analytical. It’s making an argument. It’s a mental state that involves amassing data, collecting evidence, and offering hypotheses,” David notes.
“Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding data, making the case for a proposition, and analyzing trends across populations.”
What it isn’t great for? Seeing or understanding another person.
Narrative thinking is a very different mindset. “Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life,” he writes, “how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks.
“When someone is telling us their story, we get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. We get to experience the experience.”
Because most of us spend the majority of our time professionally in paradigmatic mode, it’s easy to bring this approach to other areas of our lives.
Which means we must make a conscious choice to enter the narrative mindset.
“I’m no longer content to ask, ‘What do you think about X?’ David notes. “Instead, I ask, ‘How did you come to believe X?’ This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do.”
Other ways to prompt a story include asking, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.”
Or, David will take people back in time and ask about their childhoods. “Where’d you grow up?” “What did you want to be when you were a kid?” “What did your parents want you to be?” “When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way?”
And, he asks people about their intentions and goals.
David shares the details of a recent conversation with “a brilliant woman who had retired from a job she’d held for many years,” he writes.
“How do you hope to spend the years ahead?” he asked.
“All sorts of stuff spilled out: How she was coping with losing the identity that her job had given her. How, for so long, people came to her asking for things, but now she was forced to humble herself and approach others for favors.”
She shared that wasn’t good at predicting what would make her happy. “Now she found it was best just to open herself up to unexpected possibilities and let things in.”
The best part? “Her narrative was so open-ended,” David reflects. “Her posture toward the future was one of readiness, acceptance, and delight.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How often do I engage in “storytelling conversations” rather than “comment-making conversations”?
Action: Engage in a conversation with a stranger the next time I travel. Pay close attention to how I feel afterward.